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2nd Dec - We had a five-hour journey to reach Memphis so, after quickly calling Ralph's dad to wish him a happy birthday, we were on our way. It was one of those drives that you conjure up in your imagination of the south; long straight roads and looming thunderstorms but, now that the car no longer smells of fish and has shown its reliability, we don't dread these marathon drives at all.
The hotel we checked into (the Days Inn on Elvis Presley Boulevard) is right next to Graceland and is full of Elvis memorabilia, Elvis songs being played outside the hotel all day, a guitar-shaped pool, 24-hour Elvis movies playing in the bedrooms together with pictures of Elvis above every bed. We headed into Memphis to get our bearings and found a restaurant that served 'Sasquatch burgers' containing 4lbs of meat, (that's like 16 McDonald's quarter pounders in one burger!).The deal was that if you could eat it all with all the "fixins" (i.e. fries, lettuce, onions etc.) without any help you could have the meal for free.Ralph was going to try it but chickened out at the last minute - which we decided was wise when we saw one arrive at somebody else's table. They fed 4 large children with it with over half still remaining untouched!We then strolled through Beale Street, which is the centre of downtown Memphis and the birthplace of blues. There were bars and restaurants with music playing, much like a blues version of Broadway in Nashville. Beale Street is amazing, even when it's devoid of people like this time of year it still seems to buzz, and we now knew where most of the museums and fabled blues bars that we want to see were.
3rd - Today was Elvis day! Graceland was smaller than we thought but was far more stylish than expected - in parts it was so garish and 70s that it actually looked really cool - except for a few faux pas, like green shag pile carpet on the walls and ceilings in some rooms!!! All in all, Kirsty was like a kid in a candy store and I was just thinking about fishing in Florida (only joking, even for someone who can't stand Elvis, it was still a great place). There is even a section outside the mansion that has the world's largest collection of sequined jumpsuits - and if that's not rock 'n' roll, we don't know what is! We saw the opulent aeroplanes and cars in Elvis' collection, and struggled hard to resist buying a life-sized inflatable Elvis to put in the back of the car with Eric and Ernie (Bert has been sent back to the UK with Ralph's friend Darran as he was surplus to requirements).Graceland is currently decorated up for Christmas and so there was a huge nativity scene lit up on the front lawn together with fantastically decorated Christmas trees inside.The tour of Graceland does not include the upstairs of the house as this was always Elvis' private quarters and they want to keep it that way.You get to see the downstairs rooms such as the living room and kitchen as well as the basement rooms where Elvis used to play pool, relax and watch three televisions at the same time, because he heard the President watched three televisions at the same time to see the three news channels.The grounds of Graceland are lovely and large, complete with horses and a racquetball court.The room next to the racquetball court was a relaxing lounge for Elvis and his friends and still contains the piano he sat at and played at on the morning of his death.The graves of him and his family are also in the grounds and are surprisingly peaceful and beautifully adorned with well-wishes from fans.We were lucky enough to choose a quiet day for the tour but on anniversaries such as his birthday thousands of people come here to pay homage.
After that it was quickly back down to Earth when we went to the Lorraine Motel, now lovingly, respectfully and sympathetically renovated into the Memphis Civil Rights Museum, where Martin Luther King Jnr was shot. The façade of the building remains as it did in 1968 with a wreath outside room number 306 where the assassination took place and the inside of the room is an exhibit within the museum. The building from which James Earl Ray is believed to have taken aim is also owned by the museum and exhibited just as sympathetically.We would honestly say that this was one of the best-organised museums we have seen so far.A great thing for travellers like us is that on Monday afternoons they give free entry to the museum for two hours - worth knowing if you are on a budget.
We then headed back into downtown Memphis for food and culture. We found a great restaurant with live music and had a fantastic Deep South meal of Jambalaya and Cajun shrimp. As a real treat we even had some bread and butter pudding desert with a Jim Bean sauce - it's so hard to find warm deserts here! The blues guitarist, who looked a lot like BB King, was a little iffy with his initial jazz numbers but once he got onto the blues he was really good.
