Rio to New York in 6 Months

We left Austin and headed for Memphis. Home of “The King”. We underestimated the huge distances again so ended up stopping in a state park again. It was at the state park that we met a couple of people called Naft and Jill. They were pretty cool. Naft was in a bike gang called the Freewheelers and he had loads of tattoos.

It was interesting speaking to him as he had some interesting stories
about his life and what his bike gang was like. He had done some pretty crazy stuff in his life. We had a few drinks with them that night and they invited us down to their house for a couple of days to chill out and shoot some guns but we had to move on as time was getting short.
Here is a picture of us all at the campsite. (Have a guess which one is Naft. The other guy is his brother.)

The next day we left for Memphis. Memphis has a lot of musical history and a lot of pretty talented people have recorded there. Elvis recorded his first ever song in Sun Studios in Memphis. Here are a couple of pictures of us outside the studio.

Talking about Elvis, I met a guy at our motel who said he used to play guitar for Elvis back in the day. He told me that he had been to Graceland quite a few times (when Elvis was alive) and that lvis was a really nice guy.
We couldnt come all the way to Memphis without seeing Graceland so we out on our blue suede shoes and headed down there.
Here are a few pictures of various parts of the house. They are quite dark because they did not allow flash photography in the house.

Here is the lounge just as you come in the front door.

Here is the dining room (on the opposite side as you open the door)

Here is another lounge. (Notice the TCB lightning bolt on the wall)

Here is the games room. He used loads of material to cover the ceilings and walls.

Here is one of his capes that is displayed in his old raquetball room. (Not sure if you can read the description below the cape)

The old raquetball room is also filled with hundreds of awards and gold records.

Here is a picture of Kelly outside the front of the house.

Along with the house we also got to see his private jet. Inside the jet there were gold plated seatbelts and taps in the bathroom. I think he spent more refurbishing the plane then he did buying it. The museum said he used to fly off in the middle of the night to get his favourite food from far away cities. You gotta love Fat Elvis.

Here is a picture of the plane.

The lighting inside the plane was not too good so I could not get many good photos. Here is one to give you an idea. The plane had three or four areas the size of the one in the photo housing various types of room. You can see the door to the next room at the back of the photo.

Here is the final picture from Graceland of me standing next to the entrance sign. I probably should have put it at the beginning but oh well.

Another thing that Memphis is famous for (slighty morbidly) is the hotel where Martin Luther King was shot. The hotel has been converted into a museum but they left the original front and the room that he stayed in before he died. It is called the “Lorraine Motel”
Here is a picture of Kelly standing outside the hotel / museum.

Here is one with the balcony he was standing on when he was shot in the background.

We were not allowed to take any pictures inside the museum so there will not be any on the blog. It struck me as odd that we were allowed to take as many pictures as we wanted in Graceland but we could not take any inside a civil rights museum due to “Copyright” reasons. There was some pretty interesting things in there too. Capitalist America strikes again.
While we were in Memphis we also checked out Beale Street which is a famous street full of blues bars and various other drinking places. We saw a pretty good live band there with a guy who played some awesome harmonica. After the band had finished at about midnight we headed back to the car. We were about to get in when this guy started cleaning the car windscreen. His brother came over to help and we ended up taking to them in this car park for about 2 hours. They did a pretty good job on the car windows too. Here is a picture of us. When we asked how old they were they told us 38
and 40. I couldnt believe it.

Here is a picture of another guy we met who insisted on giving us help back to the car (1 minute walk). There are a lot of homeless people in America and unfortunately as far as we can tell nearly all of them are black. We have not seen one white homeless person yet.

Here is the final picture from Memphis of us stood in front of the Elvis statue right on Beale Steet.

Thats it for Memphis.

James

Tags: Memphis, Travel, USA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 3:38 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.