Memphis is Egypt; Nashville is Athens

    I don't know why, but there's a pyramid here that is bigger than the one in Las Vegas, and there's a Parthenon in Nashville. The pyramid was actually a basketball arena, but has had a history that suggests to Memphians that it may have been cursed from the very beginning.

    Here are our hosts. Katie and Marcus, on the right side of the couch, don't actually live together; but Katie is hosting Andreas from Denmark, seated in the middle, and Marcus is hosting Deb and me.  You can see that Marcus and Katie are fond of each other. Marcus introduced Katie to CouchSurfing, and now they both host. 

    We had dinner together, and talked until late in the evening, when Katie took Andreas for a cultural experience - line-dancing at the Electric Cowboy. Andreas aspires to be a linguist, and is well on his way - he speaks Danish, English, French, and a little Swedish and Norwegian. Katie is a speech pathologist working for a travelling nursing company, while Marcus Wiggins is a professor of tuba at the university here in Memphis. Katie soon has to leave for Maryland for a three month stint. I think she and Marcus both feel that's quite unfortunate; they are clearly well-suited. 

    Marcus is from New Mexico: Roswell and the Las Cruces area that we passed through a week earlier. His great-grandfather's stepfather was Sheriff William Brady, who was killed in an ambush by Billy the Kid and four other "Regulators" in Lincoln.  It was this murder that Billy the Kid was tried for in Mesilla, and taken back to Lincoln to be hung, as I described in a previous blog posting.  There, he killed two guards, escaped, and was later killed in his turn by Pat Garrett.  Marcus didn't know all the details, not even the name of his ancestor, but he phoned his grandfather for us to get some info, and I researched the rest. 

    On Friday we ate lunch at Gus's Fried Chicken, which is a recipe that blows the Colonel's out of the water. After you've had it, you can't even look at a piece of KFC. The restaurant is a hole in the wall, but a favourite of the locals, who describe it as being "as addictive as crack". 

    Then we walked to the river, and then over to Main Street and down Beale Street, past the Orpheum and B.B.King's club, and the statue of Elvis ("the King").  We watched some "flippers" tumbling for tips down Beale Street, and listened to the blues coming out of bars into the street - and I'd played every tune I heard, at some point or another in my amateur band past. 

    We went up to the Duck Palace on top of the Peabody Hotel. There's a tradition at the Peabody: at 11 a.m. the Duckmaster herds his five ducks from the rooftop, down in the elevator, and out into the lobby on a red carpet to the fountain, where they enjoy the day until 5 p.m. and then march back into the elevator and back up to the rooftop. 

    In the evening we went to Corky's for the Memphis BBQ experience - ribs, this time - and finished the evening back at Marcus's, where we had a margarita and watched one of his doctoral tuba recitals on dvd, which was a rare treat, quite frankly. I don't know when I'd ever have such a high level tuba recital experience, otherwise; I certainly never had in my life prior to tonight. 

    Saturday: after another hellish experience trying to book a room in Nashville through Bookit.com (during which we actually got accepted by a CouchSurfing host but didn't realize it until too late!), we went to Mud Island, where we enjoyed a museum of the Mississippi - the history and culture from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. It was small and narrow in focus, of course, but a very good little museum. 

    Outside the museum we walked part of the mile long scale model of the Mississippi before riding back to town on the suspended monorail to have lunch with Marcus, before heading out on the highway to Nashville along the "Music Highway". 

    We stayed at a Howard Johnson's overnight. We'd planned to visit a couple of clubs, but we weren't motivated enough to fumble our way around in a strange downtown after dark for the sake of some C&W music. After four and a half months away, we're starting to feel a little like a horse headed home at the end of its day; I think that might have been part of our sudden paucity of adventurous spirit. We'll see some of Nashville tomorrow during the daylight, and then head to Cincinnati, where we've been invited to a nice Sunday turkey dinner. We'll probably be back in Toronto by Monday night. 

    All the Memphis and a few Nashville photos are here.

Next stop: Cincinnati, and the last leg of our trip back to Toronto