Nashville, Memphis and a hitchhiker.

10th – 15th Oct

Our journey continued west to take in Nashville and Memphis. These two cities are only about 200 miles apart, both in the same state of Tennessee, of similar sizes (pop 650-700,000), but are very different in their character.

Nashville: mostly white, thriving, expanding at a rate of 100 people per day, home of Country music.

Memphis: mostly African-American, still struggling economically, home of the Blues.

For this portion of our trip we were joined by Lori, our good friend who lives near Seattle. She had arranged to fly into Nashville and out of Memphis and come along on our adventures in between. Tin Can, although spacious enough for two, is very cozy for three and we decided that we wouldn’t inflict 5 nights of communal living on Lori.

Having examined all the various options for some nights on dry land in Nashville the best compromise in the end was booking two rooms in a medium quality airport hotel. This gave us affordable accommodation (Nashville is surprisingly expensive), close enough to town to make getting around by Uber very easy,  with plenty of parking for the rig (or so we had assumed).

We arrived mid-afternoon to the hotel which did have plenty of parking, but  mostly either underground or around the back which could only be accessed under a 11ft archway. We are 12ft tall. After a tense 15 mins of shuffling around the small area at the front of the hotel a solution was found. We could park next door in the petrol station. It was wasn’t ideal, but at least there were plenty of security cameras and we were pretty confident that we parked far enough from the pumps that the pilot light on the gas powered fridge wouldn’t cause a moderate petrol explosion.

We chilled out for a few hours and then just as we were planning to head out for dinner, the heavens opened. There was a half decent restaurant less than 1km down the road, and of course we walked. The expression ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen…’ should be altered to include: ‘…try and walk anywhere in the USA where the car is king, there are no pavements or pedestrian crossings across 4 lane highways, and it is dark and raining’. We arrived a little damp, but intact, and had a lovely, albeit oversized, meal and drinks at a very packed family owned restaurant. Very worth the minor adventure it took to get there. The walk home was drier, but no less exciting. Lori didn’t get in until late, long after we were abed, so we caught up with her at breakfast. This was a fiesta of disposability: cups, cutlery, bowls and plates. A buffet-style affair that fulfilled its primary function of breaking our fast, but without any frills.

We had two full days in Nashville. We started day one with the first of many Ubers and headed to the Country Music Hall of Fame. This is to Nashville like the Sagrada Famillia is to Barcelona. A cathedral of country music worship, a site of pilgrimage for the faithful, (although it is finished, so my comparison is imperfect.) We had a guilty secret as we walked through the hallowed portals of the main entrance. None of the three of us actually liked country music. We kept quiet and kept moving. By the time we left two hours later we were much the wiser and had a new found appreciation for the genre. I think it’s the miserable, warbling-type of country that we dislike. It was a very good museum with some great displays. Well worth the visit. After the Hall of Fame we wandered up to the madness that is Broadway. This is the party street of Nashville and is about 4-5 blocks of nothing but restaurants and bars, interspersed with a few cowboy boot and cowboy hat shops. Almost everywhere had live music all day. It was 12.30pm and already buzzing. We found a cool place for lunch (without music), Acme Feed and Seed, and then escaped the tourist craziness by wandering up to the state capitol building. It still amazes me that these are open to the public and you can just wander in and look at all the chambers. Mid afternoon we headed back to the hotel for a recharge and change, then headed back to town for the evening.

Now, we had made grand plans to join the crowds and do a ‘crawl’ through some of the well known and popular drinking, eating and music venues of Broadway. You know. Suck it up. When-in-Rome and all that. But what we ended up doing was spending a very grown up evening in an out-of-the way venue called ‘Skull’s Rainbow Room’. This is a legendary and iconic Nashville establishment located down a back lane called Printers Alley. It is a stylish atmospheric place that over the years has hosted big names such as Elvis, Johny Cash, Bob Dylan and Etta James on its small central stage. We secured a rare table and ended up doing our drinking, eating and listening to live music without having to move. And our second guilty secret? The live music was jazz.

The main event of day two was tickets to The Grand Old Opry that evening. Now this really is a Nashville country music institution. It started 93 years ago as a radio show featuring multiple country artists recorded in front of a live audience. Except for scale and venue it is essentially unchanged to this day.  Most big country stars past and present have trodden the Opry boards at some point in their career.  It was to be a true test of our newfound appreciation of country music.

The Opry, which used to be hosted in an old theatre just off Broadway called the Ryman, now has its own purpose built ‘Opry House’ out of town. This is flanked by a big shopping Mall and cinema complex, ‘Opry Mills’, and the most enormous hotel and conference centre called ‘The Gaylord Opryland’. This is one of the largest hotels in the world with more than 3000 rooms. The central courtyard areas, 9 acres of them, are covered with huge glass domes giving the place a bit of a Disney type vibe.  The whole area is home to numerous other hotels and the usual entertainment options. The Opry is a phenomenon.

We started the day by introducing Lori to the fabulousness that is mini-golf. She whipped our behinds. Mind you, she is a proper golfer and has been receiving lessons from our favourite golf pro, Cal. We ignored her glorious victory and, as I beat Hampson, we are now 2:2 on the overall mini-golf scoreboard.

Second activity of the day was a trip to the cinema to watch First Man on IMAX. Quite amazing that all that happened with 1960s technology. If it happened at all…….

Next to the Gaylord and a late afternoon drink and early pre-show dinner. Our waiter was an ageing hippy from Hawaii who was charming but very forgetful. He seemed happy though, probably for all the usual hippy reasons, I imagine.

