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I’m sitting in a diner in Tennessee some 40 kilometres from Lynchburg the home of the Jack Daniels Distillery. There are signposts everywhere alerting you to this and that you can tour it. Now I have never drunk JD, but my curiosity was pricked. So I ask the waiter if he had ever been. You know, to JDs, not pricked. “Oh sure when I was a kid, I would sure like to get back there. It was great”. I’m sitting in the car park outside the diner looking at my map when a couple who had obviously overheard my conversation with the waiter wind down the window and start giving me directions on how to get to the Distillery. “Is it worth it?” “Oh yeah it’s fantastic”. So the house of Jack it is.
It’s hot at the distillery and there is obviously going to be something of a wait for the tour. There are boards running around the waiting area that give you the story of the Distillery and Mr Jack. Jack apparently was a confirmed bachelor, but according to the Distillery there were as many as seven women who mourned his death and there are chairs on each side of his headstone, so the many women who mourned his passing could sit a spell. Now a confirmed bachelor in those days was normally someone I’m guessing who had made a lifestyle choice similar to Mr Smithers, but I don’t know if this would have sat well, back in the day or with the typical JD aficionado today. I don’t know what I thought JD fans were going to be like. I hadn’t imagined a Noel Coward type talking to an Oscar Wilde type, but oh my Lord! Neck tattoos, leather, denim, doo rags (doo rags are the things that for reasons unknown Peter FitzSimons wears), piercings and lots of hirsute plumbers’ smiles. And the men were worse.
After a two hour wait in 100 degree heat, it is away we go with Dusty as our guide. The photographer (who takes a group shot before we commence), tells us “He is quite the character – you’ll find it all fascinating”. Well he isn’t and the making of Tennessee whiskey is mind numbingly uninteresting (I don’t why I thought it would be otherwise). It goes for an hour and it is unbelievably hot. End of the tour – Dusty “Yawl can go to Lynchburg after this – it stays open for the last tour, but remember it is a dry county”. I go up to Dusty “Did you say it is a dry county?” Dusty very jauntily “Yes sir”.
That’s Dusty sitting down in the 1st picture. I think he had a lost a little bit of interest by this stage. The second photo is the spring they supposedly take all their water from. Really, who would give a shit.
Blue Hills Golf Club, Roanoke, Virginia. Play with Trey, a ripper bloke, who tries to arrange for his mate in Atlanta to take me out and show me the sights. This is after he had only just met me (this didn’t work out as he sent me his mate details by email and I had some serious Outlook problems that were only fixed a week later). People in the South are just incredibly hospitable, likable people. Nice course – 87. Did I make that sound matter of fact?
Did I mention I had an 87?
Richmond, Virginia. The capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Edgar Allan Poe museum. The Curator to me (and to all patrons) “Hopefully you will find out something about Edgar Allan Poe that you didn’t know previously”. This wouldn’t be really hard as the only things I know about Poe is that the world’s greatest ham, Vincent Price, made a lot of bloody awful films in the 50s and 60s based on his works and that Lisa Simpson made a diorama based on “The Tell-Tale heart”. So around I go. Apparently he was greatly admired by Jules Verne and Monet and that he married his 13 year old first cousin when he was 27. So a few things I didn’t know; the French don’t just like Jerry Lewis and Poe was an incestuous paedophile.
Our boy Eddy – funny he doesn’t look at all like a pervert.
• A good tour
• 2nd Best course
• The circular nature of life (as witnessed at Tullamarine)
• Some reactions
50 States of golf 