Yes, I know. The cheesiest of titles for todays blog but it HAD to be done 😀
We are now on our last day in Memphis before moving on down south along the Delta Blues Highway to Clarksdale. Last night was spent on the outskirts of the city at the Guesthouse at Graceland in readiness for this mornings trip to the Kings House but the previous couple of nights have been spent a few blocks away from Beale street taking in the sights and sounds of the Memphis blues scene.

First stop of the days walking tour was for breakfast in Memphis’s oldest diner, Arcade Restaurant. The pancakes, bacon and syrup were good and we sat a booth away from the Elvis’s favourite seat when he used to visit. Due to the restaurants original 50’s style it’s been used as a filming location for several films including, Walk the Line, Great Balls of Fire, The Firm and loads of others i’ve never heard of.
After a hearty breakfast it was only a few blocks up to The Lorraine Motel, an iconic location for all the wrong reasons. It was here that on the 4th April 1968 Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated.

I’m not going to pretend it touched me in some spiritual kind of way, It didn’t. In truth, I’m from little England and though i’ve learned a lot over the last few days about the segregation in the Deep South i’ll never know how that felt ( or feels). I can however understand what an important location The Lorraine Motel is and how important the Civil Rights Movement was back then and i’m glad we stopped by to check it out.
Anyway, after that we wandered back through Downtown Memphis up to Beale Street and visited the Rock n Soul museum.

The Rock n Soul museum, and later the Memphis Hall of Fame had some great exhibits. The former told the story of the Memphis music scene from the cotton fields right through to explosion of Stax in the 1970’s whilst the latter was exhibits of some of the greatest musicians to come from the area from Elvis Presley through to Issac Hayes. Both were worth a visit though the Rock n Soul museum was a lot more informative on the history of the music and the self guided tour with headphones was very good.

After we had finished at the museums we headed to the Peabody Hotel to see the “Duck March”. It was, errr, very American shall we say 😀 I’m not going to go into detail on some Ducks walking from a hotel lobby fountain to an elevator here so you can read more if you visit the Peabody Hotel website . After the Ducks we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the evening. Back on Beale street we headed to Silky o Irish pub or whatever it was called for food, beer and live music.

The following morning ( May 14th i think – I’m losing track) we had to check out of the Holiday Inn so we headed out of town to get breakfast at the nearest Ihop. You know you are in America when you are eating sickly sweet pancakes with whipped cream for breakfast!

From there we wandered off to find Lauderdale Courts which was where Elvis Presley lived with his parents when they first moved to Memphis. It’s now a trendy gated community so was not easy to find and get to but after several loops of the block we eventually found 185 Winchester at Lauderdale courts which housed apartment 328 where he lived.

Next on the list was the Bass Pro Pyramid. This is essentially an out door pursuits shop housed in a huge pyramid and filled with boats, Guns, Fish, Crossbows, clothes and stuffed wild animals. Yep, it was as odd as it sounds. You could buy anything here (as long as it aided you to kill a wild animal) and the place housed enough firepower to take down a small country – a day shopping here and i reckon you could probably overthrow Wales for example. It was “interesting” and scary and lets just say there were a lot of mullets on show 😀

We didn’t do a great deal for the rest of the day. We drove up to the Guesthouse at Graceland (nice but a little underwhelming) took in a few neighbourhoods and shops along the way and spent the late afternoon and evening drinking beer and eating burgers, grilled cheeses and Peanut butter and Jelly sandwiches served by a little old lady who i’m sure was in the Golden Girls 😀