Lynchburg, Tennessee the home of Jack Daniels

We got up bright and early (for us anyway) and had a quick breakfast at our hotel. No breakfast buffet this morning – that only happens on the weekend apparently. Or perhaps it was stopped after I dropped the bacon on the floor one morning.

Then we packed up and headed off to pick up a hire car. Today we would be driving to Atlanta, with a stopover in Lynchburg to go to the Jack Daniels distillery. It was about an hour and halfs drive to Lynchburg, and our tour was booked for 10:45am, so we made sure we were at Avis to pick up our car nice and early. Except they didn’t have our car. So we waited. And waited. When we could wait no more we asked to just be given whatever random car they could. It was a downgrade from what we had booked. Such is life. We had a distillery tour to get to. Put the address in to the GPS. GPS didn’t work. Time is wasting. Steve runs back into car rental place. Woman makes GPS work. We start driving. GPS crashes and stops working again. Decide to use Google Maps on our phones instead. Holiday saved.

We got to Lynchburg at 10:30am. Parked and walked swiftly to distillery. No bags allowed inside. Steve ran back to the car and I went inside to get our tickets. Made it on to the tour by about 2 minutes. Once all that excitement was over, we could enjoy the tour. We got to see the spring where they get the water to make Jack Daniels from, amongst other things.

At the end of the tour we got to do a tasting of 4 Jack Daniels whiskeys. Incidentally, Lynchburg is a dry county and the sale of alcohol is not allowed. There is a small loophole that allows for the distillery to serve these samples on a tour, but that is all. Crazy.

Tour done, it was time for lunch. Some prior investigation old us that Barrelhouse BBQ was the place to eat BBQ when in Lynchburg. Seems everyone else had the same idea.