Tuesday 29th November – the BEST day so far….

Even with one of our earliest alarm calls, this day will be hard to beat!  

As well as the issues with the engine battery a warning had come on during the previous week stating that the RV needed an oil change.  We’d asked the folks at Tom Sawyer for a recommendation and the man who rescued us a couple of days ago suggested a garage in West Memphis, advising us to always get work done at a non-RV specialist where possible as specialists will over-price their work.  Over the phone the garage had suggested getting the RV to them as close to opening at 730am as possible as we’d explained that we would need the work to be done while we waited as we literally had nowhere else to go!  Now, I do not trust garages in the UK one bit.  Whenever they've told me I need something done on my car in the past I am convinced they are lying and I am being done every single time.  Here, we mentioned the issues we had been having with our battery and asked them to check it whilst doing the oil change for us.  Fully expecting to have to shell out for a new battery as well as the oil we braced ourselves for the bill.  But no, they checked the battery and found no fault at all, suggesting instead that the living area of the RV must be drawing charge from the engine battery and we should turn the engine isolation switch when we stop for a few days – this should resolve the issue.  Only 45 minutes and $71 later for the oil change, we had a renewed confidence in humanity and mechanics as we left to find somewhere for breakfast.

It turns out you can achieve so much more when you get up before 8am – but we found it difficult to find somewhere for breakfast -apparently we were too early!  We headed towards our second stop of the day – Graceland and ended up eating in the diner there, which was over-priced but authentically decorated as you would expect an American diner to be.  Here’s a picture from the diner - it's a sad example of how the young people today just don’t talk face to face anymore, imprisoned by their technology… 

The Graceland experience consists of a few different options.  The essential and by far the best is the tour of the Graceland mansion itself.  You are handed a tablet and headset each for the tour and part of the entertainment is watching the more senior members of the group trying to get to grips with the technology!  Once you’ve been dropped off by bus at the front door of the mansion you can explore it at your own pace.  

At this time of year, the house and grounds are decorated with the Presleys' original Christmas decorations so it appears as it would have been when Elvis was alive (spoiler alert).  Priscilla and other family members still entertain here sometimes and upstairs is completely out of bounds, preserved for their privacy and memories.

The lounge ready for Christmas

Elvis's 'man-cave' with state of the art TV screens in the walls

'There's a pretty little thing, waiting for the King, down in the jungle room' - Walking in Memphis lyric.  This is the jungle room - along with a bar, waterfall, plants and green shag carpet on the floor AND ceiling for acoustic reasons!!

I don’t claim to be a mad Elvis fan, my earliest memories of him were in his cheesy GI films that my Nan used to love watching regularly, but you cannot deny the talent and impact that he had on music and culture as a whole.  Walking down corridors, the walls filled from floor to ceiling with gold and platinum records sold around the World, you perceive some idea of the scale of his achievements and why he was idolised.  And in such a limited lifespan.  Who knows how much more he could have done if it weren’t for his early demise?  The glitz and specialisations within Graceland cannot be understated – from the gym, the television room or ‘man cave’, the pool and stables – everything you could want or need was there in glittering diamond-encrusted form!  

Then there was the Memorial garden within the grounds containing the tombstones for all of the departed Presleys:

Separate exhibitions were available depending on your interests.  We paid a small extra fee to gain access to Elvis’s private jets (of course we did, you can never see enough planes?!), including the Lisa Marie clad in suede, leather and gold throughout. 

Then of course Elvis loved his cars, including this Stutz Blackhawk which is the last car that Elvis drove through the gates of Graceland on 16^th August 1977.  We learnt more about his birthplace and upbringing in the Tupelo exhibit, which was lucky as we weren’t making a diversion to that part of Mississippi.  A committed Elvis fan could make the visit last for the whole day easily.

(Hotel sign , the motel is round the corner)

But we had more attractions to cram into our day.  We drove back into downtown Memphis to the Lorraine Motel, room 306 - scene of the murder of Dr Martin Luther King Junior on 4^th April 1968.  The National Civil Rights Museum is now housed within the building but there are also listening posts on the pavement outside that provide a lot of information about the build-up to the shooting.  For example, I was unaware that Dr King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers calling for improvements in safety standards, following the death of a man who was crushed in substandard machinery.  The mood surrounding the location was sombre as one might expect in a place of such shocking tragedy.   

The motel was bought and restored to its 1968 appearance, along with cars from the era on the forecourt.  Room 306 is on the first floor behind the wreath.

Heading further into town, looking for somewhere to park Harvey, we then stumbled across the St Blues Guitar Factory Shop. This company have been making guitars since the ‘60s and their guitars are all handmade in Memphis and distributed from there. Some of history’s guitar greats, such as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton have played St Blues Guitars and the company have now branched out into handmade ‘Cigar Box’ guitars. Each Cigar Box Guitar is truly unique, four strings and best played with a slide and they all sounded great. Again, the staff at the factory were so friendly, happy to show us what they were making and talk to us about the history of the brand…

(Remember the photograph behind the bar for later on....)

We had seen so much already.  But, as music lovers, the best was still to come.  We drove to Sun Studios which can best be described as the birth place of rock ‘n roll.  Here’s Simon enjoying a revitalising coffee in the café before our guided tour:  

We saw the original broadcast booth of 'Daddy-O’ Dewey Phillips who shattered the mould with his ‘Red hot & Blue’ radio show from 1953-1959. He played Elvis’s first record, ‘That’s all right’, on 8^th July 1954 and the reaction to the record was so extreme that he played it 12 times before inviting Presley to appear as a guest for a live interview.  A star was born.

The climax of the tour was heading into the basement containing the recording studio itself where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, (all together in this photo called the ‘Million-dollar quartet’) cut their early records: 

The studio is still in use today.  We all had a go at striking cheesy poses with the microphone (right):

After the other tour customers had left and we were still hanging on, we cheekily asked our guide if we could see the sound booth itself.  Imagine our joy when he told us to go ahead and take a seat in there!  To be able to sit where the buttons were pressed that were responsible for capturing all that classic music was humbling....

Note the small pile of black and white photographs on the desk – these were pictures of the King himself, Elvis – right there and in this very studio.  Afterwards we both admitted having a fleeting thought of swiping one for our collection, but quickly came back to our senses!

It was late as we returned to the RV park and we were exhausted.  But what a momentous day!  How on Earth were we going to top a day like this when we had visited so many unique and historically significant locations in twelve hours?!