Today was a remarkable day, chiefly as we actually left our hotel at the time we vaguely planned to. In fact better than that, we had planned to leave at 09:00 and at precisely 8:59 the valet parking chap delivered our car. Having seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off I had made a note of the mileage the day before and confirmed all was well.
The first task of the day was to track down a key location from the Bond film Live and Let Die. In the pre-credits scene an MI6 agent is seen in downtown New Orleans being murdered under cover of a jazz music based funeral. The Fillet Of Sole restaurant he was staking out forms a key part of the film's plot and as luck would have it was less than a five minute drive from the hotel. As you can see in the following comparison shots we managed to find the place:
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| Fillet Of Soul - now closed / not a real restaurant. Note the one guy in NOLA more tired than I was |
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| Spot the difference |
Having achieved this we pointed the car toward Memphis for the next stop. Given Memphis is more or less due North of New Orleans it seemed only fitting to start the driving with a few listens to Eastbound and Down. The road out of New Orleans, I55, starts off well with a lot of swamp type scenery and stuff to look at. As the road gets further from the coast it becomes a lot duller and looks mostly like this:
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| I55 - dull |
A concern today was the restaurant chain Denny's does not seem to be well represented in Louisiana which made choosing a spot for breakfast very difficult. In the end we selected Waffle House which is a bit like Denny's but possibly occupying a lower place in the market, something I did not think was possible.
I was behind the wheel for the first leg of the journey up to and beyond breakfast, however soon after I had to hand over as I realised I was very close to falling asleep, at least twice I felt my head starting to drop. Once Alistair was at the wheel I managed a bit of a disco nap which served me well for the rest of the day, in fact until I was asked to take back over as Alistair was similarly in danger of a nap with potentially disastrous consequences.
Despite being boring the I55 had the key benefit of being very lightly policed so is an excellent road for hauling ass (as Bandit from Smokey and the Bandit would say.) This enabled us to complete the 300 miles ish distance between New Orleans and our Memphis stop in relatively good time and more importantly before Graceland closed for the day.
The spot I chose to park in was a reasonable distance from the museum meaning I needed to walk in Memphis (Marc Cohn reference) to purchase tickets for the Graceland tour. For younger readers and the ignorant Graceland was the home of Elvis Presley and family. I am quite a big Elvis fan so the prospect of visiting Graceland was a welcome addition to the trip. Elvis fans are generally having their afternoon nap late on Tuesdays so we pretty much had the run of the place:
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| Graceland. Graceland. Memphis Tennessee - smaller than you think |
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| The architectural style of a small airport hotel |
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| The Jungle Room - No Jungle Music was played |
In addition to the main house Graceland offers a huge museum including Elvis' cars, planes and various Elvis outfits. The car museum is fantastic, one of the two planes is fantastic, the other memorabilia would require one to be much more of an Elvis fan than I am, it was OK but not exactly captivating. That said this quote from Elvis does show that he was very much on my wavelength:
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| Elvis - an excellent judge of character |
Sadly the tour was cut short after I innocently asked a guide if we could see 'that' toilet, following which I was asked to leave. The next step was to find a hotel for the evening. Initially the plan was to stay in Memphis, however the prospect of another late night was not that compelling so it was decided to head up the road a bit towards the next stop of Nashville. An arbitrary destination of Jackson Tennessee was set and we set off.
En-route the car radio played an advert for a bar which had a steak happy hour on Tuesdays, that sounded good so the next step was to find a hotel nearby. The beauty of staying out of a city is hotels are very very cheap, in fact a room was only £30. At this price we could afford a room each, this will give me welcome respite from Alistair's really loud snoring, although I should add that at this point I would have paid ten times the amount for a night of P&Q. That said even at £30 there was quite some debate on the one room or two question.
Fans of My Name is Earl will be familiar with the format of the hotel given that it is identical to the one depicted in said programme. The check in service was great and the receptionist was happy for me to change rooms from the one she had allocated me to one with a palindromic number (121) so I am happy. Therefore if you ever find yourself in Jackson TN I can recommend the Old Hickory Hotel.
The bar advertised on the radio was just round the corner from the hotel and was not half bad. In addition to steak happy night it was pretty cheap anyway and Tuesday nights were open mic night. That said open mic night seems to mean a different thing to at home, here it was mainly one guy performing although he wasn't terrible he didn't seem to get into the spirit of things. Another bonus of the venue was a chap befriended us who was a photographer and showed us a portfolio of nudie pictures which was a nice surprise before dinner. Actually now I think about the pretty cheap comment above I am writing this after 8 pints or so and I think it is relatively coherent so perhaps they make profits by watering down the beer.
Tomorrow I head for Nashville and Kenny Rogers / Dolly Parton, hopefully after a nights snore free sleep. I am about to go to bed now but I have an alarm set for 3:00AM to go and knock on Alistair's door / window to see how he likes it.
Something about
TWITTER here.
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