C&W and KY

I'm back from Computers and Writing. Well, I've been back for a week, but less than 100 minutes after my plane landed in St. Louis, Tracey and I were on the road to Kentucky for a Virtue and Vice themed vacation (we visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries and the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill).

The distilleries were cool. While Jim Beam doesn't do a tour of the distillery proper, they do have a cool set up. Maker's Mark's grounds are beautiful, and while they don't offer samples of their bourbon, they do let you taste it as it ferments (fermentation takes place over four days and they let you sample each day).

The Shaker Village is well worth visiting. Plan to spend at least a day and maybe more if you want to go on a number of area hikes, a river boat cruise, or participate in one of their workshops (they'd just done a dry stone construction rock wall workshop a few weeks before we visited). While we didn't stay overnight (there's something like 80 rooms and I've been told by a friend the accommodations are good), we did eat in the restaurant and the food is excellent.

I uploaded some of pictures from the trip to Flickr. The oddest thing we saw was an traveling Angus Beef exhibit, which consisted of a cargo truck (which had most of the exhibit, I'm assuming), and a pickup pulling a cow statue:

I'll post more on C&W in the next few days.