Memphis - Day 120- 126 of 178 Day Trek

We did not see it coming ... Memphis, I mean.  Well, we did know that we were going to Memphis, but because we had been warned to be very careful about our safety, we had approached the city with some trepidation.  But what I mean when I said "we did not see it coming" was that we really did not see coming such a lovely city with a great amount of diversity, history, and so, so much to see and do.  Memphis quickly became our favorite city on the trip, so far.
     Who'd a thunk it?
   

(Diedre was happy to find another man to add to her kissing collection.)

 Our first two days consisted of travel, rest, and reconnaissance.  The 2nd day, we took a car tour to preview all that we wanted to see, and we topped that off with a wonderful leisure walk along the mighty Mississippi River in downtown Memphis.  After that, we were ready for a week of fun and learning about a city we really knew little about.   

 On Tuesday,  September 3, our week began with a bang ... that means "Graceland," of course.  Now it's not that we're such huge fans of Elvis, although we both do like his music.  In fact, truth be told, we're not really big music people; Diedre is partial to Broadway show tunes, of course, while I really only like the hard acid rock from the late 60's, a remnant of my hippie lifestyle (meaning I tried to grow a goatee in 1966, but it was all white peach-fuzz).  But what do you do if you go to Memphis if you don't do Graceland and the King.  So we went.

     Diedre had gone on line and found that mid-afternoon was the best time to go to Graceland, that all the really serious Elvis devotees were in line first thing in the morning.  And that was true; the lines were immense, even for a school-day Tuesday morning.  But when we got there at 2 PM, we were the first ones in line and our tour group was only about 15 people.  So far, so good.
     The mansion was good sized, but not immense by any means.  The tour included Elvis's house (except for the upstairs) and the buildings out back, which included a racquetball court.  I did not know the King played racquetball, one of my favorite pre-heart-bypass-surgery sports.  Apparently, Elvis had even played racquetball on his court the morning he died.
     The tour also included a small building which held all his gold/platinum records.  

Out back, there was his grave alongside that of his twin brother (who died in infancy) as well as Elvis's mother and father.  I noticed Elvis's dad's middle name was "Elvis," so that's answered for me the origin of where his name came from.  The grave site was very arresting; he was just so damn young, far too early to leave us.  It was easy to get a catch in your throat while gazing upon the peaceful, contemplative area out back.  Everyone there was deadly silent.
     Diedre and I are usually not big on tours; we prefer to self-guide ourselves to special places like these.  But this tour was a lot of self-guiding including those digital recorder/transmitters that you wear around your neck and which gives you whatever information you want for whichever location you're at.  It's all done at your own speed.  It was very nice.
     Across the street from Graceland there were additional Elvis exhibits.  These exhibits were right next to the actual Heartbreak Hotel.  We were staying at the Graceland RV Park which is right behind the hotel, giving us just a short walk across the street to the main house.  The other exhibits included Elvis's spectacular automobile museum, his two personal jets, and several special exhibits about his life: his movies, his time in Hawaii, and his historic 1968 Las Vegas comeback.  

A particular highlight for me was that I got to have a peanut butter-and-banana sandwich (1/2 of course; the food-sheriff is always watching) with Diedre.  I had never had one before.  We ate it at the Elvis Cafe right across the street   That meal was courtesy of Phoenix area actress-friend and new mother (again) Candy Stanton who had encouraged me to go for my dreams (my limited dreams, of course, being to eat a PB&B sandwich at Graceland).  Apparently, I unknowingly spilled melted peanut butter on the-guy-sitting-next-to-me's (me's?) blue-suede shoes.  What a hound dog!
   

 The next day our vacation was interrupted by a visit to the doctor ... a vet, actually.  No, my hoof-and-mouth was not acting up again.  Middle child (kitten) Casey had been scratching his ear forcefully enough that he was now bleeding, so we drove all the way to Mississippi to find a competent vet.  Of course, Mississippi was only about 8 miles away.  The vet was very nice and gave Casey a shot which seemed to clear everything up.  We both breathed a sigh of relief.  That night we caught the movie "The End of the World" which (I thought) was very funny and unusual.  How many movies do you get that start out with a bunch of buddies doing an epic bar crawl ("pub" crawl, actually; this was England, after all) for the first half of the movie only to have them then save the planet from aliens during the second half.  Once again (see first sentence of today's blog), I did not see that coming.
     

