BBQ, Music & Bourbon

We left San Antonio on Thursday, June 30^th, and after an overnight stay in College Station, made our way to a RV park in Longview, Texas. We’ve stayed there before and it is close to our favorite Texas BBQ place, Country Tavern, just outside of Kilgore. It has been in business since 1939, and serves the absolute best ribs in Texas. They use pork loin back ribs. They are slow smoked, tender (tooth tender…not fall off the bone) and have the perfect smoky, bark flavor. We enjoyed dinner there on early Friday night.

  

On Saturday we overnighted outside of Little Rock, and then on Sunday drove to one of our favorite campgrounds, Tom Sawyer’s RV Park in West Memphis, Arkansas. It is right on the Mississippi River and we enjoy watching the river barges go by.

Monday morning July 4^th we drove to Nashville and we just got settled into our campsite when it started pouring down rain. We skipped going downtown to see Sheryl Crow in a free concert, followed by a spectacular fireworks show, because severe thunder storms were forecast with an expected crowd of 250,000. We stayed home and watched the concert and fireworks on TV.

 

We decided to go downtown on Tuesday night for dinner and visit a few honky tonk places. We rode a shuttle bus from the campground for $10 roundtrip per person. It was nice not to have to worry about traffic or parking. We decided on Jack’s BBQ on Broadway and it was very good. After dinner we went to Tootsies and then to Legend’s Corner, both famous Nashville honky tonk bars. There is no cover charge and the music was pretty good.

 

Wednesday morning we drove to Frankfort, Kentucky for a 2-night stay at the Elkhorn Campground. On Thursday we stopped by White Castle for lunch (small hamburger sliders). After lunch we toured the Buffalo Trace distillery, a National Historic Landmark in Frankfort.  The Buffalo Trace distillery is the oldest distillery in the country. Many of the buildings were built in the late-1800s. We toured a bonded warehouse where bourbon was aging in oak barrels and then toured another building where they were hand bottling special aged bourbon. Afterwards, the tour guide then took our group to the visitor’s center to taste some of their products.

We stopped overnight in West Virginia on Friday where a thunderstorm knocked out the campground electrical power and we also lost water (electric well pumps). Oh well, we had to use our own generator and on-board water supply to get by. We drove to Winchester, Virginia on Saturday and stayed for 3-days to visit our niece Stephanie, brother-in-law Mike and my sister Marcia.

Today, July 12^th, we left Winchester and drove through 5 states (Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York). We’re overnighting at Black Bear Campground near the village of Florida, NY. Tomorrow we head to Bedford, MA (near Boston) and on Thursday to Bar Harbor, Maine to finish the last portion of our planned trip to New England.

Steve & Julie Cornelius