A Dusty Road Trip In Tennessee
By The Bartender, PubClub.com’s Roving Party Animal
I was visiting my friend Olive Oil (a well-earned nickname) in Nashville, when I announced I would like to go take the tour of the Jack Daniels Distillery while I was in the area.
After all, I’m a native Tennessean and I could not be that close to one our state’s icons and not go see this landmark.
Other notable Tennessee icons, by the way, are country music, Neyland Stadium, Tennessee Vols fans (dressed in that wear-the-shades bright orange), Daniel Boone, blue tick hound dogs, the Great Smoky Mountains, hillbillies (more myth than reality these days), moonshine (again, more myth than reality today) and the ducks at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.
So one morning, we headed out of Music City toward Lynchburg. We didn’t really know how to get there and I didn’t help matters by insisting that Olive Oil turn off that obnoxious voice on her car navigation system.
We stopped at a pizza place in a small town – I later learned from my dad who pretty much knows everything about nearly every town in Tennessee as well as his native North Carolina, that original Tennessee towns all have a town square, build around the courthouse – and asked the two cute girls working there if they had ever been to the distillery.
They got all excited, talked about how they went on a high school field trip and really enjoyed it. When we asked them for the “best way to get there,” however, they looked dumfounded.
“Well I don’t know,” one said. “We were on a school bus.”
Now here’s something about getting directions in small Southern cities. No matter how close the people may be to another town or area – and this town is less than an hour from Lynchburg with nothing else in between – they don’t know how to get anywhere except where they go everyday in their lives.
Olive Oil pleaded to turn on her navigation but I’m a stubborn Leo and surely, if we stayed on the correct highway we were bound to run into it.
That turned out to be true, with a couple of “er this way!?,” wrong turns thrown in for good measure, of course.
We walked in and were put in a room with a couple dozen other people to get an overview of the tour. Into the room walked a big guy in overalls, the second coming of Junior Samples (Hee-Haw fans will recognize the analogy).
“Ha,” he said in a Southern manner so slow that one word took about a minute, “my name’s Dusty and I’ll be your guide.”
Dusty was a character and turned out to be the highlight of the tour. The Jack Daniels Distillery Tour goes out of its way to make you think it’s run by a bunch of country bumpkins when in fact it’s a sophisticated operation. The huge factory is a few miles down the road but here all you see is the limited production facility of Gentleman Jack.
And Dusty proved to be the perfect straight man for this show. While he was showing us one part of the whiskey-making process, he said – and you’ll have to read this with a full Southern drawl – “there are people here who get to taste Jack Daniels before it goes into full production. They are called tasters.
“You are supposed to spit it out.
“If you swallow it as a taster (big pause here), they make your a too-r guide.”
Olive Oil and I laughed about Dusty the rest of the day, on the ride back to Nashville and that night over dinner and salsa dancing at a place called MadDonnas.
What we learned is that it wasn’t the tour that was worth the drive, but the experience of it. And isn’t that what travel is about in the first place?
Cheers!
JACK DANIELS DISTILLERY LOCATION & DIRECTIONS
The Jack Daniel’s Distillery is located at 280 Lynchburg Highway. (take I-24 South to US 231 South, left on Highway 82 (the Flat Creek Highway to locals) and right on Lynchburg Highway.
The distillery is 3 miles on the left. Tour hours are 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Phone: (931) 759-4221.
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