So National Geographic has named the Kentucky Bourbon Trail Tour a “Best Spring Trip” for 2013. Well, we’ll be darned—and darned proud.

Seems the yellow-bordered magazine of our youths, the one packed with photographs of mountain peak ascents, exotic wildlife and pics otherwise deemed um, well, unacceptable outside of a strictly educational setting, has the hots for one of Kentucky’s greatest travel treasures.

“Tasting tours and tulips, fish fries and far-flung festivals … Just in time for spring, our editors have selected ten trips that will awaken your senses – and your sense of adventure,” we read in a press release on the subject.

So the Bourbon Trail is showcased along with excursions and festivals in New Zealand, India, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Argentina and more: impressive company, don’t you say? Only three American trips made the top 10, which certainly gives Team Bluegrass something more to crow about.

“This is a tremendous honor for our distilleries,” said Adam Johnson, Director of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail experience, the release continued. “This accolade from a respected source with an international reach will only bolster our tour’s growing popularity and attendance.”

To read the entire feature story, click here.

The Kentucky Bourbon Trail tour features Four Roses and Wild Turkey in Lawrenceburg; Heaven Hill in Bardstown; Jim Beam in Clermont; Maker’s Mark in Loretto; Town Branch in Lexington and Woodford Reserve in Versailles. It attracted more than 500,000 visitors in 2012, the first time the tour has broken the half-million mark since its creation in 1999 by the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. Apparently among them were some “Nat Geo” folks.

For more coverage of the Bourbon Trail, see Food & Dining’s feature story here.