In the grand scheme of long lines, this one isn’t super long, but it’s what I got.

2017, my wife and I took a road trip to Tennessee for the solar eclipse because Nashville was just about the only major city in the path of totality. We were down there for about a week, we didn’t have any particularly solid plans and we’re flying by the seat of our pants, we snagged the last couple of campsites in that part of the state, and pretty much started out every day with googling around for stuff to do in Tennessee.

One day, we decided to take a trip down to the Jack Daniels distillery. We’re both whiskey-drinkers, Jack isn’t our usual thing, but we don’t dislike it either, and figured we might as well check it out while we were in the state. Their distillery isn’t exactly close to Nashville, but we didn’t have anything else going on so we were up for the drive.

Now a lot of people traveled to Tennessee that week who otherwise wouldn’t have ever had a reason to go, I’ve since met a good handful of people who were in or around Nashville at the same time as us for eclipse, so I’m sure this was probably a particularly busy time for JD.

We got there, stood in line for probably about 45 minutes, slowly snaking our way though the little mini museum in their visitor center. We didn’t mind the wait, we took the time to compare the different tours they offered and by the time we got to the front of the line we had made our decision.

Unfortunately we were informed at that time that all of the tours we were interested in taking were sold out, and the only one they had available was one where you don’t get to try any of the whiskey (for those not familiar, they’re actually located in a dry county, so not even like you could just go to a bar down the street and do your own whiskey tasting afterwards)

At no point during the 45 minutes we waited in line did they make any kind of announcement, or put up a sign or anything to let us know those tours were sold out. If they had we probably would have just rolled with it and done the tour that was available, but after standing around for 45 minutes it felt like a bit of a bait and switch to us and we decided to just leave at that point.

I also kind of boycotted JD for a few years after that, which was mostly symbolic because I never really bought Jack anyway. I have lifted my boycott fairly recently though, I decided when they had an add campaign that featured drag queens that I could reward that bit of wokeness, although I still haven’t actually bought any jack.