The Hamster and the Highway

It’s not every day that I drive 600 miles through five states. I did just that on Sunday though.

On the last full day of our trip (and Sam’s last day as a 10-year-old), the plan was to use the Blue Ridge Parkway to make our way from Asheville, North Carolina to northern Virgina. The parkway, which is maintained by the National Parks Service, winds 479 miles along the Blue Ridge Mountains from the Shenandoah Valley in northern Virginia down to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s far from the most direct route but it’s known as one of the most scenic drives in the country.

We got on the parkway pretty close to its North Carolina terminus and stayed on for about 200 miles until we crossed the border into Virginia. Unfortunately, rain has been the default setting for the weather for most of our trip and today was no different. The clouds were so thick that they obscured the picturesque mountain views we had heard so much about. We still managed to sneak a peek through the clouds here and there, though.

Much more troubling was the fact that, as we gained altitude, those clouds enveloped the road itself. Forget seeing mountain vistas, I couldn’t see more than 30 feet in front of me!

Eventually we made our way to Mt. Mitchell, the tallest peak east of the Rockies. I know this is not the most impressive distinction in the mountain world, and at 6,684 feet Mitchell is barely even a mountain. Last year we were about that high up on Mt. Rainier and we didn’t even get halfway to the summit! Still, whether you’re in the schoolyard or in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there’s something fun about standing on top of the tallest thing around.

We still had lots of ground to cover but we still stopped off at various points to hike to waterfalls, enjoy the views at various overlooks, have a picnic lunch, and generally make sure to stop and smell the flowers–sometimes literally.

After a few hours we crossed into Virginia and decided to abandon the Blue Ridge Parkway for the much faster and more direct I-81.

[Side note: The stark contrast in both physical attractiveness and traveling effectiveness got me thinking about President Eisenhower. His terms in office predate me, so I can’t really speak with any authority on his political prowess. But is there any post-WWII president who’s had a more lasting positive effect on the country domestically? Our interstate highway system, implemented under Ike, is not beautiful but it is one of the most important parts of our national infrastructure. Trips like the ones Sam and I have taken–like the ones that millions of American families take every year–would simply not be possible without the interstates. And their importance to manufacturing and commerce in this country cannot be overstated. There’s barely an industry that isn’t helped by the ease of interstate travel. Nobody likes paying taxes or seeing the government spend lots of money, but when it’s well spent on useful infrastructure improvements the whole country benefits for generations to come. People complain about how ugly and boring the interstates tend to be, and they’re not wrong. But when you need to get from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in one day, as the Hamster and I did today, suddenly those ugly highways look pretty great.]

I wanted to make our last dinner of the trip special, so instead of our usual routine of grilling burgers or hot dogs or chicken at a highway rest stop, we grilled steaks … at a highway rest stop. It was good that we were well-nourished, because by this point I had spent most of the day behind the wheel and still had another 3+ hours of driving ahead of me.

Sam wanted to stay up until midnight so he’d be awake when his birthday started and I agreed, partly to make him happy and partly to allow us to get us closer to Gettysburg, which will be our last stop of the trip Tuesday. Sure enough, by 11 pm we were in southern Pennsylvania and I had enough time to get Sam showered and tucked into bed just in time to kiss him goodnight and wish him happy birthday at midnight. The Blue Ridge Parkway may have been the most conventionally beautiful thing we saw today, but we also saw beauty in some unexpected places.

This morning I woke up in North Carolina with my 10-year-old son, and tonight I’m going to sleep in Pennsylvania with an 11-year-old. Tomorrow night we’ll sleep in our beds back home in New York. It’s not easy to sum up three weeks of driving and sightseeing and bonding and arguing and adventuring, but here goes. In a weird way, this trip has been a lot like Michael Phelps’s performance in London: it didn’t have quite the same magic as last time (when just about everything worked out perfectly), and it was even a struggle at times, but there were still flashes of brilliance that showed just what can be accomplished with a little drive.

