Second day in Memphis

We ignored the cleaners knocking on the door and slept until 11:00 am, catching up from the week’s Arkansas road trip. Obviously missed the delicious motel breakfast and decided to do Graceland the next day. So it would be Museums and hanging around downtown today.

Kellogg’s promotional Rice Krispies Treats and yesterday’s orange juice for breakfast in the room. By now Miriam had lost her voice completely.

We then headed off by foot through empty and decaying commercial sections of Union Road to the Star Studio, where Elvis recorded his first record to give it to his mother. A tiny place with a lobby, a museum room upstairs with lots of old stuff and the original radio station D…. which started off lots of local artists. A very enthusiastic guide in rock & roll look shared moments of the birth of rock & roll. Nice.

Long walk back to the motel to drop some clothes- it turned out to be the first warm summer day of our trip – and then across downtown to the Civil Rights Museum, set-up in the motel in which Martin Luther King Jr was shot. A very impressive museum, good for a day’s time spent there, about the struggle for equity.

From the civil rights museum we went, again by foot, to Beale Street for an early dinner. A cheeseburger and a pulled pork meal, and some Memphis beer in a place with lots of film posters, many featuring Elvis but also from film icons like Easy Rider. Nice.

Some souvenirs shopping in Schwab’s and then back to the motel for a siesta, to return to Beale Street around 11:00 for a last beer of the day. Saturday, all bars had cover charges, so we just bought a beer and a coke at a street counter of one bar. Miriam had to buy the beer for me. I had forgotten my passport. After moving away from the bar we swapped the drinks – and felt like criminals.

The street was a lot more crowded than the day before, most people colored with only a few white visitors. Heavy presence of police cars at all the entrances of the street, I wonder whether that is normal or an reaction to terrorist attacks with trucks in Europe, London and Oslo only a few days ago.

On the other hand, lots of people had handphones sticking out their pants’ back pockets, easy targets for pick pockets, that does not seem to be a problem here.

Miriam was whispering the whole day, gained her voice back only marginally in the evening.