I ran, grabbed my coat and camera, and ran outside.  I ran over and wrote this on Kari's car's windshield (she drove to Atlanta this weekend in my car).  I then went for a walk around the apartment complex.  The wind and the show stung my face, but I didn't care.  I was enjoying this way too much.  It was so beautiful to watch the super tiny, light flakes be tossed around in the lightest of breezes, much like how a flock of small birds collectively twists and turns as a single cohesive unit.  People standing on their balconies looked at me like I was some kind of idiot, but I didn't care.  This is what I had wanted and hoped for for so long. 

On the way over, we drove by a neat tractor trailer truck filled with dozens of fire hydrants.  We thought this would make for a neat photo, so we let it pass us, and then re-passed it to get more pictures.  The driver didn't quite understand why an SUV from New Hampshire was buzzing around it, taking pictures, which could explain his WTF look. 

For a moment when we first got off the Graceland exit off of I-55, I thought the signs must have been wrong.  Elvis wouldn't choose to live in such a crappy area, but sure enough, there was the Heartbreak Hotel, the visitor's center, the $5 parking lot, and Graceland hiding across the street.  We paid for parking and then found a space against the chain-link fence that faced the Heartbreak Hotel.  We sat there thinking "wow, what a dump."  A nice feature that didn't make it into the picture is the large, moat-ish, drainage ditch filled with trash and a rusty, overturned shopping cart. 

We walked across the parking lot and past the fenced-in area to see Elvis' cars and airplanes, where we saw this big honkin' jet engine quietly sleeping under a blue tarp.  Definitely a nice touch. 

Somewhere along the way we ended up in megalomaniac land where they kept his umpteen billion awards, gold records, and other ego-inflating devices.  It was interesting to learn from the self-guided headphones that Elvis was quite the philanthropist and was very generous with his money.  Pretty neat.  I also remember reading what a man-whore he was from an article in Playboy.  This picture goes along much better with the man-whore Elvis than the philanthropist Elvis.

We walked back to the front of the house where there was a covered walkway for people to gather and wait for a shuttle bus back across the street (you can't just walk back for some reason).  There we met a delightful employee who also loved to yell and told us that she wouldn't let us on the bus unless we hung the headphones just so on the neck cord.  I was finally able to get a picture of the front of the house, and then thankfully a shuttle bus arrived and took us away from that place.   

        

After miraculously making it to Memphis in one piece, we checked into the hotel around 9pm, got settled, and went out in search of fun-ness.  We accidentally ended up on Beale Street (basically like the French Quarter of Memphis).  Surprisingly, it's the #1 tourist attraction in all of Tennessee, which means most tourists must be raging alcoholics.  The rain was still coming down in buckets, which must have kept the drunkards, and the routine 12-steppers at home, but not the determinedly soused candidates for liver transplants.  I figured the streets would be empty, but no, there was still a few hundred party people out and about. 

We walked around for a bit and ended up in the Blues City Cafe ("the best meal on Beale!") where we had a very yummy, late dinner while listening to the live blues band play in the next room.  It was also pretty fun to watch the people staggering out and about in the street.

We checked out and hit the road on a super-sunny Sunday.  Our first stop was to the Nixon Lumberyard.  I had seen this picture on Flickr last week when I was looking up pictures from Memphis and decided I needed to take my own pictures of it.  (Who knew I had a lumberyard?)  It was in a pretty sketchy part of town, but we finally found it...only to discover it looked like it had been closed for a few years.  Everything was boarded and chained up, so we weren't able to walk around and find the exact same painted building, but I did find this super-crappy, chipped, faded, almost-unreadable version. 

The ducks appear at 11am, so we were there by quarter of...and so were about 200 other people.  The duckmaster guy came down and told the crowd the story of the ducks (drunk hotel GM in the 1930's who was playing a prank put live ducks in the fountain), then went up to their "penthouse plantation" to get them.  A few minutes later (right at 11am sharp) the elevator door opened and those five ducks were in the fountain next to me before I even knew they had left the elevator (50 feet away).  For all they had built it up to be, I felt it was kind of a letdown.  Maybe I had mis-remembered it from when I was a kid, but I assumed they would calmly waddle down the red carpet, hop up the three steps, and lightly splash into the fountain.  Not a chance.  They ran like hell and it was over within three seconds.  This is the one picture I got of them. 

One of the cool things about the roof was the view.  There isn't all that much to look at far as Memphis goes, but it had a great view of the Mississippi River and the bridges that crossed it.

                                                                    © 2006 Eric Nixon.  All rights reserved.