Elvis Is In The House

Day 5 - Sunday: I was up at 5:30 a.m. to take the dogs for their morning walk.  Cali our 9 year old Shitzu started to have problems climbing the RV stairs yesterday, so we where somewhat concerned with that.  We decided to carrier her in and out from now on, an on our walk she seemed to do pretty good.  I started to hear thunder in the distance and hurried back to the RV to dump the tanks and disconnect the water.  Since it didn't appear we could be the rain and get the car connected, we decided to wait the fast moving storm out for an extra 20 minutes.  I felt bad for all of the tenters although many

Graceland

did get their tents torn down and put into their vehicles just before the rain hit.

We made the 3 hour run to Memphis and arrived at Graceland RV Park at 11 a.m.  With the temps in the upper 80's and high humidity it felt like summer now.  We got setup quick and walked over to the Elvis museum to do the Platinum tour.  Elvis was a little before my time and I never really got into his music.  When I was younger I had seen a few of his movies and I once dated a girl who's mother had taken over their entire living room with a shrine to Elvis.  That was pretty much the extent of my Elvis knowledge other than the bits and pieces you catch on radio and tv about him.  I must say I really enjoyed the tour, and it's a shame he died so young.  We toured the house, the car museum, the planes and a few other exhibits.  I plan to check out the documentary on his life when we get home.

Our next stop was Mud Island which was very interesting with the replica of the mississippi river carved into the walk way.  You can either walk the 1/3 of a mile or for $4 you can ride the monorail over and back.  In the picture of the Memphis skyline you can see the river running into the the replica of the Gulf of Mexico.  Each step represented 1 mile with a total of a 2,000 ft to explore, it pretty impressive.  Afterwards we headed to Beale St for dinner.  It was Sunday so it was pretty quiet in the city and on the recommendation of the Monorail operator we took the trolly to Kings Palace.  The trollies appear to be pretty old and it was pretty cool to see the drivers have to navigate the traffic and the crazy controls.  Since the trollies only run until 6 pm we didn't have a whole lot of time to check out the area.  Our dinner at Kings Palace was really good, I had some of the best ribs in a long time and their sauce was just the way I like it.  Their was a musician setting up and running through a sound check as we where eating and I would have loved to hear him play.  Since we had a really long day of driving the next day we decided to high tail it back to the campers and call it a night early.

I must say Memphis surprised me, it seems like a really cool city with some very interesting history.

~Bill

Memphis Trolly

Beale Street - Memphis