Checking Out Memphis--Saturday, January 31

The day dawns warm and sunny. We call Marilyn’s, talk to Hannah, and ask her to check for the plug in the outlet in the guest room. Yep, it’s there. We give her Aunt Flo’s address in Ft Myers. A little later Marilyn calls back and says that we have also left a flash drive; should she include in in the package? I’m glad we remembered the computer!

We use the iPhone to locate an RV parts store to replace our water filter so that we can fill up the water. First one is a dud. No filter. I call the second. We are in luck. We put the address in Ms Garmin and head off. While Norb is getting the filter I look for a nearby Radio Shack in hopes of getting a cable to fix the Garmin problem. Just down the street. About 100 yards south of…tad ah! We are in Memphis, after all. Graceland. We’ll come back tomorrow.

No fix for the Mac but we do get a cable for the Garmin and, while we are there, we buy some small speakers for the iPhone for our ocean voyage in March. The young man assisting us has been so helpful, giving us the address of the Apple store, trying to solve our problems, that I feel we owe him something.

Our first museum of the day is the National Ornamental Metal Museum on the banks of the Mississippi. Once part of a military hospital, the brick building has 4 small galleries with a variety of pieces, some large, some small, some abstract, some humorous (remind me to show you the pictures of a few of the Wallys). We watch them making a hammer for a bit, admire a commission of 80 beehive pieces that is being created for a commission, and wonder the grounds looking at various pieces. I liked the place very much.

Then we head for the National Civil Rights Museum, created in and around the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was killed. There is a special exhibit on important black women that has a very interesting video on Rosa Parks and the background on the bus case. The museum itself starts at the beginning and pretty much ends with King’s death. If you go, I recommend the headsets. It is almost overwhelming to be reminded again of how awful blacks were treated. The motto for the Birmingham sanitation workers strike was “I am a man.” To me that sums up the entire thing—blacks were treated as less than human.

Across the street in the former boarding house where Ray was when he shot King is another exhibit, essentially on Ray, the shooting, the aftermath, and the various theories around him. Did he act alone? How did he finance himself? Why did he do it? Etc. No answers, just a lot of questions.

It was 2:30 by the time we finish so we eat lunch in the RV, call the Apple store and are told that we need to make an appointment with a Genius to get our problem taken care of. So we set up a 6:45 appointment.

Then we head north to downtown Memphis. We find a place to park on the street and walk 4 blocks to the Center for Southern Folklore. Turns out to be a store with lots of CDs etc. The very friendly woman puts a very interesting video on the TV about Beale Street and southern musicians. I have a latte and we watch. Then we check out the Peabody Hotel. Reminds me of the Palmer House and the Drake Hotel in Chicago. Of course, we don’t have any ducks in our fountain in the middle of the hotel. Peabody Place turns out to be a big dud. All of the shops on the second floor are closed and many of the first floor shops are shuttered. It’s a dying mall.

Beale Street, on the other hands, is quite alive. I hadn’t realized that it was originally the center of black social life, but it was. We buy US flag pins at Schwab’s, which is the oldest store on Beale and still reeks of five-and-dime. We cross the trolley tracks to walk along the river for a while. Mud Island, which has a five block long replica of the Mississippi, doesn’t open until April, but we can see it laying out there so close.

We head for Germantown and the Apple store, some 22 miles away! Turns out to be a very upscale area, quite a contrast to Memphis. It’s 5:50 when we arrive, but we go in hoping we can solve the problem easily without waiting until 6:45. No luck. I am 8th on the list of people waiting to talk to a Genius, according to the monitor. We wander around. 45 minutes later, I am 7th. We find out that we need to check in, so we do. Norb is pretty annoyed by the fact that no one told us that we needed to check in. I settle on a stool to wait and he takes the cord and goes to talk to the store manager. To make a long story short, we walk out of there 5 minutes later with a new cord—complimentary. He really is very good.

We make the 22 mile drive back to Memphis and settle in to the Elvis Presley RV Park, right next to Heartbreak Hotel. I kid you not. Tomorrow, barbecue, the cemetery, and Graceland.