Hello again!
Well we're back in Virginia after a very memorable few days. Since the last entry, we've been to Graceland, the home of country and western and over 660ft down into a mountain!
Graceland was amazing, a definite highlight so far. Roy's uploading photos right now, so you can all see what we got to see first hand. From all his cars and motorbikes to the jungle room (it had green carpetted ceiling!), from his customised plane to the wall of golden records, we saw everything and loved it all! There were loads of people there but we still managed to have a great time. The house itself was smaller than I imagined, but impressive nonetheless. It was so surreal being where he lived! Everything was preserved from when he lived there, although you couldn't go upstairs. We saw the grave site too, covered with tributes, and the audio tour we had told us loads of facts too. Very worthwhile, not just for Elvis fans (ie. me and Roy!)
There was a free shuttle bus to Sun Studios from Graceland, so we went there and had a great tour round the historic recording studios. It was where rock and roll began, and we even got to pose with the microphone that Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis etc etc actually used!
Memphis at night turned out to be not as scary as we'd thought! We spent the night at Beale Street, where there were thousands of people (the American Idol auditions had just been to memphis that night!) and loads of jazz and blues bands and musicians, just in the street or in bars. It was so cool just to walk down the street and soak up the atmosphere.

After memphis, we headed out to Nashville, the home of country and western, where we toured the C&W hall of fame which was actually really interesting. They also had loads of memorabilia (including Elvis' gold cadillac, Johnny Cash's guitar and Dolly Parton's dress!) We spent the rest of the day wandering Nashville, listening to music and being tempted by cowboy hats and boots, before ending up in a place called the Wildhorse Saloon. There was a live band playing called Jackson Hill (look out for them, they're gonna be huge!) who were amazing, and there were people line dancing all the time, even to the slow songs. There was a free line dance lesson which I took part in (yes, I did line dancing - there's a video to prove it!), Roy was too embarassed to dance in front of others...(yeah, as if you'd all believe that!!) Great fun! We ate out at Hooters, where I had the biggest chicken sandwich the waitresses had EVER seen (see photo for proof) and I ate almost all of it!

From Nashville we travelled across to Knoxville, although we decided to have a movie and meal instead of seeing the sights of Knoxville (apparently, not much to look at - it all seemed to be still bieng built).

Today though we had hopes of going to Dollywood, so set off all excited, before finding out that today is the ONE DAY this week that it is CLOSED...grr...We raced around the parking lot for a bit though, Roy was letting off steam. Instead we found the 'Forbidden Caverns' in the Smoky Mountains, where we went over 600ft underground with a very cheerful tour guide called Angie and we saw amazing stalagmites and stalagtites (see how cultured I am?!!) along with a few bats. It was really pretty, and I wasn't scared of the darkness at all. honest. We carried on along the Appalachian Mountains before stopping here in Roanoke for the night.