Oh, man. It's been forever since I've written. As usual, I have a great excuse - May is a ridiculously busy month for me and general, and THIS May was my Oldest's 30th birthday, and she wanted to go to New Orleans with the family to celebrate it, and how the hell does any sane person say no to that? Yeah, I don't know either.
So, anyway, the whole first part of the month, I went crazy trying (and failing) to get everything planted in the garden before we left for New Orleans, then we went on the amazing trip, and then the last week I've been recovering, and STILL trying to get everything planted in the garden. So, now I am finally getting around to writing in the blog. I will start with the first day of The Oldest's 30th birthday trip.
We left Iowa City at 5:30 in the morning on Thursday, May 12th. We stopped in Cape Girardeau, Missouri for lunch, and then wandered down to the Mississippi River, where they had cool murals. We skipped rocks for a few minutes before we got back in the car to drive to Memphis, Tennessee, where I had never been before.
I know a lot of people like to go to Graceland when they visit Memphis, but we only had an afternoon, and we were WAY more into seeing the Civil Rights Museum. If you've never been there, I highly recommend it. It is powerful and heartbreaking and so well done. It is housed in the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr was shot.
It covers the history of Black oppression in the United States, beginning with the first slaves who were stolen from their homelands and forced to live in violence and bondage here in the U S of A. It then talks about Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Everything is so haunting and terrifying during slavery, and then when they get to the parts with the KKK.Why are people so messed up?
The museum then talks about Martin Luther King's role, and how he was murdered at that very hotel.
The second part of the museum is across the street. It's the boarding house where the killer shot and killed Martin Luther King from a bathroom window. That part of the museum mostly dealt with the aftermath of MLK's murder and the conspiracy around his killer or killers. We were all very quiet at the end of our museum tour. There was so much to reflect on. A good museum will do that to you.
After we were done at the Civil Rights Museum, we went to our airbnb and tried to figure out where to eat. We are a family of women who get very HANGRY, so finding food is extremely important for us...And especially for poor John, who has to deal with us.
I found a BBQ place that looked amazing and had chicken and seafood, but when we got there, it was in a pretty depressed area of town. I figured that's usually where the best BBQ is, right? We entered the joint, and there was one guy behind the counter and a bunch of his friends hanging out in front of the counter. They were all very nice, and the guy behind the counter said, "Sorry, but we're out of a lot of our BBQ". Then the menu posted had a lot of stuff crossed off, so we decided to eat somewhere else. I'm sure after we left they were all wondering how the hell these Wypipo ended up in that neighborhood.
We headed to Beale Street, and BB King's place had a $10 cover charge with only the shortest little wait for a table. We were all in.
We had an amazing meal and fun drinks. Two different bands played while we were there, and they were both really good. Although, if I can go a while without hearing "Tennessee Whiskey", that would be more than fine.
, After we ate, we wandered around Beale Street for a while. It was pretty early on a Thursday night, so not much was happening. The Youngest wanted to check out the Coyote Ugly bar, but it was almost empty. The poor woman paid to dance on the bar looked almost as bored as I was.
We finally had enough and went back to our AirBnB. The Oldest had to go back out and pick up her boyfriend from the air port, but not before she got to tease her sister. Our place only had two bedrooms, so I figured The Youngest would sleep on the couch, but she found an air mattress in a GIGANTIC closet and decided to sleep there. Poor little Harriet Potter, forced to sleep in a cupboard under the staircase...
We all went to bed pretty early, so we could get up as early as possible and head to New Orleans on Friday the 13th. What could go wrong?
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