We tried to buy a tour of the most famous horse farms, but they were all sold out. We did visit the public Kentucky Horse Farm complex.

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Today we’re in horse country - Lexington, Kentucky. Absolutely beautiful miles and miles of rolling green fields.

We visited Buffalo Trace distillery, the oldest continuingly-operating distillery in America (yes, they were allowed to continue production during Prohibition). Bourbon whiskey must be more than 50% corn but can contain other combinations of grain, thus their various blends and vintages. The photo with the the 4 transparent barrels shows what happens over time - all Bourbon is aged at least 5 years, but due to evaporation and natural barrel-leakage, the oldest stuff, at 18-20 years of maturity, has less than a third of the original volume left in the barrel.

The Hillerich & Bradsby museum, makers of the Louisville Slugger bats for baseball - one more visit to be marked off the ol’ check-list. It’s really an interesting tour, learning how the bats are made, even for folks who aren’t all that tuned in to baseball. Unfortunately, photos are prohibited in the actual factory, so we saw the hand-lathed and machine-lathed bats being produced, and lacquered etc, but no photos were allowed.

Attn: Dad

A travel day today, we drove from Memphis to Louisville, a bit longer than most previous stretches. We’ll do Louisville stuff tomorrow and then probably Lexington stuff the next day - at this point we’re largely making it up as we go along, so you’ll find out when we do.

Like I said......want a piece? Just a little squeeze of the fingers.

This glistening piece of meat is a pork shoulder, that’s been in the smoker for 8-10 hours. Sauced in the last 40 mins or so, the sauce caramelizes and becomes that gooey consistency we all love. No need for a carving knife, this stuff just falls apart when gently squeezed by hand. “Melts in the mouth” is a tired old cliche, and yet seems perfectly appropriate here. So good.

Lots of international competitors.

We are at Ground Zero, of southern BBQ. Inside the fairgrounds, with hundreds of teams burning cherry and apple wood and cooking pork shoulders overnight.....this is what Heaven must smell like. If it doesn’t, it should.

The World BBQ championship starts tomorrow here in Memphis. So, for those non-foodies who don’t like the pictures of cooking......tough cookies.

We’ve arrived in Memphis, and will put down roots for a few days. We condsidered going to Graceland, but didn’t think we were Elvis fans to the tune of the $100 price tag. So we went to the National Civil Rights Museum, which has been built around the Lorraine motel, where Dr. King was killed. The museum is unrelentingly powerful.