Our goal for today… Memphis TN where we were to see Elvis! On our way through the great state of Alabama where we discovered the Talladega Nascar track. We say discovered because we had been seeing Talladega signs for the last 30 minutes. Talladega Forest, Talladega home cookin’, Talladega yada yada yada. So when there forest breaks to reveal the race track itself, clear as day, Jamie was uber excited. You see, for Jamie’s Birthday she got a Dale Earnhardt Jr. GPS to have a little Southern with her on the journey home. The “Dale Earnhardt Jr.” actually speaks the driving prompts to us and we are even a racecar on the screen as our arrow. We ate lunch at the Race City Diner where we had the pleasure of enjoying a truly southern lunch buffet which consisted of fried chicken with gravy, green beans with bacon, sweet potato soufflé, franks and sauerkraut, fried okra, rice cake, succotash, and best of all CHEESECAKE!
Back on the road (and anticipating many more detours) Jamie decided to put in an audio book she had burned for the trip. It was Sense and Sensibility and Sea monsters… I fell asleep through a good portion of this because it was not really my kind of book. We are going to try to listen to Eat, Pray, Love soon which I am excited about! When we were not listening to the book, we were both singing “ I put on my blue suede shoes and boarded the plane…touched down in the land of the delta blues in the middle of the pouring rain.” We could not get it out of our heads, it seemed our Memphis theme (though ironically, not written or ever performed by Elvis).
In Mississippi (which we did not realize we would be going through, another Talladega like reaction) At a Mississippi rest stop we had our first sighting of Elvis (a paper cutout). I gave him a kiss on the cheek! I took the wheel after this rest stop, me driving is something you may not hear about often, not that I don’t offer, Jamie is just crazy obsessive about her truck. We passed through one horrendous rain storm (Jamie has named the storm “the 3 minutes of terror”) until we started getting close to Memphis. (Really it was just off and on rain showers, Jamie is too dramatic). Keeping in theme, Memphis surprised us too! One minute we were driving along the interstate, the next we were surrounded by cars and halted at a stop light. There was not a great place to stop the truck so at the next stoplight we did an old school Chinese fire drill and she took the wheel again. It was quite exciting. It has been a while since either of us have done one and never with such urgency.
So we were finally in Memphis! Yay! We found the Rock n’ Roll Café easily which is where our Elvis would be performing and decided to tour around the sites until the show. We were not allowed to go up and look at Graceland, having missed visitor hours, so we took a picture by the gate, and then our camera died. After setting up the camera to charge we did what any self respecting set of girls would do…we went shopping of course! We bought an Elvis CD and Elvis postcards. Jamie got some Elvis matches…she likes to get matches wherever she goes. Oh and we found these awesome gold sunglasses which I wanted real bad. They looked super cool. Don’t cha’ think!
The Joe Kent Show (dinner included) began at 8, we arrived early to snag great seats and order dinner before the show. We were pretty hungry and ended up ordering a lot of food, which included the famous Elvis Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwich. Then I got a Turkey Melt which was not as great as I thought it would be. Jamie got the Hunka Hunka Burnin’Burger which was HUGE! Then we settled in for our Elvis Impersonator, Mr. Joe Kent!
We are having a blast so far and it is just the beginning. More adventures to come J
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