This morning marks our fourth week on the road. We are headed to Nashville to see the sights and learn more about country music.
Category: Trip Log
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Tennessee, With a Dash of Mississippi
Having spent the afternoon in Tennessee, we crossed over into Southaven, Mississippi and spent the night in a Quality Inn there, just to add to our state tally. Currently, it stands at 18 plus one Canadian province: Massachusetts, New York, Ontario, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi.
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Poor Boys and Pilgrims with Families
And we are going to Graceland.
What else to do in Memphis? Well, we decided to do one of the more obvious things, and take in some Americana. We arrived at about 4:45, certain that it would be closing (flashbacks of the Henry Ford museum…) shortly, and we’d be left taking pictures of the exterior from however close you could get without paying admission. But we were wrong! They were happy to take our $84 and let us go on a recorded audio guided tour. And we had a great time, aside from the funkiness of going around sort of together but with headphones on, listening independently to the tour.
Turns out, Elvis earned lots of gold and platinum records
and had lots of funky clothes
Who knew?
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Here’s Mud in Your Island
Thanks to Matt’s and Caryn’s suggestion, we stopped at Mud Island today, where there is a scale model of the Mississippi river that you can walk along (and in!).
It’s about half a mile long, and the water gets to about a foot deep or so in places. It is one of our favorite places we’ve visited thus far. At the very end is a big wading pool, and a bigger one representing the Gulf of Mexico, in which you can rent paddle boats, though we didn’t.
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He Jes’ Keep Rollin’ Along…
We re-crossed the Mighty Mississipp’ today,
and are (therefore) back in the east. Only this time, we did it much further south, on I-40 at the border between Arkansas and Tennessee.
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Hospitality
Last night we stayed with Matt and Caryn and their family. Matt and Caryn lived in Belmont eleven years ago, where we attended the same church. At the time, we both had children one year old, about the only two kids in the church. They left for Arkansas about eleven years ago, where Caryn’s family is from. We’ve had occasional letters from them in the intervening years, and as with most of our friends, they are better correspondents than we.
In spite of our lack of communication, when Susan emailed and told them we’d be driving through Arkansas, they opened their hearts and home to us, and hosted us for dinner and breakfast, and shared with us their warm, cozy home for the night. The epitome of hospitality. Thank you!
Their boys are right around the same age as our kids, and they seemed to get along right away. Their two dogs were also a hit with our kids. In addition to enjoying a small part of their land, we got to meet a rat snake that lives under the workshop, and their rabbit, Bun-Bun. And they introduced us to the game Spore — not sure if that’s a good thing or not 🙂
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Cough, Cough
Clara has had a cough for essentially our entire trip. At the beginning, it seemed like the tail end of the cold she had had. And at times, it seemed to be getting better. But we finally had to admit that it wasn’t really clearing up, so we went to a clinic in downtown Conway, where in under an hour Clara had been seen by a clinician and gotten the three prescriptions he had prescribed. Hopefully, this will help.
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It Looked Innocent Enough…
The ice cream cone sign, visible from the interstate, drew us in.
There was also a fresh food market inside, with produce and everything. Very nice! Who would have dreamed that this placid exterior hid a fast food restaurant inside?
Well, there we were, and it wasn’t McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, Hardees, etc. It was Braum’s. So we ate.
