Day 03:

Day 03 - Knoxville, TN to Louisville, KY: 2 states (TN, KY), 290 miles 10 hours on the road, 7 in the saddle.

Beautiful weather and great roads today. The bikes continue to run great. 

While eating breakfast at the hotel this morning we met at very nice couple that's also heading up to Milwaukee for HDs 120th celebration. By chance, they hooked up with a representative for the motor company in Fort Lauderdale, the southeast "ride in" location, and have been riding with the group everyday. It sounds like they're having a great ride. Maybe we'll meet up with them again in Milwaukee. 

The GPS continued to throw us a few hiccups. The first hiccup occured while trying to leave Knoxville where we found ourselves trying to navigate our way out of downtown Knoxville. Eventually, after a few not-so-nice words spoken through my intercom headset we were back on track and riding through some beautiful country.  

Not too far outside of Knoxville, up on a hill, was a huge display of well placed gravestones and a huge banner that read "Prepare to met God".  Hmm

Our route included US25E through Kentucky, which is an absolutely beautiful road. It does include a tunnel, but this one was well lit and fun, unlike the tunnels on Blue Ridge Parkway. My eyes don't do well in the dark and some of the tunnels even had curves. But, again, I prevailed and made it to our hotel safely to rest up for another very full day tomorrow. 

We took a side trip before landing in Louisville to tour the Maker's Mark distillery. Wow! Impressive! The grounds are maticuluaous. Including the women's restroom. 

The tour was fantastic which include tastings of four varieties. Sadly, we didn't finish all our tastings since we still had another hour and half ride to the hotel. Our tour guide, Taylor, did a great job educating us on everything Maker's Mark. Definitely recommend the tour if ever in the area.

Getting to the distillery was an adventure. The GPS continued to be questionable. We stopped for gas about 15 miles from the distillery and double checked directions. My Google maps showed a different route than Curtis'Waze and Garmin. We picked Waze and headed out.

When our tour guide mentioned if you didn't take the scary route to the distillery you may have seen some of our rickhouses, buildings where they store some of their barrels.  Well we didn't see any rickerhouses because we rode in on the scary route. Beautiful country but the road looked like someone's driveway with a couple extreme up and down hills. 

We decided to skip the dealership stop since the last two stops didn't have much. We were tired and ready to check-in to hotel grab a bite to eat. Tomorrow will be a long day as we make our way to Rockford, IL.