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Sunday morning, we missed the included breakfast, who's up by 9am when on Sunday or anytime for that matter if on holiday? Thankfully we had a microwave and coffee maker so after scrambled eggs and bacon we set off again.
We'd not gone far when we spotted an old beat up ute displaying his southern pride. It had a large confederate flag on each side. He also had a back seat, a bench seat in the tray of the ute lol.
Heading through largely rural Tennessee we passed a number of smallish goat farms, some larger cattle properties, lovely larger homes, small often dilapidated demountable style homes and some large horse properties complete with the perfect paddocks, large homes and white fences. All up it was very green and lush, the weather warm and sunny. All the many churches we passed must've been packed if the number of cars outside them is anything to go by.
Many of the homes both large and small have rocking chairs on the front porch. Common also are fall displays, often by the front door but sometimes in the garden or by the letter box. For the most part they consist of a collection of pumpkins of various sizes, colours etc and some also have tied up bunches of dried out corn stalks and or sort of scare crows made from corn stalks. Some of the bigger displays at welcome to town signs and such also incorporate some bales of hay. It's all kind of weird, it looks vaguely pagan, like some sort of homage being paid to the gods for the harvest just gone. I don't think it's anything to do with Halloween given that's still 6 weeks away but really have no idea what it's all about.
We arrived around midday at the little country town of Lynchburg, pop 380ish and pulled into the driveway of the Jack Daniels Distillery, it was packed! Yesterday at Jim Beam there a few cars but nothing like at JD. There are two types of tours, one ends with a sampling and is $11 ea and the other is free, takes an hour and a quarter with no sampling at the end. The first was booked until 2pm. The time factor alone meant we took the free one. It was great fun, lots if interesting facts and we were surprised how much their product pre barrel time smelt like ours.
The weirdest thing we learnt is the county the distillery is in has been dry, they could make it but not sell it locally. That's changed but even today they can't sell it on a Sunday, they can however sell you a souvenir bottle which happens to have whiskey in it lol
After the tour we took a spin around the small town of Lynchburg, met some lovely, very chatty locals and bought a few souvenirs. Then it was back on our zig zag travels slowly inching our way back to Dallas.
There were patches of Tennessee that the radio was a bit of a wasteland in our opinions, all either holy rollers or hard core, yeee ha country stuff :-(
We got into memphis about 6 pm, checked into our hotel which is a couple of blocks from Beale St which is named in the song, walking in Memphis. And walking in Memphis is what we did later on. It's a bit like Nashville but being Sunday night it was calmer with a lot less people. There were the usual noisy clubs with bands with varying degrees of ability. We gave it away after a while and headed a couple of blocks away to a much quieter area for a late dinner.
Back to our room for a couple of drinks. Tomorrow morning we're going to check out Gracelands.
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