right on bro!

I woke up at the Wigwam feeling totally rejuvenated, and started off. It was still cloudy out, but it didn’t seem to matter as much today. Up I-65 for about 30 miles, and then out into the Kentucky countryside. The day’s destination was the Maker’s Mark distillery in Loretto, KY.

After awhile I started seeing signs for Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin birthplace. I had no idea Lincoln was born in Kentucky - I’m sure I learned it back in high school but it’s not something that I think about every day. So I decide to stop at the national park. Lincoln’s got himself a nice little park off of Route 68 near Hodgenville. I stopped at the visitor’s center and got a map of the park, and then walked off to the memorial to see his birthplace. The memorial is actually a huge building in which the cabin is housed, to protect it from the elements.

I walked inside, talked to the park ranger for a bit, and discovered the memorial’s dirty little secret - it’s not really Lincoln’s cabin. Apparently back in the day, two guys from New York bought the farm where the cabin stood, dismantled the cabin, and took some of the logs on tour around the United States, and after they went bankrupt, the logs were in storage quite awhile in places like New York City and Lexington. The cabin’s been re-built a couple of different times since then, including once to move the cabin down the hill so they could construct the memorial back in the early 1900s. So now what we have here, the ranger said, is a “symbolic cabin.” Okay.

Onward to Maker’s Mark. But again, I saw another sign for Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood place in Knob Creek, so I stopped again. There was no one at the park, but there was another log cabin and a little sign that had a quote from Lincoln saying that his earliest memories of his boyhood were from this cabin. I suspect that this cabin might not be real either, since it’s not covered - how can a log cabin survive 150 years and be in almost pristine condition?

Finally I reached the outskirts of Loretto on a winding, hilly two-lane road through a bunch of farms, to the Maker’s Mark distillery, which is a United States historic place for being the oldest distillery in Kentucky. This place was really cool - I got to see the fermenting room and taste whatever it was that was fermenting, one of the warehouses where the whiskey is aged (white oak barrels with the insides charred, hand-rotated for an average of 6 years per barrel), and the bottling line. The warehouse smelled just like when you open a bottle of Maker’s. Unfortunately there was no whiskey sampling to be had - the “personal bottle dipping” mentioned on the Website meant that you can buy a small bottle and dip your own wax seal. Which I did anyway.

That was it for the day - after that it was straight driving. I’m in Hilliard, Ohio right now, which is a suburb of Columbus. There’s nothing but chain stores here, and almost everything was closed, so I ended up getting some food from Chili’s and watching a Kurt Russell movie on HBO. It’s the one where his wife gets kidnapped in the desert by a trucker - anyone have any idea what that’s called?

New photos are here, galleries 7 and 8.