Art, It was a blast! A friend of mine who is also a blogger made the trip with me from South Carolina. It was a little over 6 hour drive, but TN is an hour back from us so that worked out great since we left at 3am lol. We got to talk to a lot of great teams and also sample some of their Q. I can't wait to go back next year! It was so worth the drive!
We have been lucky enough to go the last 2 years and cook. It is amazing. The atmosphere is SO different, everyone is Happy (and Thankful) to be there.
One thing you learn when cooking at the JACK, is that you need blockers when running boxes. The town goes from 500 people to over 10,000 in that weekend and many of them in the "Hollar" during turn-in on Saturday. Hence "The Wedge". LOL! There was a lot of traffic in our area because of our neighbor, Jacks Old South (Myron Mixon). This is why we had a wall of hay in front of our site (definitely one of my better ideas.)
Yeah it was pretty crowded. They estimated over 24,000 people! We got there at 8am Saturday and took the tour of the distillery before it got busy. Can't wait to go back next year!