I survived my four day weekend with “the boys.”  Unfortunately I came back to a severely impaired webserver…  It is definitely limping.  So, I’m doing the best I can with what I have.

Thursday afternoon Martin & I flew out to Louisville, KY to attend the ’09 Bourbon Festival in Bardstown.  We met up with Todd & his brother-in-law Eric at the Louisville airport, rented a vehicle, and proceeded on to Bardstown.  We pulled in to our Bed & Breakfast pretty late, and after a rather, ummm, “extensive” tour of the house we headed out to check out the surroundings.  We stumbled across a rather inviting place that met our somewhat low-brow requirements, and ended up staying rather late;  Which is to say when the lights came on and they told us to leave.

Friday we awoke bright & early (early at least) to start the weekend festivities.  After a delicious breakfast (highlighted by listening to the proprietress scream up the stairs at Chris to get up, which became a morning ritual by the time we left) we piled in the car and took a rather circuitous route to the Four Roses Distillery for the “Let’s Talk Bourbon” seminar.  (We found the navigation equipment somewhat dicey in Kentucky.)  Oddly this was possibly one of my favorite, and cheapest, events of the the festival.  Don’t get that combo very often.  It was an outdoor event on a fine day, an informative and festive event, pretty much all around fun.  We stayed quite a bit past the posted end of the party, until we noticed we were sorta the only people there, so we slunk back to the car and drove off.  Next was the Woodford Reserve distillery.  That was kinda a non-event, I’d say we were a little disappointed in that one.  “Done, check, move on.”  We headed back to Bardstown & took a quick nap, then headed out to the big “Cigar & Jazz Festival.”  Hopefully you can pretty well put together the content of that evening from the title…  Yeah we kinda sat around and, er, smoked cigars and listened to jazz.  There ‘ya go.

Saturday, after another fine breakfast, we took another long drive out to Maker’s Mark for a tour.  The tour was sort of marginal, but there really wasn’t anything better to do.  I’m a fan of the brand so it was interesting to hear all the history and such.  Plus we got free ice cream;  Can’t go wrong there.  After that we went on a failed quest to find President Lincoln’s birthplace, then ate some lunch, then it was time for the coup de grâce of the weekend, (according to Todd,) the “Bourbon Tasting & Gala.”  This was a black tie event (strike one) held in a large indoor area (strike two) with 1,200 other people.  (Yep that’s three.)  Ahhh, it was fun.  I guess it was like every other Gala I’ve been too, for that matter.  I thought the dinner was very good, and I got a lot of cool swag too.  The fact that I was sweating to death in a stupid tuxedo while enjoying these things was certainly unfortunate, but couldn’t be helped.  Probably the worst part was that they had the same stinkin’ band from the party we went to the night before, so we had to listen to the same set.  It was good the first night, entertaining even;  Two nights in a row?  Not so much.

Sunday was spent travelling back home.  As mentioned, I got home to a gimpy webserver, so I spent the rest of the day alternating football games & geeking on the pc.  About 8:30 the impact of spending three days partying hit me full on, and I wiped out on the couch.  DONE.  Yes, yes I do have some pictures.  In fact, I took a brand new camera just for the event, and I must say I was a little disappointed in the performance of it.  Some of the pics I was most looking forward to just didn’t come out.  (Like the four of us standing in the back yard of the B&B in our formals while the lady snapped pics like we were heading to our senior prom;  All of them are blurry.)  So, I’ll pick through what there is and see what can be done.