Thursday,  September 5, was another "history" day for the intrepid duo.  It's the kind of day I so love and that my wonderful wife gracefully endures, although I think she was pretty impressed with all that we did that day.
     We started out at the National Civil Rights Museum at the old Lorraine Motel.  Amazingly, we were allowed to stand on the exact spot on the motel balcony where Martin Luther King was shot and killed in 1968.  We both felt knots in our stomach standing there.  We quickly moved on; it just didn't feel right, like we really didn't belong there.  However, we were both grateful for the moment.

     Earlier, we had been in the boarding house across the street in the room from which James Earl Ray fired that fateful shot.  That building and the Lorraine Motel have been turned into The National Civil Right Museum.  We had thought that Elvis dying at 42 was such a shame, but to hear that Dr. King had died at 39, well, both of those events are just so sad.  It was a very moving day.
     

Regrouping, we then made our way to the legendary Sun Studio.  Note that none of the great sites in Memphis are very far away from each other.  For a big city, it's very "small-town."
     For those of you who, like us, weren't aware of the significance of Sun Studio, it's been called "The Birthplace of Rock 'N' Roll."  It was started by a gentleman named Sam Phillips and was where so many legendary talents got their starts.  Beatle Ringo Starr called it "ground zero for R&R."  Bob Dylan even kissed the floor upon his first visit there.
     Best Sun Studio story: When the 18-year old Elvis walked into SS for the first time, he was asked who he sounded like.  His confident response?
     "I don't sound like nobody."
     And then he sang a birthday song for his mother.  He actually had to pay $4 to have the song recorded, but later that year during a jam session, Sam heard Elvis do his own rendition of "That's All Right" and the rest is history.
     

     My shoes were getting a workout that day as I stood on yet another historic spot: the place in the recording studio where Elvis did his first recording.  I even got to hold the giant old microphone he used (see amazing picture-you can hardly tell if it's Elvis or me).  There was also a great, oversized picture in the studio from December 4, 1956.  It was dubbed "The Million Dollar Quartet" photo.  Now while I know that doesn't sound like so much money to you now, remember that this was back in the mid-1950's when gas was something like 9-cents a gallon.  The MDQ consisted of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins.  It was the musical version of "The Four Horseman of Notre Dame" (football metaphor, this time).
     Our history lesson continued the next day.  We made it to a more rundown part of down to check out "Slavehaven," a house that an abolitionist farmer had built with hidden spaces for helping runaway slaves make their way north before the Civil War.  It was eerie to be in the cold, cramped basement where slaves had hidden 160+ years earlier.  The old house's walls were covered with all sorts of history about slavery and the underground railroad.  A particularly interesting fact brought to our attention was that Aetna Insurance, those same rogues we go to battle with almost daily to get them to cover our scrapes and bruises, was one of the companies who insured slave ships on their trips from Africa to the U.S.  Their willingness to compensate these slave traders for any slaves who died during the long trip across the Atlantic was a big reason the slave-traders cared very little for the hygiene and nutrition of their cargo.  It was a very unsettling, yet enlightening tour.
   

 OK, we were done with the difficult parts of history, at least for Memphis (Watch for Dallas and the School Book Depository next week).   We were off to the elegant and venerable Peabody Hotel to see their legendary "duck walk."  Yes, for the last 80 years, the hotel staff has marched their 4 ducks from their pond on the roof down the elevator and into the giant lobby fountain where the ducks spend their day swimming, posing for pictures, and talking trash about Donald and Daffy.  Then at 5 PM, they get marched out and back up the elevator.  And it draws people ...LOTS of people.  It made the hotel's happy hour "just ducky."
     