Americans love superlatives. We use lots of words that end in -est and we want everything we do and see and own and hear about to be described as the somethingest. It’s natural, then, that -ests have been a big part of this road trip, even when they’re a bit obscure: the oldest minor-league ballpark, the world’s steepest incline, the highest mountain east of the Rockies. On Friday we took the extremes to an extreme by visiting Biltmore Estate, the country’s biggest private home.

This time, however, “biggest” seems like a significant understatement.

In American history, it doesn’t get anymore -est than the Vanderbilts, and it was George Vanderbilt (grandson of Cornelius) who lived here. According to our audiotour, he imagined the place as a country house but started thinking bigger. The estate encompasses 125,000 acres. If you’re like me, you’re not good at picturing how big an acre is, so let me help: after we entered the estate, we drove about a quarter-mile to the ticket building. From there we drove three miles to the parking lot. Then we walked about eight minutes from the parking lot to the house itself. After touring the house, we drove another five miles to the part of the estate where the farm and winery are. Let me put it another way: the grounds were designed by famed Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmstead. You could fit 72 Central Parks inside the Biltmore grounds.

The house itself, well, the photo above doesn’t do it justice, but nobody’s allowed to take pictures inside. Here’s how the Biltmore website describes it: “4 acres of floor space, 250 rooms, 34 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, and 65 fireplaces. The basement alone houses a swimming pool, gymnasium and changing rooms, bowling alley, servants’ quarters, kitchens, and more.” And this was in 1895, when even one indoor bathroom was considered extremely schmancy.

The house was so big that even the servants had servants. No, seriously, there was actually a kitchenmaid whose job was to serve meals to the full-time staff of 30 before the staff would then go serve the Vanderbilts.

But it wasn’t just big, it was beautiful to an extreme. Sam, who still frequently uses his shirt as a napkin, described it as “elegant.” It’s like the anti-Graceland; I wish Elvis had seen this place before he started decorating. Sam and I couldn’t decide which part of the house we loved more. Maybe it was the main dining room, with its seven-story ceiling, its three massive fireplaces, its massive pipe organ, and its seating for 43. Maybe the two-story library, with its 20,000+ plus books, its incredible spiral staircase up to the second level, its secret door to another part of the house, and its chess set and game table that had been owned by Napoleon. Maybe the grand staircase, four stories of cantilevered limestone slabs holding each other in place as they wrap around chandelier after chandelier, surrounded by windows showing off the breathtaking estate. In fact, the house was so big that even the staircase had its own staircase. No, seriously, built into the stone walls at three levels of the grand staircase were wooden doors that led to a narrow outdoor staircase terrace that wrapped around the outside of the indoor staircase.

Just walking through the 44 rooms we were allowed to see was exhausting, so we decided to drive through the gardens instead of walking. We did get out of the car, though, to wander around the bass pond and enjoy its waterfall and boathouse.

After about 10 minutes of driving we finally made it to the winery, where we couldn’t participate in the free tastings but we did get to stomp some grapes in a big vat. It felt squishy and slimy and very slippery, and suddenly that famous episode of I Love Lucy seemed a lot more realistic.

When we left, it took another 10 minutes just to drive out of the estate. By this time it was after 4:30 pm, and we still had more than three hours until shabbos–plenty of time for another activity if we wanted to squeeze one in. But we knew that somehow nothing would compare to George Vanderbilt’s extraordinary house. Sure, there are other things to do in Asheville, North Carolina, but none of them are the biggest.

I was pretty down by the time we checked into our hotel Wednesday night, but Thursday turned me right round baby right round like a record baby right round round round.

The entirety of today was spent in Great Smoky Mountains (GSM) National Park, supposedly the most visited National Park. Well, not quite the entire day: first we spent a very entertaining half-hour or so driving through the hillbilly tourist towns of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I have never seen more dinner theater options in one place, and every one of them was hillbilly themed: Dueling Lumberjacks, Hatfield & McCoy, Dolly Parton’s Dixie Wonderland, and on and on. The restaurants and shops were all hillbilly themed, too. I spent much of my childhood watching The Dukes of Hazzard, so this was by far my favorite:

Yes, that’s the original TV Cooter in the picture on the side of the building.

