Road Trip! Dan in his new Woodies sunglasses!
Harkness Edwards Winery, Winchester, KY
Shortly before we left on our Road Trip from West Virginia to Colorado, I won Dan a pair of Woodies Sunglasses, and they arrived literally as we were getting in the truck! So he looked spiffy, indeed! 🙂
As I detailed in my previous “Trip Tips” post, I use mapquest.com to map out our Road Trips, usually with no more than 4-5 hours of driving each day, so that we can stop to see and do things along the way on the spur of the moment, and keep it fun! (Yes, we know you can go “pedal-to-the-metal” and drive 12 hours a day, but that is NOT fun!)
The first evening of our Road Trip west found us in Kentucky, and when I spotted a sign for the Harkness Edwards Vineyards https://www.harknessedwardsvineyards.com/ in Winchester, KY at dusk, just as we needed a break and a bite to eat before going to our hotel, we happily pulled in. It wasn’t terribly cold, and we had a delightful wine tasting outside in their garden, with a yummy cheese board, and we bought two bottles to take with us, to remind us of the evening- the start of The Great Big Box of Booze we’d bring home… The staff was friendly and made us welcome, and it was a great start to our trip! Dan may be a chef, but I am the “foodie-winey”, LOL, and I really love finding special, local places for food and beverages when we travel. It is always SO much better than eating at a fast food place or a chain restaurant on the highway! In addition to enjoying and learning about local foods and drink, we get to support small, local businesses (like ours), many of which are struggling now simply to keep their doors open, and meet great people who are truly of the places we are visiting! We usually buy at least one bottle of something we have tasted and enjoyed to take home, which allows us to extend the pleasure of the trip once it’s over! Stopping at wineries, distilleries, and breweries everywhere we go has been a tradition of ours for many years all over the world, and our friends do tease us about it: one friend told me that we weren’t doing an elk hunt, we were doing a cross-continental bar crawl. LOL
That night (11/27) we stayed at the Holiday Inn Express Lexington East, in Winchester, KY using our IHG Rewards Club Points, (a program we HIGHLY recommend, as we have used our IHG Points, accrued both by staying at IHG hotels and using our IHG branded credit card, for hotel stays all over the world), and it was fine: clean, warm, and nice, with professional and friendly staff, and good beds, linens, and pillows, which made for a good night’s sleep. I will say that the over-the-top, arbitrary, and inconsistent (and thus meaningless), so-called “precautionary safety measures” that the chain hotels are taking due to COVID hysteria were neither wanted or needed by us: almost no amenities remained in the guest rooms (as if you might die from touching a pen or a notepad- but not little shampoo bottles or soaps, LOL), silly stickers on guest room doors to let you know your room has been “sanitized”, but no room cleaning or fresh towels daily unless specifically requested- and that their highly touted “grab and go breakfasts” are nasty, and really have to GO. At an Embassy Suites we stayed at you could order food and eat it in the public Atrium (no mask required as long as you were seated, of course), but not in the restaurant, which was closed “due to COVID”. LOL It does seem as if hotels are using COVID to cut back on service and staff and save money, and as no one is screaming about it- because it’s “for our health”, of course, and to complain results in “shaming ” and hateful nastiness- I have a bad feeling that the hotels won’t willingly go back to providing the amenities that hotels need to and should be providing. We want the “good old days” back as fast as possible: daily room cleaning and restocking, guest room amenities, well-prepared meals served in dining rooms and drinks in bars, and full, hot breakfasts, not some nasty, pre-packaged thing that has been sitting in a fridge for a week to be eaten in our car, or outside in the freezing snow or sleet. (At one hotel we were told when we checked in, at 10pm, that if we wanted a “breakfast sandwich” in the morning, we should get it that night, as there were only three left in their fridge. Uck!). And, as we learned on this 3 week road trip that took us through 6 states (WV, VA, KY, IL, MO, KS, and CO), and had us meeting with and talking to a LOT of people in the hospitality industry, our views are those of the vast majority. IMHO hotels should offer two choices: normal guest rooms and service for people like us, and rooms stripped of everything with no service for paranoid Covidiots- the people who wear masks in their cars with the windows rolled up, and really believe they are doing something of value for themselves and “society”. Masks, by the way, are basically a national joke. You wave them, like a white flag of surrender, as you walk into restaurants, to comply with the laws mandating them posted on most every door, and then remove them the instant you sit down to order food, as upon sitting you, quite evidently, immediately become 100% healthy and incapable of transmitting any disease or infecting anyone with anything. LOL Yes, masks are total BS and everyone with functioning brain cells knows it- it’s tantamount to peeing in a swimming pool wearing a bathing suit. LOL But staff at the hotels and restaurants have to wear them all day long- often for 12 hours at a time, if not longer- which is both unhealthy and very dangerous. One waitress at a fine restaurant told us that she had passed out and collapsed several times from the mandatory mask that covered both her mouth and nose and cut her oxygen- but that she would be fired if she removed it, so she didn’t dare. Mark my words: Months of of this irrational insanity is going to result in a LOT of people with chronic lung damage-and tons of lawsuits down the road.
