The tour guide at the Peerless bourbon distillery looked at me like I was crazy.
“You don’t know what Cracker Barrel is? You’ve never heard of Cracker Barrel?!” She guffawed. “You have to go. And you have to try the biscuits.”
I was in bourbon country, but apparently I was also in the land of fried chicken and biscuits. I was the only person on the tour that day because it was a rainy weekday in the industrial part of town that used to be a bit dodgy. I left with a small but expensive bottle of a double-barrel bourbon that tasted like caramel and spread warmth down my throat.
Slightly tipsy, I wandered over to Churchill Downs, home of premier horse racing. Cool stadium, and a star-studded history, but horse racing just doesn’t thrill me the way other games do. There’s not enough play-by-play drama. The horses run around in a circle, and… then it’s done. It’s always over so fast. What I will say is, sassy horse names are the best. I saw one winner called “Behave Yourself.”
What came next was a stormy downpour so intense I couldn’t see more than a hundred feet in front of the car, and it stayed that way for miles. Trucks sped by me and cut in front at 80 miles an hour, spraying even more water all over the windshield. I was terrified that one jerky move on the steering wheel would send my car skidding out of control down the soaked highway until it crashed into the guardrail, popped up into the air and crashed upside down. I drove with eyes wide open and alert, both hands on the wheel and the radio off.
Finally I reached Bowling Green and stopped at a Cracker Barrel, where a row of rocking chairs were lined up for sale on the outdoor porch. I ate a plate of Southern fried chicken, cole slaw, salty roasted veggies and two fluffy biscuits.
Paducah
The little city of Paducah, a trading town at the confluence of two rivers and a former Civil War battle site, is also the home to the National Quilt Museum.
This was about as Americana as it gets, folksy and homespun goodness woven into the squares of quilts from all over the country and the world. A few showed real mastery of the craft, with complicated tiny stitches creating bumpy textures in the fabric that, when viewed farther away as a whole, looked quite elegant. Others were simple symbols of patriotism. One room displayed 50 red, white and blue spangled quilts to represent the states.
The city of 25,000 people had a cute, if somewhat rundown, downtown main street. There were a few ghost stores. Nearby, a wall mural showed what was once a lively town market filled with carriages.
The wall murals chronicling Paducah’s history was by far the most interesting thing to see. Murals portrayed Native American settlement (the city is named after a Spanish word for the Comanche people), the trading culture of steamboats, river barges and tobacco storage and its sacking during the Civil War.
