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Published: November 12th 2011
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So it’s up early, farewell to downtown Memphis and off to the Hertz office to pick up our car. I was slightly bracing myself for a bit of a heated discussion as we’d booked through an internet site as it was so cheap and most importantly we didn’t get charged a ‘one way’ fee for picking up in Memphis and dropping off in Nashville which seemed unusual but there it was in black and white on the paperwork ‘no one way fee for this rental’. Can’t say it plainer than that. But I was still half expecting a bit of a kerfuffle about it.
However, good old Hertz were as good as gold and we even got a bigger car than we’d booked so the other worry about the size of our cases fitting in the boot (I mean trunk!) was also a non starter. So, get ourselves acquainted with the car, the gears, the right hand drive, the radio, a/c...... and off we go.
Next stop Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis. Tupelo is a large town in Mississippi and its main claim to fame is the Elvis link and also the fact that it’s on the Natchez Trace scenic drive which
we used for part of our journey today, very pretty.
The main street is where the hardware store is, where Elvis got his first guitar, apparently he wanted a rifle but Momma wouldn’t let him and a guitar had to do. All along the main street are big wooden guitars decorated to portray an Elvis song, and there’s a big cardboard Elvis in the hardware store window, but not Elvis overkill and basically Tupelo is a pleasant busy Mississippi town.
We had some lunch and then drove down Main Street to the turn off for the Elvis birthplace site. This is the actual house he was born and lived in until his family moved to Memphis in his early teens, and there’s also the actual Assemblies of God church the Presley family attended on the site, although that’s been moved here from its original site. There’s a statue of Elvis as a boy, a memorial fountain with engraved quotes from people who knew him, a meditation room and a museum about his life in Tupelo.
It was very quiet so we could wander around at leisure and the staff were just local people who were happy to chat about
their lives and memories of the Presley family.
The church was set up as a multimedia presentation......screens came down all around the pews where we were sitting and projected on the screens were a congregation made up of local Tupelo people acting the part of a church congregation from the 1940’s. We listened to the hymns, heard a visiting gospel group from Nashville, listened part of a sermon, watched them lay hands on some sick people for healing and even heard a young 'Elvis' invited up to sing a song. It did feel like a step back into a different time and as Elvis always included gospel music in his concerts it was interesting to see where his spiritual life had begun. I was struck how informal and fun the service was.
We only had a short time here as we had quite a long journey ahead of us and wanted to arrive before dark.
Destination Lynchburg, Tennessee – home of the Jack Daniels Whisky Distillery.
We’d booked a B&B here called the Tolley House and it was beautiful, like a mini plantation home.
We got a Chinese takeaway for tea (no restaurants open at night in Lynchburg, it’s so
rural) and washed it down with beer as Lynchburg is in a dry county which is ironic given the Jack Daniels link. However recently the law has been relaxed and places can sell beer. That puzzles me – either you don’t mind alcohol or you do! Anyway, the whole licensing law thing became a puzzle to us as we went further on our travels..................but more about that later!
The next morning we were up to the smell of our breakfast cooking......French toast casserole. All I can say is YUM!!!!!!
It would have been great to have had another night at the Tolley House but we had places to see so off we went. First stop the distillery.
Perhaps you’ve seen ads for Jack Daniels at the cinema or on hoardings....you know, sleepy fields and cows and men in baggy denim dungarees.....well it actually isn’t very far from that picture. Things are still done very much in the same way as Jack Daniels began the business albeit more mechanised. We had a tour guide with a very dry sense of humour who made the tour entertaining and actually really interesting. No free samples but we did get to sniff a few
bungholes!!!!!!!!!! And boy did the smell make your head swim!
The whisky is still made using water from the spring JD discovered all those years ago.
A quick visit to Lynchburg town square for a look round the shops at all things Jack Daniels related but no whisky to be seen anywhere, although we did buy some whisky flavoured fudge, and then we had to leave to drive towards the mountains to arrive before dark at our first stop, Beehive Cabin, Coker Creek.
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