4th - We headed into Memphis and took a tour of the Gibson guitar factory.Here they show you how they take a piece of wood and turn them into fantastic guitars.We both thought that most of this process would be done by machines but we were thrilled to be wrong and the large majority of the process is still done by hand, from planing to the painting and buffing.The tour was short but really interesting and so once Ralph had spent some time playing some of the guitars offered for sale in the factory shop we headed over the road to the Memphis Museum of Rock and Soul.This is a great museum charting the beginnings of soul, blues and rock and roll from when it was simply being sang in the cotton picking fields and the southern homes to its heyday when it exploded all over the world.The amount of information in the museum was amazing and you could choose to listen to all range of songs on your personal headset as you went round.Obviously there was a lot more information on Elvis here, but it was alongside musicians like B.B.King, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Issac Hayes etc.We then took a brief detour to the home of the Memphis Grizzlies basketball team as Kirsty wants a Washington Wizards basketball team top but is unsure on sizes so she tried some on there to find out the right size and had to pretend to be a grizzlies fan for a short while.We then took a walk to Sun Studio.This is the only Studio in America to be classed as a National Heritage site.Here, from this tiny studio, artists such as Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison cut the tracks which would make them stars.We took the tour around this place which manly focuses on Elvis, and Kirsty got to stand in the exact spot Elvis did when he made his first ever record as well as sing into the microphone he used.The tour is great in that they have the original recordings of many of the stars that have recorded songs there, which they play you as part of the tour.There is also a famous picture of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins which was taken at Sun Studio and we were told it was taken exactly 51 years ago to the day we were visiting.We headed up to the post office (a REALLY long walk!) to post our Christmas cards to our families as today is the last day for posting to the UK, and then went for tea at a place voted best burger in Memphis since 1984 - and they were good!!
5th - Today we hit our first real crisis! Our bank Nationwide who allow us commission free transactions overseas and a whopping 4.5% interest on our current account have thrown a humungous spanner in the works. My Nationwide VISA card stopped working on Saturday and Kirsty's stopped yesterday! We had set up Kirsty's mum with power of attorney on the account so she could handle our financial affairs in the UK - ideal for this sort of emergency, but a real pain for her. After Kirsty's poor mum spending long torturous hours talking to the buffoons at Nationwide, it transpires that they cancel the existing bank cards when a power of attorney is set up (we can only imagine in the belief that the account holders are mentally incapable - insert your own gag here - as why else would you have a power of attorney) and maintained that they would have told us this would happen when we opened the account! The best they can do is have new cards sent out to America for us to collect around Christmas, assuming they get there in the Christmas post! We are now using our reserve account and praying that Barclays do not decline this one thinking it has been stolen (they did that on holiday in Florida last year, despite telling them I would be using it there and requesting them to honour all transactions). So a REALLY big thank you to Janice and AC for your invaluable help - we might eventually have had to come home without you and we are just about to head for the warmer weather!
The show must go on, so we headed back into Memphis to see Stax Studios where soul music was born and recorded. The likes of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Isaac Hayes wrote and recorded such songs as 'Soul Man', 'Shaft' and "Dock of the Bay". This studio is to soul music, what Sun Studio is to blues and rock 'n' roll and is a great insight into not just black music but racial segregation, civil rights and the evolution of music as whole in the 20th Century. In fact this is what Memphis is - an education in race and music, full stop. If you like country, gospel, blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll or soul music, Tennessee is everything! If not, it's a nice introduction to the South with its friendly people (even the tramps) and tons of things to do. We then took a little drive around Memphis to see the parts that you don't see wandering around the downtown area and, although generally a little more run down than the tourist areas, the suburbs have just as much charm and character.We then headed back to the hotel as a storm was brewing and Kirsty wanted to catch the Washington Wizard's Basketball game on tv - she's addicted!
6th - The LONG drive to Savannah, Georgia starts and we are already looking forward to the warmth again. After a few days in beautiful sunshine but bitterly cold Tennessee winter (it's actually fluctuated between about 0 to 15 degrees C but without warning, so its been really hard judging what to wear), the prospect of beaches and heat again is all too appealing. We have to do the trip to Savannah in two stints, as it's about 16 hours of driving across Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, so we are stopping off just outside Atlanta - near Athens, where REM and the B52s are from - for one night to break the journey up. On the way to Atlanta, we drove through Tupelo, Mississippi and Elvis' birthplace. The town of Tupelo is really quaint and old-fashioned 50s style; not 50s prefab like Britain, but 50s American style like Back to The Future; and Elvis' birthplace is the smallest house we've seen so far. It's supposed to be a two-roomed house but looks too small for one room - a little bit smaller than Graceland! I think Kirsty wanted to look around the museum there but we didn't because she wanted to get me to the hotel so I could watch the space shuttle Atlantis go up on TV (we were planning to be at Cape Canaveral to watch the launch originally, but the detour into Tennessee after meeting Darran and his family made more sense), so although I told her she'd regret it, she said she wouldn't and insisted on just a drive around the area. Turns out the launch was delayed - poor Kirsty does suffer for my affliction with spacemania!
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