Thursday, 5/16, Jim Beam and Mammoth Cave

We left Frankie's this morning and drove to Clermont, Kentucky. Nana and Poppa were going on a tour of the Jim Beam Bourbon Distillery. Dottie and I are too young for the tour, so we stayed in the RV and played Scrabble:




I'll let Poppa tell about the Jim Beam tour:
Bourbon is the official spirit of the USA. 95% of all bourbon is produced in Kentucky, and 51% of that is from Jim Beam. So, it's appropriate that we started the Bourbon Trail at Jim Beam. Here is a cartoon representation of the whole process:




The limestone-filtered water is essential to producing bourbon. It removes iron, which can turn bourbon black. Thus this sign at the distillery:




The basic ingredients:




This is how much farm land it takes to produce the ingredients for a fifth of bourbon:




How much had Jim produced in 1935?




and by 2011?




See if you can find out what "low wine" and 'high wine" are:




Nana wants to know where she can buy these bottles:




The US government won't allow bottles bigger than 1.75 liters. These bad boys are exported to Europe.

O.K., thanks, Poppa, I'll take the mike back now. I'm glad Dottie and I stayed in the RV playing Scrabble.

After Jim Beam, we drove to Cave City to see Mammoth Cave. And it is MAMMOTH! 400 miles of tunnels in an area only 7 miles across:




This model shows the tunnels. It's "like a big but shallow platter of spaghetti."




Unfortunately, inside it is just a big tunnel through rock. So the only picture we took was of water dripping at the entrance:




Most of the time the roof was high enough that Poppa didn't have any trouble walking through. Then came "Fat Man's Misery". It got real narrow - from the knees down it was less than a foot wide, and the roof came down to about 4 feet. It was really funny watching Poppa bent over sideways, knees bent, shuffling through there. It looked like he was doing some kind of wedding dance! I kept giggling and reminding him what that section was called.

Our guide was named Autumn. She was tall, smart, and funny, just like my Autumn. She told us the cave was created by ground water dissolving limestone. But there's a sandstone layer over the cave that acts like a roof to keep water from dripping down through the top of the cave. So, we didn't see any stalagmites or stalactites.
Last year we visited Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. It was a lot prettier, but not nearly as big.

- Tigger and Dottie seeing the country with Nana and Poppa