The trip almost didn’t start, which would have been entirely on brand for a group that spent seventy-four days planning three days on the ground.
Ajay and I had a forty-four minute connection in Chicago. Dinesh — who had flown in from Seattle the day before, picked up a rental car, driven to New Albany, checked in, bought groceries, hard-boiled some eggs, and prepared a salad for our arrival — had the grace not to mention that he’d suggested we book a more sensible layover. He didn’t need to. The missed connection said it for him.
We got rerouted to Lexington the following morning. Dinesh tracked our flight from the house. Manoj drove out from New Albany to collect us. When we came through arrivals, there was a blue Tesla at the curb and two men with the patient expressions of people who had been awake since before we’d gone to bed.
Dinesh had chosen the house. Three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a fire pit in the side yard. He’d chosen it, he explained, for the separate bedrooms and bathrooms — a practical man’s reasoning the rest of us were grateful for without needing it spelled out.
His own travel kit, for context, weighs seven kilograms. He rinses his clothes in the sink at night. He has not checked a bag since 2007, a streak he broke only in 2022 when mountaineering poles were not permitted in the cabin. He sent us all a link to a Rick Steves lecture on packing light. He was not joking.
My cameras alone weigh more than his entire suitcase. Dinesh is aware of this and considers it a personal failing on my part.
That first evening Manoj drove us to the Big Four Bridge as the sun went down over the Ohio River.
Left to right: Dinesh in his bucket hat and unnecessary jacket. Ajay in the pink shirt, already looking like a man on holiday. Manoj in the Buffalo Trace polo, the quiet pride of a local showing visitors something he loves. Me, hat removed for the photo, trying not to think about the checked luggage situation ahead.
Below us, the Belle of Louisville made her evening run, paddle wheel churning, completely indifferent to our planning failures.
Saturday: Churchill Downs. Manoj drove. This would become a pattern — Manoj driving, Manoj knowing exactly where to park, Manoj having already checked the camera policy (no detachable lenses over six inches, which I accepted with the dignity of a man leaving a telephoto lens in a bag in Indiana).
The gates are exactly as you imagine them. The twin spires. The black iron horse mid-gallop in a bed of red flowers. Dinesh, who had spent a portion of the previous evening explaining why horse racing constituted animal cruelty, walked through the Paddock Gate without breaking stride.
Inside, we found the gift shop. Inside the gift shop, we found the Panama hats.
Ajay has worn a Panama hat for as long as any of us can remember. Dinesh, who lectures on the virtues of packing light, could not stop trying them on.
Ajay slipped one on and looked, as he always does, entirely at home in it. Dinesh worked the whole shelf — every hat tried, every angle studied in the little mirror — and then, on the firm principle that a man does not acquire what he cannot pack, bought none of them. He talked about them for the rest of the day.
Sunday morning: Buffalo Trace. Manoj drove, again, fifty minutes east on I-64 to Frankfort. Manoj had been a tour guide at this distillery until the previous year. He knew everybody. He knew about the woodshop. He had booked the earliest tour — 10am, party of four, complimentary — and had also, some weeks earlier, personally scouted the Blanton’s supply situation and reported back with pricing and purchase limits. One bottle per person per day, $74.99. The group chat had been treating this intelligence with the seriousness it deserved.
Before the tour: the woodshop, where craftsmen turn spent bourbon barrel staves into muddlers on a lathe for twenty-five dollars. The craftsman there was Jon. The Lexington floods had destroyed his original shop, and he’d recently rebuilt it — new equipment, new workbench. I recognised the workbench immediately. I’d seen it on Instagram. Jon looked at me the way woodworkers look at each other when they realise they speak the same language. I asked if I could try the lathe. Jon handed me the tool.
Dinesh watched this with the expression of a man filing it away as evidence that I could, in fact, manage with less luggage if I simply left the cameras at home and turned things on lathes instead.
After the tour came the tasting, the gift shop, and the reckoning. Dinesh does not drink Blanton’s. Ajay is becoming a teetotaler. This left me, with plans, and Manoj, who had already bought his allocation weeks earlier on a scouting trip and was watching with the serene amusement of a man who had sorted himself out in advance.
I bought two bottles. I would check them. Dinesh, who had not checked a bag in fifteen years, fixed me with a look that said several things simultaneously, the most printable of which was: foolish boy.
Monday: Manoj had quietly added Lincoln’s birthplace to the itinerary. Hodgenville, forty-five minutes south. Nobody argued. This is the thing about travelling with Manoj — he knows the region, he knows what’s worth seeing, and he simply puts it in the plan without making a fuss about it.
In the town square there’s a seated bronze Lincoln on a granite plinth. Dinesh stood beside it and waved at the camera. Abraham Lincoln, who walked forty miles to borrow a book and taught himself law by firelight, looked appropriately dignified. Dinesh looked cheerful. The contrast was instructive.
Inside the memorial, Lincoln’s birthplace cabin sits enclosed in white marble — sixteen logs, one room, the door a rectangle of dark. You stand in front of it and feel the arithmetic of history: this small, and that large. Four men from India, standing quietly in Kentucky, doing the math.
The sign outside read: They cleared land to raise vegetables, used the trees to build and heat their home, hunted game, and raised their children, Sarah and Abraham.
Humble origins. What followed was not.
Ajay and I flew home from Lexington at 2:50. Dinesh had three days with his in-laws ahead of him before flying back to Seattle — separately, divorced, different towns, visits requiring careful choreography. He always stays longer than anyone else. Whatever you say about the man and his carry-on philosophy, he shows up for the things that matter.
Manoj drove us to the airport. Of course he did.
The thank-you messages arrived over the following days: Kay’s brunch, Manoj’s driving, Lincoln’s birthplace, the distillery, the bhindi recipe available on request. Dinesh sent the expense accounts as a PDF, itemised to the dollar, along with a Venmo QR code that nobody could figure out how to scan. Manoj explained the correct procedure. Dinesh replied: Learn something new every day.
Three days. Four men. Two bottles of Blanton’s in checked luggage, one Panama hat with a seven kilogram carry-on problem, one muddler made from a bourbon barrel stave, and a group chat that still exists on all our phones.
We are going to Seattle next year. The Panama hat will be waiting.