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For the first full day of our Louisville trip, my husband and I drove east toward Lexington. You can head pretty much any direction out of town and hit half a dozen major bourbon distilleries who distribute nationwide, but our first stop was actually a smaller, local place. In Lawrenceburg, in an unassuming, warehouse-looking building (with a kangaroo statue out front), you'll find Larrikin Bourbon Company.

We were prepared for this place to be hit-or-miss; it was really just a convenient stop before a scheduled tour we had a short while later. But it turned out that this random small batch distillery made really solid stuff. We sampled several good options, with the clear winner being their American Maple -- with just the right amount of "drenched pancake" flavor to be different without actually tasting like syrup.

Well... strike that. Their clear winner was their "Smidge of Maple Bourbon Cream," with a taste surpassed only by the bartender's endless suggestions on how to use it (as an ice cream topper, in hot chocolate, just to name a couple). But leaving a cream-based spirit in a hot car all day just seemed like a supremely bad idea, so the American Maple was the souvenir we took back home.

The next stop was Woodford Reserve, a more-well known brand with a huge operation on a sprawl of beautiful land. We took a guided tour of the place and saw all parts of the operation in full swing -- from fermentation (with giant two-story vats of sweetly bubbling goodness) to barreling (with freshly-filled barrels rolling down a gently-sloping track) to storage (with towers of racked barrels signed by everyone from state celebrities to fellow tourists sneaking in their graffiti) to bottling (sorry, you can't go in that room, but by all means take a peek through the door). Of course, the tour concluded with a guided tasting, sampling five different whiskeys in Woodford Reserve's repertoire.

I have no doubt that you could have a similar tour experience at whatever large bourbon maker might be your personal favorite -- all the big names have built grand buildings that are as much about impressing tourists as making whiskey. But Woodford Reserve has been around long enough for their buildings to receive historical preservation status, and to me the setting felt especially beautiful. I expect the sights we saw on the tour will flash to mind now whenever I have a pour of their bourbon.

We stopped for lunch at a small local place called The Stave. The extensive whiskey list might have you expecting a fancy restaurant, but really the place was a small bar with shelf after shelf of Kentucky bourbons stacked all the way the way to the ceiling -- because of course it is, when you can drive half a mile down the road to get some of them.

We were less than a mile away from another distillery called Castle & Key that merited a much quicker stop. I'd never sampled their stuff before -- but the distillery itself is built on the grounds of a much older, defunct distillery. Those grounds include a stone castle that's been standing since the 1880s, and a large garden area you can wander around. (And on an afternoon not at the height of summer, you might actually want to.) I wasn't wowed by the few things we tasted here, but the stop was more about the venue than the whiskey, so I can hardly say I was disappointed.

The afternoon was slipping away by this point, so we headed back toward Louisville for a non-whiskey activity, a trip to the Louisville Mega Cavern. It's a massive underground space left behind by limestone mining operations, and now you can tour the place... or, in our case, zipline through it. Ever since a trip to California, my husband and I had kept an eye open for novel places for a new zipline experience, and decided to take a chance on this one. I would say it wasn't quite as enjoyable... as you might expect, what really makes the experience is being able to see everything around you (and you obviously don't get that in a cave). Still, it was a fun change of pace -- and you can't drink bourbon all the time, even on the "bourbon trip."

We closed out the evening with a late dinner at Buck's Restaurant, which served a decadent meal of things wrapped in other things (shrimp in bacon, lamb in prosciutto...). When the waiter learned we were in town sampling whiskeys, and had visited Woodford Reserve that day, he brought a tiny splash of an 18-year bourbon from their own extensive collection (arrayed alphabetically around the bar).

Having had a delightful and full day -- and determined not to burn ourselves out with another full day ahead -- we decided that was a fine time to call it a night.