Day 21: Bardstown, KY - Rest Day!

Today was a great rest day, though we did a lot of sightseeing and not much resting! It rained almost all night last night and sometimes pretty hard, but the REI tent still kept the water out and the warmth in. Though the was no alarm going off, I still woke up at 6am ready to go. When I heard the rain let up a little, I dashed off to the bath house and back. I was going to do a little planning to try to get some sort of lose schedule for those who have been asking for it, but back in the tent, the patter of rain coaxed me to sleep in no time. Around 7:30, Jeff got up and started heating up water for an oatmeal breakfast. I got to eat it sitting in the tent. Does that count as breakfast in bed?

As we we were packing up, a couple on bikes with packed panniers passed by. Definitely bike tourists. They waved and we walked over. Dave and Patty are a young retired couple who sold their home, packed up their life, and now spend 3 to 6 months of the year touring this country and others by bike. They were heading a few miles down the road today, but we may run in to them again. You just never know!

After that, we really got down to breaking camp. It was sometime in the 9's, and we had things to do and see. First, we rode to Enterprise to pick up a rental car. Next, we biked to the hotel room to check in. The guy at Enterprise drove the car over to us and I gave him a ride back. In all of the confusion of de-BOBing the bikes, getting them inside, and taking the guy back to the car place, I managed once again to lose my wallet. What is going on here? Jeff has almost constantly been dogging me about losing it back at Monticello AND I can't tell you the last time I left a purse or wallet somewhere. Good grief. This time, I left my gloves and my wallet in my helmet in the bushes outside the front of the hotel. At least my stinky gloves were hiding it.

After we showered and decorated the room with all of our wet equipment, we headed out for lunch and our first sight-seeing adventure of the day, the Maker's Mark Distillery. I highly recommend stopping by if you are ever in the area. They offer free tours every hour and you get to walk through several parts of the distilling process. The first cool part for me was the room where they have giant vats of pre-bourbon in various stages of "cooking." It smelled like a cross between yeasty bread and stale beer, but in a good way. We were actually allowed to dip our fingers into the vats to taste the various stages. Don't worry, this is early on in the process and given later heat and alcohol content, it doesn't matter that our fingers touched the mashes. The second cool part was the bottling room. We got to see the plain, empty bottles get filled, capped, wrapped, labeled, and then hand-dipped in that telling MM red wax/plastic. Seriously, each and every bottle is hand dipped. Bac!
k in the souvenier shop, I had a chance to buy my own bottle and hand dip it. Way cool.

We left the distillery and headed towards Louisville. Churchill Downs was our next stop and we had to get there before the last tour at 4:15. We had asked a few people, and everyone thought that racing season was over. Wrong! We pulled up to a packed parking lot. Thanks to a guy in the lot, for $2 we got a box just to the right of the finish line, complete with TV. It was awesome! We decided to forego the visit to the museum in order to watch a few races. We even picked the winners for a couple of them, but being non-betters, we only had bragging rights amongst ourselves. I also tried a mint julep and really liked it. Jeff just got beer, per usual.

Back in Bardstown, we stopped by a drug store and then had to turn the car back in. Total mileage, about 130. At least the Enterprise shop was only a mile from our hotel. With the skies clearing overhead, it was a relatively nice walk back.

We ate at a Mexican restaurant that left Jeff missing the real stuff from Southern California. The best part is that the hotel front desk guy couldn't give us a recommendation for any places to go in town, and when we asked about the Mexican places, he responded with, "I don't eat Spanish food." Really? So how about Mexican?

Time has really slipped away from us and it is now very much past bedtime and we still need to figure out where we're going tomorrow. Jeff was calling for a 95 mile day. I told him he's nuts.

AKB