Memphis

BLUES CITY CAFE

After a three and a half hour drive from Nashville, our bodies were telling us that we needed food, hearty food, and quickly. Memphis answered with a half rack of ribs, fried catfish, french fries, cole slaw, baked beans, Texas toast, and chicken fingers with barbecue sauce. And then, that city decided to show off by giving us the whole meal, including our two sixteen-ounce beers, for around $30.

It was called the “Best Meal on Beale,” and I’d be scared if it wasn’t, because honestly, find food any better than this and I’d refuse to get in the car to Oklahoma City. We're talking about barbecue sauce so good I was dipping my fingers into it by the end. The fries were just a vehicle for the sauce. We're talking ribs that fall off the bone so easily a day-old baby could separate the meat from the bone with it’s chubby, newborn fingers. Really, the perfection of that barbecue made knives in general seem obsolete…

[Visit the Blues City Café at the corner of 2nd Street and Beale]

BEALE STREET

It was Elvis Week in Memphis, uh huh. This is a statue of the King on Beale Street. Ahh, Beale Street. That's a fun place. Only a 10 to 15 minute walk from our hotel (the Comfort Inn on Front Street, which I recommend) depending on whether we wanted to walk through town or along the Mississippi River.

The $5, 32 oz. beers on Beale! Marc was psyched. 

GIBSON GUITAR FACTORY TOUR

Gibson: American Made, World Played. The factory in Memphis is the third Gibson factory, the first being in Bozeman, Montana (acoustic guitars) and the second in Nashville (electric guitars, including the famous Les Paul model, and custom-made guitars). For $10, you can take a 45 minutes guided tour of the factory in Memphis, which was specifically designed to accommodate tours. We donned the mandatory safety goggles and entered the factory. 

Walking between the yellow lines on a sawdust-covered factory floor, we saw men sanding wooden guitar parts by hand, airbrush painters, wiring experts, and the sound check station. We saw Gibson guitars in every stage of assembly, which was especially interesting for the guitar-player and aspiring guitar-builder among us (Marc). I was just as fascinated, even though I am simply a music lover. 

After a great couple of days in Memphis, it was finally time to make a big push westward. In one day, we blew through Arkansas and the majority of Oklahoma. In Clinton we rested for the night before making the final leg of our journey, past mounds of rust red soil in east Oklahoma, through the northern handle of Texas and the northwest corner of New Mexico, before arriving in Colorado Springs on Day 5.

I'll leave you with a song by Fleet Foxes, a small part of our road trip playlist. 

"... to the Blue Ridge Mountains, over near Tennessee..."