And so to the Opry. We went prepared to be bemused by the whole thing, but it was fantastic. We deliberately chose seats high up to get a good view of the whole auditorium and do some people watching. There was a disappointing lack of cowboy boots and fringed leather. Each of the acts did 2 or 3 numbers, including a bona fide Hall-of-Famer, the octogenarian Charley Pride. They were all very good. No-one did any depressed warbling and we loved it. It is still a live radio show and the acts were broken up with the MC doing announcements and adverts for the benefit of the listeners. You can find it at opry.com if you are interested.

The next day was road-trip day.  We reclaimed the truck from the Shell garage (all in one piece, no explosions), packed our bags and Lori into the back seats and headed to Memphis. Unfortunately it wasn’t the most interesting of drives to share with Lori. The two cities are linked by an interstate highway, door to door. We did, however, introduce her to the delights of a couple of truck stops along the way. Three hours, two coffees, a Subway lunch and a bag of sweets later we arrived in Memphis. Here we had booked an RV park which had a self contained cabin for Lori next to our site.  The park was about 10km from the centre of town, but only 2 blocks away from Graceland, a place we were definitely going to visit. There are two RV parks in this part of town: The park which is actually at Graceland, co-located with the Graceland hotel and enormous visitors centre, with security and part of the Graceland ‘machine’, and then there was the one we were staying at. Ours, chosen because it had the cabins, was a bit more ‘rustic’. It backed onto some dodgy looking housing and had no security. Graceland aside, this area of town can be rough but Lori was very brave and still went running in the mornings having been advised that she would be fine as long as she didn’t stray off the main road. She didn’t.

We had two nights here. The first evening it rained cats and dogs, but we hung out in Lori’s cabin and cooked dinner. It was very cozy and we sorted out most of the world’s problems over some wine.  The next day we took an Uber into town and started with a visit to the Nation Civil Rights Museum. This incorporates the original Lorraine Motel which is the place Martin Luther King was killed. It was amazing, blending the events surrounding his assassination with the history and overall timeline of the civil rights movement in general. It was sensitive and incredibly moving and I left with a hugely improved understanding of the situation. I took two main things away. 1. Civil rights in the USA have come a long, long way, but issues of colour still divide this country. In the major 25 metropolitan areas there are more racial divisions today than when in the 60’s. 2. Martin Luther King was a rare human being. His murder (50 years ago this year) robbed the world of a great leader. It left me thinking that the world could really use a few of his calibre right now.

We emerged sombre in mood to a sombre sky. The cure? Lunch and cocktails, of course. We found the place, ate and imbibed and then, in much improved spirits, wandered down to the river for our first glimpse of the mighty Mississppi. They were right when they called it that. Blimin’ massive.

Our next stop on the tourist trail was the Peabody Hotel to see the ducks. For some reason this fancy-pants hotel has an ever-present flock of about 5 ducks which sit around in the fountain in the main foyer/lounge/bar area. Each morning they are escorted down from their home on the roof by a  uniformed doorman. They travel down in the lift and waddle their way along a special ducky red carpet to the fountain where they float around all day, posing for photos. Then at 5pm they go back up to the roof. Bonkers.

And so to Beale Street. This is the Blues version of Broadway, Nashville. Bars and live music all the way. Except not at 3.30pm on a Sunday afternoon, we were a few hours ahead of the wave. The only place with live music was BB King’s place, so in lieu of afternoon tea, we had a few beers sat at the bar, soaking up a live set by a very good band. Now we were Blues fans too. We headed home late afternoon and later had dinner at another local institution, a BBQ joint about 1.5km from camp called Marlowes. It had a courtesy shuttle in the form of a pink stretch Cadillac limo, which we ordered, which went to the other RV park and which then sailed on past us when it couldn’t find us.  We walked, a bit anxiously, through the twilight but arrived without incident. After eating our own bodyweight in delicious pork we did manage to get the limo home.  ‘Don’t stray off the path’ the driver warned us as he dropped us off at the gate. We didn’t.

Lori’s flight home was mid afternoon which gave us the morning for Memphis’s main event: The Graceland tour.  Even as non-Elvis fanatics, this was a must. We walked the 10 minutes down the road to the welcome centre, got our tickets, and joined the throng. Now this really is a pilgrimage site. You could tell the super fans. They were wearing their Elvis T-shirts. They were bristling with anticipation. They had probably paid the eye watering $170 for the full VIP ‘experience’.  We stuck to the plain old mansion tour, collected our iPads and headphones and waited to get on the shuttle bus. This took us the short distance across the road to the house where we got off the bus and waited to get in the house. Once inside we joined the slow shuffling line that snaked the very short distances from front door to lounge, to dining room, to kitchen, to party room, to basement TV room, to billiard room, to garden, to raquetball court to memorial garden. Amazingly, considering he was ‘the King’ it was quite a modest home. This concentrated the crowds and made it irritatingly busy. Out of respect for the family, the tour did not include the upstairs at all. This is obviously the location of the bathroom where he died, at aged 42. Hard living and prescription medications caught up with him far too early. It is sobering. He is buried in the memorial garden with his parents and grandma, and near a small memorial stone for his stillborn twin brother. Just think. There might have been two Kings. Oh, and we now like Elvis a bit more too.

A shuttle bus took us back across the road and we walked back to TC. Lori collected her things and headed off to the airport. It was great to share a small slice of our life on the road with her, even if it wasn’t all shiny and perfect. This few days has been all about the music and a few important people of this country. Urban USA is very different from small town USA and the vast swathes of wilderness that we have seen and crossed. I know which I prefer.