I heart Memphis

We pulled in to Memphis around lunchtime today and had lunch at A&R Bar-b-cue, which came highly recommended on roadfood.com. It did not disappoint.

After that, we headed for the downtown. Memphis has an attraction on mud island, right along the Mississippi River, which I'd heartily recommend. It's a river park with a huge--like 5 blocks long--scale model of the Mississippi, that you can walk and splash in, curated with as much as you'd want to know about all the headwaters and every little stretch. At the end there's a huge fountain, Lake Ponchartrain, full of splashing kids.

The park is accessible by monorail and there is also a museum of river history and an amphitheater with concerts.

I particularly liked the museum, despite the fact that it was obvious that the museum has not been updated since the early 1980s. My favorite was a "theater
of disasters," covering every eventuality from cholera to boiler explosions to the 1927 flood, all illustrated with contemporary woodcuts etc; i told Mike it was disaster porn. :) The museum covered every aspect of the Mississippi river and its people, from the Native Americans to the explorers to the shipping to the role of the area in the Civil War to the advent of the blues.

Because it was sunny today but is supposed to rain tomorrow, Graceland got put off until the morning. We did drive all the way over here from Cookesville listening to relevant XM radio channels, however. There is of course a blues channel (74), but did you know there is an all-Elvis, all the time channel (20)? It's better than it sounds.