Route 96

When the excitement of standing in an sweltering parking lot looking at a big featureless triangle began to pale, we shuffled off towards Beale Street, helpfully designated by the Tennessee State Legislature as the Official Home of the Blues. En route we passed a black Baptist church that was having some kind of outdoor gospel [...]

Memphis’ other star attraction is the Great Pyramid of Memphis–a mammoth pyramidal -shaped object in the city’s downtown core. I guess the idea of the Great Pyramid was to link Memphis on the Mississippi with Memphis on the Nile, ancient capital of Pharaonic Egypt. Memphis on a sweltering Sunday afternoon did a passable impersonation of [...]

Elvissian Artifacts and Relics All these items were available at the Elvis gift stores across the street from Graceland. If you wanted the really awful stuff, like vials of his sweat or X-rays of his sinuses (I’m serious) you had to go to the unauthorized dealers downtown. 01-13 Elvis Records (Duh.) 14-21 Elvis Silverware and [...]

Of course we went to Graceland. I sang a medley of Elvis favorites (also at maximum volume) to get Petey and the still hung-over Derek in the mood, and we stopped on Elvis Presley Boulevard for a kingly brunch of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, and a small side order of lard. By the [...]

And when there was no meat, we ate fowl. And when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad. And when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand. You ate sand? We ate sand. Between the beers and the smokes and the (eek) crawfish quesadillas, Derek let himself in for a rough night [...]

There’s no really nice way to say this, but here goes: Boy, there sure are a lot of fat people in this country! I don’t think there was a woman in Lefty’s who didn’t weigh at least two of us put together, and a couple of the fellas could have given Brown Jenkin a run [...]

Brown Jenkin rolled into Nashville just as the sun was going down. Saturday night in the shiny silver buckle of the Bible Belt! We paid too much for a motel on the outskirts of town, and then piled back into Jenkin to cruise the strip of Music City, USA. (It would take us a few [...]

“I don’t think you comprehend the full import of that statement,” I said, slurring my words slightly. “All. You. Can. Eat. Catfish.” I can’t remember which of the two yuksters returned with the inevitable, “I got all the catfish you can eat right here.”