Monday, October 29, 2012

Kentucky Fried Road Trip

I took my mom on a little road trip from Friday, September 28th to October 1st. Our primary mission was to attend the World Fried Chicken Festival in London Kentucky. It made sense because my mom lives on a strict school-lunch diet of tacos, pizza, and fried chicken, and Kentucky is much easier to drive to than Mexico or Italy.

The Chicken Festival was definitely cool, but it wasn't quite what I had been expecting. In St. Louis there are barbecue festivals, and in Springfield they have chili festivals, and what both of those things mean is a bunch of people who are good at making those things compete at who is the best. And I like it because then I get to try food made by professionals from all over the place. I figured that's what the Chicken Festival was going to be like. Going from booth to booth, stuffing my face with awesome fried chicken. Well, it wasn't quite like that. It was more of a county fair type of atmosphere. There were the usual booths all over with people selling stuff, and political groups. There was the section with the carnival rides, and there was a stage for little shows. There was a country singing girl on stage for a while who was really good. Country on the radio makes me want to wretch, but she was playing Johnny Cash, and led me to discover Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight". I've listened to that song in the car about a hundred times since then. Tangent alert.






Anyway, so there were chicken signs everywhere, and I got this pretty rad paper chicken hat, but the only edible chicken was being made by a church group. I feel like there must be something going on when there's only one group selling chicken at the World Fried Chicken Festival. Seemed very monopolistic to me. 


And when you've only got one group making chicken at a damn chicken festival you get: one massive line.


To be fair, it was really really good. And they had this cool world's largest skillet thing that made watching the frying process pretty amusing. There was a guy walking around with a garden rake pulling the chicken in that had floated out of arms reach while frying.




Next we took a quick drive to Cumberland Falls, located in Daniel Boone National Forest. The leaves were just starting to change colors. It was very nice.


Apparently there is an actual thing called a moonbow, created when the moonlight hits the mist from the falls. It sounds pretty awesome.






I like to try local stuff, so of course I had a Diet Ale 8. Once I drank it I realized it had caffeine in it. What sort of a monster puts caffeine in a ginger ale? Why not start putting codeine in there as well? Sneaky soda pharmacists.


The final sight seen for the day was Corbin, Kentucky, home of Harland Sanders' original restaurant.












The place used to be a roadside restaurant and motel. I think the story was that they were going to move the highway which would kill Sanders' business. So he went and sold his secret recipe on the road.




I thought the story here was pretty cool. The sign said that the lady of the house would always check out the rooms at a motel before a family would agree to stay the night. So to smooth out this barrier Sanders made the restaurants bathrooms accessible only through replica of the rooms. Pretty good marketing I thought.





All of this Colonel Sanders fun times reminded me of how he rolls in Japan. Read about how he is dressed up by season and confused with Santa Clause here. Then, read about how the Colonel put a curse on Japanese professional baseball's Hanshin Tigers here.