From there, we went across the street to one of the world's few (at least outside of Canada) Canadian diners.  It was called "The Kooky Canuck."  In order to fit in, I referred to everyone I met there as "hoser."    They had a 4-lb. hamburger there with lettuce, onions, tomato, pickles, and cheese together with bun, giving it all a weight of 7.5 pounds; if you eat it all in under 60 minutes, it's free ... otherwise, it's $33.  I figured Diedre could do it easily, but she opted instead for just a dinner salad.
     Chicken!
     After dinner, we made our way down the block to the Orpheum Theatre, a magnificent and absolutely huge edifice built in 1928 and gloriously restored in the last decade or so.  On this evening they were running one of my favorite old movies, the 1933 original "King Kong."  And wonders-upon-wonders, they were only charging the 1933-price of 50-cents.  We had to go.
     At the ticket counter after having just purchased our tickets, the woman behind us stepped up to the ticket-seller and asked, "What's showing tonight?"
     "'King Kong.'"
     The woman thought a second and then said, "The musical?"
     That cracked Diedre and me up.  I mean, what do you say to that?  Of course, a second later, we looked at each other and a common thought crossed our 1.7 minds.  So, now we ARE working on "King Kong: The Musical"; Diedre likes Scarlett Johansson for the Fay Wray part while I'm looking at David Hyde Pierce to play Kong.
    

We finished the incredible day off with a walk down the legendary and raucous Beale St.  It was apparent during that walk that the neon-light business is alive and well in Memphis.  Those two blocks were a riot, a combination Las Vegas-New Orleans-street carnival-Bacchus liquor swilling orgy.  The police had all entrances to the area sealed off; you actually had to go through metal detectors outdoors to get in.  Probably because of that, everyone was very well behaved.  We enjoyed our beers in a very loud peace.
     
After that exhausting Saturday, you'd think we'd take our last day in Memphis off.  And you'd be wrong.      

We had heard about the fabulous Mud Island River Park just off the downtown area.  There was a monorail you could take to the island, but we opted to walk the bridge above the monorail ($10 for a 1/3 mile ride ... I mean, REALLY?  You do the math).

  The highlight of the island is a bit tricky to explain, but I'll give it as shot.  They built what is called "The River Walk."  It is an amazingly detailed, 5-block long model of the lower Mississippi, all the way from where it joins the Ohio River on down to New Orleans.  What, Lake Itasca, MN, the origin of the Mississippi, wasn't good enough for you people?


     The Mississippi River model walk had 65 stops, each telling interesting historical facts about cities along the way.  Many of the larger cities had models and bridges built in along the way, and all the land was built to scale with water flowing everywhere.  Walking this boardwalk, I at times felt like a giant ready to crush cities in a single stomp, a la Godzilla.  Come to think of it, my morning breath was probably a lot like his.
   

 This walk gave Diedre a wonderful idea.  Since our RV trips for 2014 (south and east) and 2015 (west and Canada) are already planned, she put dibs on driving the entire Mississippi trail from New Orleans to Lake Itasca in 2016.  Get your tickets early.
     

The last night of this wonderful Memphian sojourn ended with us being picked up at the RV park by a pink Cadillac (now there's class for you) and being whisked away to that Elvis-centric barbecue restaurant, Marlowe's.  Dinner was leisurely and wonderful.  And Dallas was just one day away.

     See you there.
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In famous Columbo fashion, here's Diedre with "one more thing"...

The Peanut Shoppe at 24 S. Main Street

Alexx and I love to find fun little food shops on our travels.  Usually I seek out the coffee places that roast their own beans and Alexx is in constant search of sugar-free or very dark chocolate that he can stash away for savoring when ever his blood sugar is low or his carb count will allow it.  Likewise, when he found out he can handle up to 3 cups of popcorn, he will jump through hoops to find a fresh popcorn shop.  And he did just that in Memphis.  This was a charming little shop that was actually an alley at one time and someone put a roof on it and opened a peanut and popcorn galley.  I agree the popcorn was great, but the real find was the huge counter of fresh roasted nuts.  We brought home a few bags of pitashios and pecans which I love, but the real find were the HUGE red skin peanuts.  OMG - I am not a very big fan of peanuts, but these were unbelievable.  My only regret of our lovely week in Memphis was that we didn't make a return trip to that popcorn place to get about 5 pounds of those peanuts!