Jack Daniels is a Tennessee Whiskey is made and mellowed in Lynchburg, Tennessee. It is also the name of the hotel where I’m staying here in southern New Hampshire.

I’ve been coming down here to work with Yankee for 6 years now, and have, until this trip, somehow avoided staying at the Jack Daniel’s Motor Inn. Partially this was a result of circumstances conspiring to give me other places to stay, partially it was a feeling, somewhere in the back of my mind, that a hotel named after a whisky wouldn’t be the best place for me, a weakling alcophobe.

This being something of a “new horizons” sort of trip, however, I decided the time had finally come.

And it’s actually quite pleasant.

It turns out that Jack and Daniel were two brothers who decided to start a hotel. And they named it after themselves. So there are not, assumptions to the contrary, whisky taps installed in the halls.

It would appear that Jack and Daniel had a sort of Scandanavian aethetic, as the Motor Inn is quite spartan: rooms have a bed, a washroom, a TV and bureau and two chairs. And nothing else. There’s no money wasted on adornments like paintings, or, in fact, decoration of any sort. It’s all quite clean and pleasant. But coming off 3 days in a frilly B&B in Camden, it’s a dramatic change.

And, in the end, in this heady afterglow that I find myself in post-Pop!Tech, I can think of no better place to write a novel or an essay or a treatise on life, than while sitting in the Jack Daniel’s Motor Inn, in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Stay tuned.