Early this year, when fate seemed determined to quash our family's traditional vacation week at the Jersey Shore, my husband and I decided on Door Number Two. We would spend a few days in the southern reaches of our home state, Ohio, then spend a couple more investigating bourbon distilleries in neighboring Kentucky.
Carlo was extremely eager to breathe the malt air. Over the years, he has joined the legions of aficionados supporting the American whiskey boom, as his burgeoning bar cart attests. Exploring the Kentucky bourbon trail had been on his list for a while, and neither of us had ever spent any real time in Cincinnati.
And me? While I suspected that any thirst for knowledge I might muster around the history of American whiskey could be quenched at the first distillery, I was nonetheless ready to give in to the adventure. My good-sport muscle needed some exercise.
So off to Cincinnati and Louisville we went in late June. The trip turned out to be, all at once, unremarkable and unforgettable, both better and worse than I had expected. This is almost always true. Even modest travel offers a tiny drama, a few joys and sometimes even a revelation.
These were some of mine.
I got reacquainted with the pleasures of the road.
City driving has killed all the affection I had as a teenager for getting behind the wheel, so it's easy to forget that I actually do love a good road trip: stretches of highway dotted by billboards and hay bales, stopping for road coffee at McDonald's, the sense of accomplishment in watching the odometer tick off the miles. For this adventure, I added "Carlo's Play List" to my iTunes library, and filled it with Rolling Stones, Talking Heads and Roxy Music. My eternally 17-year-old mind is still regularly blown away that we can just think of a song and then summon it into being. As Barry Manilow might say, "It's a miracle!" (Please note that I am NOT saying that Barry Manilow also is in my iTunes library. Although I am also not NOT saying that.)
The second worst moment turned out OK.
Sometime between our lovely dinner in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood and planning a zoo visit, it became apparent that I had — ahem — poorly communicated, and that the person I thought was going to babysit Daisy was not, herself, actually planning to dog sit.
This was discovered by the person who had agreed to take Daisy during a brief interim period, then hand her off to the aforementioned unsuspecting dog sitter.
Confused? Never mind — both people were my offspring, who gracefully adjusted their lives and tag teamed on Daisy's care. But for an hour or two, I deeply considered that the only fair thing for the kids and the dog was to cancel the trip and drive back to Cleveland.
This plunged Carlo and me into a dark mid-afternoon of the soul. But my point in mentioning it is that anytime your brain whispers "There is only one path," remember a thing I learned in art school: There is always more than one solution. And there was. (Thanks, ladies.)
Organic culture is nice to find.
Let's be clear that, having visited three and a half distilleries, a giant alcohol retailer, Justins' House of Bourbon, and a couple of nice bars — including one where a drunk stranger plucked a cocktail cherry from his glass and insisted I eat it — I still know comparatively nothing about whiskey.
That said, it was a blast to pepper the New Riff distillery tour guide with my beginner's questions, and to finally understand what bourbon lovers mean when they talk about the "vanilla" and "spice" notes they taste in a given bottle. To be clear, my plebeian palette cannot actually detect those flavors, but at least now I know that they derive from the barrel-aging process rather than some guy in the back room adding flavor extract by dropper.
More importantly, it was a pleasure to explore deeply rooted Kentucky whiskey culture. Age-old families, farms and craft traditions that span a century and more. Recipes refined, passed down, kept secret. In a country littered with chain restaurants and bland shopping centers, it's a pleasure to see something distinctive and organic to its surroundings.
Whiskey tastes good.
I still can't much tell the difference between the brands, but I genuinely enjoy a snort.
The very worst moment might be one worth remembering.
I can't get around introducing a harsh note, so here goes.
We were traveling from Cincinnati to Louisville when the Supreme Court released its decision in the Dobbs case, overturning Roe v. Wade and introducing a new and terrible era in U.S. history. All that day, Carlo and I managed to remain in a vacation-y state of willful denial and relative good cheer. I bought a black T-shirt at Willett distillery that just says "Nope." (OK, maybe reality had begun to set in.) I gazed in wonder as a woman dipped the top of her newly purchased bottle of Maker's Mark into a vat to seal it with hot red wax. We dined in a restaurant at a beautiful old Louisville hotel, where the room was decorated by old whiskey bottles filled with flower petals. Across the room, a platinum blonde presented bodacious breasts only 30 percent contained by her dress; her date seemed pleased. It was hard not to look.
But that night, I laid awake simmering with a depth of rage and despair about our country that I have been unable to fully articulate. The next morning in our hotel room, exhausted, I started to weep and felt I would never stop. We were due to spend another day and night in Louisville, but I didn't want to see the Kentucky Derby museum. I didn't want more bourbon history, or a walking tour, or an art gallery. We agreed to leave after breakfast.
At breakfast in the beautiful hotel's dining room, a kind waitress took note of my blotched cheeks and damp eyes. With a voice filled with softness, she said hello, then asked, "How are you doing today?" Fearful of embarrassing myself with more tears, I merely nodded. The waitress turned to Carlo. "How are we doing?" she asked him. She seemed ready for however much or little either of us wanted to say. He told her we were OK, then she gently explained the breakfast buffet and pointed us toward the coffee. The whole encounter lasted about a minute, but it was so excruciatingly sweet and caring that I thought I would fall apart. Kindness can do that sometimes.
After we'd eaten, the waitress brought the bill. "Y'all didn't each much, so I just charged you for one," she said. Perhaps she thought we had just gotten some terrible, personal news — and in a way, that's what Dobbs has felt like.
But in the moment, I accepted her kindness as a gift of grace. I tried to tell myself that this, too, was America. I must remember her the next time I see someone who needs a body to ask them, "How are you doing today?"
Home rules.
One of the many luxuries we forfeited during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic was the pleasure of returning home after being away. Traveling never fails to remind me how much I love the luxury of suffering insomnia in my own bed. How lucky I am to have this particular roof over my addled head. How great it is to be reunited with the dog.
As my friend Becky often says, "Good to go, good to get home." And surely it was.