Should you hanker for a short road trip in this summer of high gas prices, consider Kentucky. You can drive from Boone County to Louisville, Ky., in less than seven hours. If you love rivers as Kit and I do, dip your toe in the Missouri, the Mississippi and the O-high-O along the way.

Interstate 64 across southern Illinois and Indiana is a wide-open section of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway that quietly divides lush fields of corn and soybeans laid out on a Grant Wood canvas. Meticulously maintained two-story white clapboard farmhouses surrounded by mature trees are perched with their barns and grain silos on knolls set in wide landscapes unbroken by forest. This is Corn Belt country, no doubt about it.

It’s in southern Indiana and central Kentucky that limestone and shale show up regularly along highways in much the same way that they do on Highway 63 south of Ashland.

Crossing the Ohio Bridge that connects this region of Indiana to Louisville, you enter a city that feels like home. It is a Southern city whose streets are shaded in summer by graceful mimosas and venerable old granddaddy-aged trees. A wealth of impressive stone churches reach from the downtown into every neighborhood. Neat yards great and small are brilliant with black-eyed Susans.

Historic neighborhoods along Frankfort Avenue support independent bookstores, coffee and gelato shops, restaurants and cafes, art galleries, hardware stores, an early 20th-century free public library, small businesses and single-family homes along a two-lane street shared by pedestrian, bike, auto and rail traffic.

Farmers markets in local church parking lots bring people from surrounding neighborhoods together for fresh produce, grass-fed meats, homemade breads, eggs, honey, artisan cheeses, flowers and conversation with friends over a goat cheese omelet or slice of divine tomato pie.

From its riverfront origins, Louisville’s neighborhoods have grown outward over time, incorporating three major Frederick Law Olmstead parks, parkways to connect them and numerous subsequent parks designed by the Olmsted firm; a monumental public waterworks; and Louisville’s first airfield. Louisville Slugger bats are still manufactured in the heart downtown. Churchill Downs, site of the Kentucky Derby, is just minutes away.

When our longtime friends Judith McCandless and Grady Clay invited us to Louisville, an exploration of Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail was planned. Bardstown Road, an old turnpike into and southward from the city, was our route to a rich blend of local geography and the unique heritage of Kentucky’s centuries-old art of bourbon distilling.

For geographers and lovers of etymology, the Bourbon Trail’s distilleries are a palimpsest of the land that produces bourbon - America’s only native spirit - and distillery families that trace their heritage back seven generations. Wild Turkey, Buffalo Trace, Heaven Hill, Knob Creek and Woodford Reserve take their names from the land itself. Elijah Craig, Jim Beam, Basil Hayden, Booker, Bulleit and Jack Daniel’s a Tennessee bourbon illustrate the age-old tradition of using family names.

When George Washington’s 1791 Whiskey Tax drove Scots and Irish distillers westward from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, they settled in central Kentucky, where the limestone watershed provided the iron-free water needed to distill whiskey from the grains at hand - corn, barley and rye.

In Bardstown, we had a lunch of regional classics at the historic 1779 Old Talbott Tavern - fried catfish, barbecued pork, fried green tomatoes and to-die-for corn fritters. In the tavern’s bar, I stopped at a framed Maker’s Mark ad picturing this local, small-batch bourbon with its unique packaging and signature neck hand-dipped in red sealing wax. The caption read: "My brother introduced me to two redheads. One has left me, but I’m still quite devoted to the other."

Our next stop was Loretto, a tiny town known for two local establishments "of the spirits" - the Catholic Sisters of Loretto and the Maker’s Mark distillery. In 1953, T.W. Samuels, a fourth-generation distiller, rebuilt a small distillery fed by limestone springs in nearby Happy Hollow and set out to reinvigorate Kentucky’s floundering bourbon industry.

After courageously burning his great-grandfather’s secret family whiskey recipe, T.W. coupled local corn and winter wheat (lighter and gentler than rye) - grown in soil with the same composition as his distillery’s land. "In the process," current CEO Bill Jr. suggested, "Dad ‘reinvented’ bourbon whiskey." Bill Jr.’s mother came up with the unusual shape of their bottle, its hand-lettered label on colonial-looking paper, and the trademark seal molded into the glass like a pewter-maker’s mark.

Our guide around the distillery mentioned the company’s widely popular 1995 "Whoops" ad picturing an over-dipped bottle of Maker’s Mark with red wax oozing over the label. Later, as the four of us followed Bardstown Road back into Louisville, I described my personal favorite ad from 1998 - the sealed top of a Maker’s Mark bottle with red wax trickling like strands of hair down its neck. The caption is priceless - "Kentucky’s Natural Redhead - not just another pretty face."

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