Lynchburg, Tornadoes and Opryland

Why does bad weather seem to follow me around? That's what it feels like. Whether it's sitting on a plane for 4 hours in torrential rain and lighting in Chicago, snowed in at Lake Tahoe, standing on the 25th floor of the church office building during a tornado in SLC and now another tornado in Nashville! Luckily, yesterday morning we decided to visit the sleepy little town of Lynchburg, TN, just outside of Nashville. Lynchburg is home to the first ever "registered" distillery in the US. Established by Jack Daniel in 1866.



I think he was 13 at the time, maybe 17, I can't remember. Either way, quite young to be running a distillery let alone registering it with the US. Funny! Anyway, the distillery offers free tours of their operations, including a group photo and lemonade at the end of the tour. A few tid bits of information that I found interesting;




They only use fresh stream water that is naturally filtered through the local limestone into the factory's own natural creek.



Jack Daniel was only about 5' 2" tall and had such a baby face that they speculate that is why he always wore such gentleman-like suits with long tails and hats to try to appear more like his age. As you can see, the statue was built a little larger than life.



They store their whiskey in the barrels for anywhere from three to seven years before it is of the quality to bottle and sell. This is one of their smallest barrel houses, only four layers of barrels in this one.

We were the tour guide's first ever visitor from Utah and our revelation of where we were from in the "get to know you" portion at the first of our tour received a few giggles from the rest of the group.

We finished the tour, walked around the historic downtown area of Lynchburg and had lunch before the rain started, but by the time we were a few miles outside of Nashville it really started to pour! Our plan was to visit Opryland next and on a detour around an overturned semi (we would later find out was caused by a tornado) we drove through lots of tree branches and debris so we new we had just missed some pretty strong winds. We slowly made our way to the Opryland area for a stop at the Grand Ole Opry. We had to walk through little rivers of water to get to the front of the building. Matt was nice enough to drop me off while he parked the car, but to go along with my bad weather karma, I didn't think to bring the umbrella. Soaking wet we browsed the gift shop and someone walked up to us to let us know that, da da daaa, Gene Watson was here and was signing autographs! The big country fan that I am, I didn't know who the heck he was, but since there really weren't very many people there, I felt bad for him and went over to have him sign my post card. I figured Mom might know who he was and would appreciate a signed autograph from Gene Watson. I was glad I didn't have to say anything to him so he wouldn't catch on to how really clueless I was.

The rain was still relentless as we left and feeling a little like drowned rats we cut our touring short and headed back to the hotel. After drying off a little we headed out (with umbrella in hand) to go to dinner. One step out of the hotel, we decided to opt for one of the hotel restaurants. The one that we chose is located on a sky bridge which provided a nice view of the lighting and pouring rain.

It wasn't until this morning when we turned on the news that we realized that what we had driven through the night before was debris from a tornado. Oh brother!