The morning happily found us in Lexington, Kentucky: home of fast horses and fine bourbon! When time is no object we prefer to take the “secondary roads”, rather than the Interstate Highways, so as to really get to see America, and because there are more interesting things to see and do on those roads; on the Interstate you basically hit one identical gas and shopping plaza after another from Maine to California… But as we only had 6 nights to get to Colorado, this time we had to stay on main highways- basically taking I-64 north, and then I-70 due west. BUT: using your handy-dandy GPS you can finds Tons of cool things just off the Interstate- things like historic sites, museums, great restaurants, wineries, and distilleries, and I do all that “riding shotgun” while Dan drives!
The first thing we did (after stopping to see the horses, as I play the ponies, betting the Triple Crown every year on Twin Spires, wearing my Lucky Hat…) 
was tour the Mary Todd Lincoln House in Lexington, KY: https://www.mtlhouse.org/, which was her childhood home. This was quite interesting for both Dan and I, as we have both read a great deal about Lincoln, and his wife has often been maligned by biographers, for everything from being a spendthrift, to being a Confederate sympathizer, to being insane. Mary Todd Lincoln had “a rough row to hoe”, as they say, enduring tragedy after tragedy, actually being committed to a institution by her son, and having to literally beg for a widow’s pension. In my opinion, she deserves a better and more even-handed biography than she has been given to date…
As I have longed to take Chef Dan on the Kentucky Distillery Trail forever, when I discovered our trip actually put us smack in the middle of the Kentucky Distillery District I was ecstatic!
Tasting, at the Barrel House Distillery, Lexington, KY
We found two really cool distilleries that were new to us: Barrel House Distillery and Bluegrass Distillers. At Barrel House Distillery we got a private tour of this small, artisan distillery by The Guy Who Makes The Whisky, and it was really fascinating! When they say “small batch”, and that they distill using traditional methods, they aren’t kidding! We’ve visited a LOT of distilleries over the years, and Barrel House was The Smallest & Most Traditional One we’ve ever encountered, and it was truly cool to see whisky being made the way they do!
The Still, at Barrel House Distillery, Lexington, KY 
The Mash, at Barrel House Distillery, Lexington, KY 
Barrel House Distillery, Lexington, KY 
Dan and Distiller, at Barrel House Distillery, Lexington, KY
We then did a whisky tasting (see photo above), and bought a bottle of the Bourbon we liked best: Barrel House Select. After our tasting we went next door to the Elkhorn Tavern (owning the Elkhorn Inn, how could we not?!) for lunch on their heated patio, and I had a shot of one of their finest, smoothest Bourbons…
Our next stop was the craft distillery, Bluegrass Distillers, where we did another fun tasting at an outdoor table, and then bought their unique Blue Corn Bourbon, as well as a bottle of Ohio Bourbon Barrel Maple Syrup! Bluegrass also hand-crafts their spirits, and they use non-GMO and locally sourced Kentucky Proud ingredients.
Several of the more famous distilleries in this area were closed (and their websites not updated to make that clear…), which was a bit of a disappointment, but it was their loss and our gain, as we instead discovered two great, new ones! We then drove towards Illinois:
That night we stayed at the Holiday Inn St. Louis-Fairview Heights, again on our IHG Rewards Club Points, and found it clean and nice, with professional, friendly staff, good beds, and the cushy pillows I love, and we got a good night’s sleep. As nothing was open for dine-in in that area, we got takeout ribs for dinner from Bandana’s BBQ https://www.bandanasbbq.com/ to take back to our hotel room…
Next: Dorothy, we’re in Kansas!
