On the monorail headed for Mud Island
A birds-eye view of the mini-Mississippi
The mini Mississippi in front, the mighty Mississippi in back
It ultimately empties into "the Gulf of Mexico"
This Graceland room looks okay. It's his parent's room. We didn't get to go upstairs.
The lounge room. The yellow is a lot brighter in real life.
And the pasture behind the backyard
The plane. The inside is outrageous.
So, first stop, Mud Island. Mud Island is a little island in the Mississippi right at the Arkansas/Tennessee border, connected to Memphis by some bridges. At the southern end of the island they have a little park, with anamphitheater for concerts, a Mississippi Museum, a scale model of the lower part of the river, and the actual Memphis Belle, the WWII plane.
It's a neat place. You start in downtown Memphis (another parking problem, but it worked out), and take a hanging monorail over to the island.
The museum is pretty nifty. It starts in prehistoric times, and then jumps forward a few hundred thousand years, to only a few hundred years ago when they first started charting the river. They realized the potential of the river, but it was a hard river to navigate, because it's often very shallow. Lots of special boats were built just for the river, right up to the paddleboats that are famous for their trips up and down the river. The museum takes you on models of those ships, and even lets you be on a boat during a civil war battle, and then you head to the shore side of that same battle. Finally it goes into the music from the region, most notably ragtime and jazz.
After my walk through the museum, I had a quick lunch, then headed up to see the Memphis Belle. Didn't do much for me. I then walked the entire model river, which is to scale, one 30" pace is one mile. It starts from somewhere south of St. Louis, and heads all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. It's really neat actually. You can see everywhere that the Corp of Engineers created byways to try to control the frequent flooding along the river's banks. I really enjoyed it, actually.
Towards the end of my stay, the clear skies became somewhat overcast, and it got very hot and humid ... it was nice to get back to the motorhome and start up the A/C.
After that, I headed to Graceland. Now, I'm really not much of an Elvis fan, but this is Americana to the extreme. It was packed. First, a tour of the mansion, which was fairly interesting. It's a nice place, although the decor was a bit over the top. He even had his own glass-walled racquetball court in his backyard.
The entire Graceland experience, including the Elvis Auto Museum and the quick tour of his two airplanes, took about 2 hours. I took lots and lots of pictures, but it turns out that I like very few of them. The big problem is that flash photography isn't allowed indoors, and so the indoor ones don't look nearly as good as they chould.
After Graceland, I got on the road, to leave Memphis and stop for the night in Nashville, where I planned to do the stuff there tomorrow.
However, I was still in the greater Memphis area when a couple in a car next to me on the freeway gestured wildly, got my attention, and indicated that I had a flat tire. I didn't know if it was on the motorhome or the trailer ... as far as I could tell, everything was normal and I was happily going 70mph. But I pulled over ...
Front right trailer tire was shredded. Sigh. The good news: nothing bad happens when you lose a trailer tire with this rig. The bad news: I know that. And guess what? I didn't get a spare with the trailer, and during the week between the time I picked up the trailer and the time that I hit the road, I forgot to get one. That occured to me several times during the trip, especially at Nationals when I listened to other people's tales of tire disasters on their way to Topeka. And, I've had enough trailer tire disasters of my own to know better.
Okay, so what were the options? The big problem: it was Sunday at 4pm. No tire store was going to be open. Maybe, if I was really lucky, I could find a gas station that not only had a repair shop, but actually had a tire in the right size. The chance of finding a trailer-specific tire was practically nil.
Of course, I could stay the night and deal with it in the morning, that wouldn't be the end of the world. But how to I get to a campsite? I could take the BMW off the trailer and drive it around, and I could take the BMW off the trailer and drive the motorhome around towing the empty trailer (it would be fine on three wheels without the car on it). But I couldn't get both the motorhome *and* the BMW to a campsite, or anywhere, for that matter.
Well, it was only a little after 4:00, so I should at least *try* to deal with this tonight. So, I unloaded the BMW. I then removed the wheel with the shredded tire by just pulling it off -- no need to jack it up or anything, after all, the sidewall was all but gone. The wheel was a little buggered up too, but I may have done that on a curb somewhere, I'm not sure.
Threw the destroyed wheel/tire into the back of the BMW, and headed up looking for an exit with lots of services. That was easy to find, but finding a shop that could help me wasn't. I couldn't find a single tire store, even a closed one. I couldn't find any gas stations with service stations, not a one. Plenty of gas stations, but only with food stores. I finally found an oil-change place that was open. Hey, it's an automotive place, they'd be able to point me towards a tire shop.
Well, they couldn't. I asked if there was a Wal-Mart around with a tire shop. There was, about 10 miles east. So, I headed there. Got there at about 4:45. The tire shop closes at 6:00, no problem. And they had trailer tires in the right size. I had to wait forever to get it mounted (it was busy), but problem solved. The tire doesn't match, but at least it's close to the right thing.
Headed back to the motorhome, replaced the tire, and loaded the BMW back up. All done at about 6:00, so the entire ordeal took only about 2 hours. Not too bad. But now what? Nashville was too far away to do tonight. I checked the guides, and there looked to be a couple of campgrounds between the two cities, but there was one just up the road from the Wal-Mart. I called them. No pull-thrus left. Oh well. Scratch that. All of the other Memphis campsites were back the other way. So, I picked one on the way to Nashville, made a reservation, and hit the road. Pulled in at about 8:15, set up camp, and here I am.
In the morning I will make sure that all 10 tires have the right pressure in them (I checked them all about a week ago, but now I'm paranoid), and while I'm at it I'll check all the fluids in the motorhome engine, the generator, and heck, even the BMW. May as well take the time to get everything exactly right so I don't have to think about this anymore.
Then it's off to Nashville, followed by Bowling Green, KY (that's the Corvette factory -- I might not be able to time it right for the factory tour, but the Corvette museum should be cool), then up to Mammoth Caves National Park.
After that, maybe Louisville (the Louisville Slugger museum and factory sounds neat). After that, I'll head up to the SCCA Runoffs at Mid-Ohio. If there's time, I may do that via West Virginia -- it depends on how quickly I get through those other things ...