Friday 2nd December – the home of Jack Daniel's

To the South-East of Nashville is Lynchburg, where all of the Jack Daniel’s Whiskey in all of the World is made.  Again, not our favourite tipple but you can’t deny the popularity of the brand and learning about the distilling process is interesting….. Plus there’s a tasting session at the end! For a reasonable $17 each we got an hour and a half tour including the tasting.

Now THAT is a Christmas tree!

They make all of the charcoal that they use to filter the whiskey here on site and use spare whiskey as ignition fuel:

If you're struggling to read it, the canister says 'whiskey for desruction'

... meaning that they need their very own fire engines: 

I never knew before today what an REO speed wagon was!

We saw the natural spring found by Mr J.Daniel himself back in the 1860s - all of the water to make JD comes from here, no one has ever been able to trace the spring back to its source.  We had a taste… it was a bit gritty!  

Jack Daniel.... on the rocks (not my gag sadly!)

We saw the safe that they say killed Jack Daniel.  Apparently it was very hard to get open and in a fit of frustration one day Jack kicked it, injuring his foot.  He didn’t get any medical help for the injury (typical male!) and ended up dying of blood poisoning from it, at the age of just 61. 

We were shown the processes for making the whiskey – the smell of the mash bubbling away in the still was amazingly overpowering!  We weren't allowed to take photographs inside due to the ignition risk! Eventually we made it to the part we’d all been waiting for and got to taste five different Jack Daniel’s brands:

As expected we weren’t too enamoured with the normal whiskies (see above!), but we also got to sample some Tennessee Honey and Tennessee Fire (JD with cinnamon) which we both liked.

It was a great tour.  To let the alcohol ooze out of our systems before hitting the road we went for a walk into Lynchburg square itself which is very pretty, this picture really doesn’t do it justice:

Then, as dusk approached, we returned to the RV and a sky FULL of black vultures.  I even managed to get a half decent picture:

I finally know how to recognise them from the white tips at the end of their wings, as opposed to their close relative, the turkey vulture, that has a solid white bar along the back of the underside of the wing.  It was clearly time for the vultures to come home to roost for the night and luckily home for us was the Jack Daniel’s Visitors’ car park!  The trees around our parking spot filled with the birds, there must have been over 100 in numerous trees around us.

Each of those dark 'blobs' is a black vulture.... awesome!

We were booked into Tims Ford State Park only a short drive away so made our way to our extremely remote site in the dense woodland.