7.10.2012

Monday night we stayed in West Memphis, Arkansas so in the morning we crossed the great Mississippi River into Memphis, Tennessee.

In Memphis, we hit up the famous Beale Street, which is known as the home of blues music. There's a statue of Elvis, since Memphis was his home. Jaime's in love with Elvis, so this was a good day for her.

When we got downtown, they had this section of Beale Street closed off to cars, and I was a bit confused and under pressure and ended up turning the wrong way onto a one-way street. Not my best moment, but fortunately there weren't any cars coming at the time and a kind gentleman, who I'm sure was questioning whether or not I should be driving a car, directed me so I could flip around.

This is the kind of stuff they sell on Beale Street. She didn't end up buying it. I'm not sure why.

After Beale Street, we headed to Graceland, Elvis Presley's home. We really wanted to go inside but it costs about thirty dollars just to get inside the gate in front of his house. Rip.Off. So we looked around the gift shop, looked at his private jet (from afar since you have to pay to tour that, too), and peeped his house from outside the fence. Oh yeah, all this was after we'd already had to pay ten dollars to park. Outrageous.

That's as close as we got to the real deal.

His plane is called "Lisa Marie" and for a small fee of only fourteen dollars you can go inside of it.

I think this was our best find. They look good together, don't you think?

On our way out of Memphis, we stopped at a place we found on the Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives website to try some authentic Memphis BBQ. They gave us a few suggestions and then they brought out a complimentary sampler for us that had a few other things on it since it was our first time. Holy food. We ordered rib tips and pulled pork...or beef...I can't remember, with potato salad and deviled eggs. It was all really good, but I'm not really a big barbecue person. I could eat that sandwich, then have some salad or fruit on the side and be set. The thought of piles of meat smothered in sauce doesn't really do much for me. It was good, though, and I'm sure if you love BBQ, you'd love this place. We definitely had enough food for about four people.

We then crossed over into Mississippi. I had made a playlist with a few songs for each state so when we hit Mississippi, we were definitely rockin' Faith Hill's "Mississippi Girl."

We stopped in Topelo, Mississippi which is where Elvis was born. On the grounds they have the house he was born in, the church he first sang in, and a couple of other memorials. All free. That's my kind of place.

Statue of Elvis when he was twelve years-old I think. Maybe thirteen... It actually was pretty cool to learn about his life and realize what a humble start he had. I also didn't realize that he was a pretty legit musician. He grew up playing the guitar, which I didn't know.

Second time through my trip odometer. We figured we logged about 3,600 miles over the course of our whole trip. (If you'll notice, the regular odometer says 142,599. It still says that over a month later. Pretty much I'll never be able to get anything for my car.)

As previously mentioned, I loved the trees and hills that we saw in Arkansas and it carried over into Mississippi and then later in Alabama. We hit some pretty heavy rain throughout the South but the scenery was beautiful, including a rainbow.

That same day we crossed over into Alabama and stopped in Birmingham for dinner. Neither of us was very impressed with Birmingham. Ok, that's not totally true. It's really pretty because it is absolutely covered in trees. It's so cool to see the city as you're coming in from the north because you can tell it's a pretty populated area with buildings sticking up here and there but the treetops take up most of the skyline. That being said, we got off the freeway downtown and it took us probably twenty minutes to find a restaurant that was open. Downtown. What kind of a city doesn't have restaurants open downtown at 7 pm?

The rain continued to pound us all the way into Georgia, which is the sign you see here.

We ended our night in Atlanta at our friend Jayne (Smalley) Weaver's house. She's living there with her husband for a while. He's selling garbage pick up and she's just hanging out. We hadn't seen each other since her wedding almost a year ago so it was really fun to catch up. We slept on the couch in the living room and she had a blow-up camping mattress that she and Jaime put some hot air into. We talked about the Bachelorette and we all agreed Emily should pick Jef. Well...she did. So that's great.