Miles on Sunday: 227

Miles today: 75 (by car, and another 40 or so by public transport)

Miles to date: 2320

Where were we Sunday morning? Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee

Where were we Sunday night? Ste. Genevieve, 50 miles south of St. Louis, Missouri

Where are we now? Drury’s Inn Hotel, St Louis Airport

Fun fact: Visitors to Elvis’s Memphis home, Graceland, often remark on how much smaller the house is than they had expected it to be. But then they probably had in mind how the house looked on TV in the mid-1970s, when it was carrying an extra 100 lbs and was prone to wearing rather unflattering white spandex pantsuits.

Sunday’s Events: OK, so we got up early, and travelled two blocks west and six blocks south, down Elvis Presley Boulevard, to the Graceland car park. This cost us our last six bucks of cash. We then picked up our tickets for the 10.38 a.m. tour and joined the assembled masses. Talk about pilgrimages – we could have been at Lourdes. Every crazy in the whole of America was there, particularly since this was ‘Elvis Week’, a bit like Holy Week, leading up to his death on the 16th. For such a Protestant country, this was a big idolatrous binge, and you could be forgiven for thinking that Elvis had died for your sins! Since we were on holy ground, everyone felt free to talk to us – mainly to learn how many times we had been to Graceland before, and whether we had travelled from England especially for Elvis Week. Sadly, we were a great disappointment to them, we feel, except we made one guy who looked like Elvis very happy with our photo request (see above).

So, we queued for an hour to get into a shuttle bus (electric powered, like a milk float), to travel across the road, to go through those musical note motif gates, and to be dropped at the front door. It was rammed. It was more rammed than the cave at Bethlehem on Christmas Eve! All you could do was shuffle round just behind the person in front of you, and wait for the next photo opportunity. So we shuffled into the sitting room, the dining room, the kitchen, the basement bar and games room, the Jungle Room. All the rooms in the house retained their original 70s décor, including the famous three TVs, and the guns and sheriff’s badges collections. They wouldn’t let anyone upstairs (which is very worrying after you’ve seen downstairs). However, we did get to see Vernon’s office and to walk through all the outhouses containing all his gold records (quite a few) and all his outfits (also quite a few). Don’t worry, Fiona, we have as many photos as we could take.

This took about two hours, and by then, we had had enough, especially Vikki who suddenly felt like an atheist at a Billy Graham rally. Malcolm, however, is convinced that touching Elvis’s wall to ceiling shag pile has cured his verucca, and any other diseases he didn’t even know he had.

Anyway, from there, four hours hard driving across the Mississippi (which we couldn’t see from the bridge), across into Arkansas (flat), turn right, and up the I-55 into Missouri. We think this means we have now left the south behind us. Last night, we stopped in Sainte Genevieve, an historic French settlement by the banks of the Mississippi. We decided that we couldn’t manage to go a further 100 miles beyond St Louis in order to see Hannibal (hometown of Mark Twain and setting for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn) so we would do Ste Genevieve instead. This turned out to be a good choice, probably one of the few unspoilt small towns left on the Mississippi, even if we did have to do B&B (as a one-nite-only break from budget motels) and make conversation with the landlady, and mind the antiques. What’s more, their wireless internet wouldn’t talk to our computer, so we couldn’t post our Elvis blog entry!

Monday’s events: Up early, again, and along the levee and across the railroad tracks to a little ferry across the Mississippi. This was the business, so we both dipped our fingers or toes in and made a wish.

From there, hammered it up I-55 to St Louis and round the suburban motorways to the airport, where we dropped off the bags at the hotel and the car at the car rental place. (In that order – smart, eh?) We then got the shuttle bus to the airport, the mass transit (more a railway than an underground) into St Louis waterfront, where we got to see the famous St Louis Arch (The gateway to the West). Malcolm was disappointed because he had thought that it was a McDonalds arch and couldn’t understand why it was silver not gold, and why there was only one of them. Seriously, though, it is both enormous and impressive.

St Louis is another American city trying to re-generate its downtown (which started dropping off after the Gold Rush of 1849) but it seems to have forgotten to install an ‘historic’ trolley bus system! We also managed to get in a ‘steamboat’ ride on the Mississippi. This was good but we were a little disappointed that the wooden blades on the back weren’t really powering the vessel. The Mississippi is a serious waterway, full of tiny tugs with 14,000 horsepower engines, pushing (not pulling) up to 12 gigantic barges upstream, against a current that makes the Thames look like a tiny backwater.

Anyway, we are now in our hotel room and happy hour starts in 10 minutes and, better still, we get three free drinks. We have to start early because we have to be up at 5.00 am tomorrow to check in at the airport at 5.30 for a 7.30 flight to Denver, from where we will hopefully tell you more. So, tara a bit!

Ted’s Photo Blog

A picture of me, Your Teddy Bear Ted, at Elvis’s pad. (Wearing me Elvis T-shirt; Ah-thank-you-very-much.)