Sunday October 14, 2018 (full photo album here)
Sunday rainy Sunday, as the song approximately goes. Nothing is quite so deflating, when camping, as waking up to a tent utterly submerged by the force of the rains. Crawling out, we did that very specific careful dance/joust/yoga move where you need to run across a muddy hill at a campground without falling while also trying to get gear out of the rain as fast as possible. Maybe, to our neighbors, we acted as though we had seen something strange and were sneaking by it quickly? I know not.
We got on the road quickly and stopped at a nearby gas station with a large overhang – he needed to refuel, and I needed to send a bunch of things home to clear out some space in my overloaded truck. The chores for the day done, our next stop was the Woodford Reserve Distillery:
Bourbon is good and interesting and I have previously done the entire Bourbon Trail – suffice to say that I pointed Steven to Woodford as my favorite bourbon and the best of the distillery tours. We enjoyed seeing their iconic and unique 3-still system with traditional copper stills…
… and then got to experience the taste-testing process inside one of their historic rickhouses, which was a treat (as was the included bourbon candy accompaniment):
I highly recommend checking one or three or 10 of the distilleries if you are interested in how alcohol is actually made (but honestly, if you are in Kentucky for the purposes of such a tour, please do check out the Independent Stave Company, where the VAST majority of bourbon barrels are done with traditional coopering paired with modern cleverness). At the suggestion of the distillery gift shop clerk, we went just down the road a few miles to a new restaurant called The Stave. As one can surmise, this place is very much meant to draw bourbon patrons, as a stave is the proper name for each individual plank in a barrel… say, for instance, a bourbon barrel. As a yuppie-3/8 scoring business (on the yuppie restaurant scale) they were insistent on high quality ingredients and being true to their setting. This was great for us – we got to try a Kentucky staple, burgoo and *the best* cornbread, and washed it down with Kentucky’s beloved Ale 8 One (phonetically, “A Late One”) ginger ale…
… and then finished off our respective meals with some kind of divinely-inspired, tax-free, joy-giving and otherwise scrumptious best bread pudding in this sector of our galaxy. I am not sure I can be any more specific about how much we loved it.
All told, we we walked out to the parking lot and our respective vehicles, I can comfortably say that this was a delightful meal and brief visit together on my trip. Here is the requisite picture of us pointing to the state we spent time in, beautiful unbridled Kentucky:
Steven departed with his car full of crap from my truck, heading back up to Dayton.
I, on the other hand, needed to figure out where the heck I was going to go. Just like usual! I very much wanted to go see the Huntsville Rocketry Center in Alabama, very famous and integral to NASA’s efforts to get humanity out into the Stars. As such, I settled on driving towards the Franklin State Forest Tennessee, based on the (hopefully accurate listing for) free camping. I was not hopeful to have a dry night, though, with Hurricane Michael and weather systems it created spreading across the American South. That is fine, though – I cannot be stopped. 🙂
A bit more accurately: I would try to drive into Franklin State Forest. The trails into the place were not even trails – two of them turned out to be gravel-specked mudpits which were scarcely a lane wide. I am not especially crazy about getting stuck in the middle of nowhere by myself [Editor’s note – however I might be crazy, in general] so I thought I would give the third entrance trail on Google Maps a try – and nixed that plan too, when it was overgrown enough to guarantee scratches on the paint without guaranteeing a safe path in:
So.
Plan Q? Y? FF? Perhaps I ran out of numbers and hexadecimal numbers, but I was rolling with the punches. Rolling, in this case, southward towards Alabama…and maybe free camping if my boondocking Spidey senses were attuned properly. Bearing in mind that I had about 6 hours of driving behind me, and how late it was, one can likely imagine my delight at coming across the Walls of Jericho trailhead, right over the line into Alabama. I had made it – and, more important than a mere trifle like safe arrival, I had discovered not a single sign barring boondocking. Success!
Tent set up, fan inside on full to try and encourage the rain from the prior night to dry out, and I was fast asleep in one time zone, or another. Or both, as I found out.
A Jaunt Around the States 