Once we were past all the fake (and real) hillbilly stuff and safely in the park, we stopped at the Sugarland Visitor Center to pick up maps. While we were there I mentioned my plan of attack for the day to a Park Ranger and asked him if it was realistic. He laughed and shook his head. Then he suggested a completely different plan, I suggested a few modifications, and we came to an agreement.

We headed west to Cades Cove, one of the park’s very few open areas, in hopes of seeing some elk or bears or at least some wild turkeys. Nothing. At one point we got stuck in a ton of traffic because there was a mama black bear and three cubs wandering around, but by the time we got up to it they were so far away that I barely made out the head of one of the cubs before they all disappeared into the tall grass. Big disappointment. After practically tripping over herds of buffalo, elk, deer, and prairie dogs everywhere we turned in Yellowstone last year, we expected to see lots of animals here, too. The best we did at Cades Cove was a cool butterfly.

We did, however, make a few stops before we got to Cades Cove to check out waterfalls. (We love waterfalls!) Most of the really impressive waterfalls at GSM require multi-mile hikes, which we weren’t going to do. But the elegant if not humongous Laurel Falls required a mere 1.3 mile hike, which we decided to take, not realizing that all 1.3 miles were uphill. At least there was a pretty good reward waiting for us at the top:

And there to entertain us on the long walk was this rather dire warning about the consequences of letting your kids run wild:

In other words, either watch your children or watch your children die! Enjoy the waterfall!

Anyway, once we were done with Cades Cove it was time to slay a dragon. Tail of the Dragon is a particularly windy section of U.S. Highway 129 on the Tennessee-North Carolina border and is widely considered one of the best drives in the world. This reputation is due to a mix of stunning mountain scenery and a completely ludicrous 318 curves packed into just 11 miles. Tail of the Dragon also happens to be on the outskirts of GSM, and thus has been in my plans for months. The only problem was how to get there. Looking at the park map, I noticed a one-way road that went southwest from Cades Cove and would dump us out directly onto Tail of the Dragon. The Park Ranger at that first visitor’s center recommended a different route, saying that the one-way road is very slow. I decided to take the one-way road anyway, which seemed like a great idea until we came upon a rather interesting sign that seemed to indicate that the Ranger had severely understated his case.

Undeterred (and yet terrified), we held our breath and drove in. The road was barely paved and gravelly with huge ruts here and there, constant turns, and streams occasionally flowing over the road. The road, which was barely wide enough for our car, was flanked closely on both sides by tall trees that blocked out all sunlight except for momentary gaps when the sun was able to suddenly sneak through and blind us. The strobe lighting had our pupils getting larger and smaller and larger and smaller so quickly that we may as well have been cartoon dogs staring at a gorgeous woman. There were also several parts when the trees on one side would disappear and we’d suddenly be on the edge of a cliff with absolutely no room for error. For eight miles, this lasted. I don’t know what the speed limit was but it doesn’t really matter because the preposterous conditions meant we couldn’t go faster than 10-15 mph for most of the way. Between the near-constant tight turns, the steep hills and drops, the ruts, and the loose gravel, I felt the tires slipping on several occasions and cursed our lack of four-wheel drive. And have I mentioned the fallen tree trunks and branches that occasionally stuck out into our path with no warning?

Needless to say, Parson Branch Road is FREAKIN’ AWESOME!

And when it was finally over, our reward was 11 miles of one of the windiest roads in the world. The turns were so constant that driving the Tail of the Dragon felt very much like a slalom, especially as we watched countless motorcycles actually slalom through it, leaning left and right and left and right. Except, of course, when the road turned almost completely around on itself, like it did at this curve:

I must say that after spending the past two weeks driving more than 3,000 miles for the purpose of getting to various places, and especially after spending all afternoon and evening Wednesday driving to go nowhere, it was especially fulfilling to be able to truly enjoy the act of driving.

We then circled back into the park and on to Clingman’s Dome, an observation deck on top of the tallest peak in the park, 6643 feet above sea level. We got there with about an hour of daylight left and enjoyed the extraordinary views. “It looks like the picture on the front of a water bottle,” Sam noted as we looked out onto the Smoky Mountains, and I had to agree.

I’d buy that water.

In addition to the long-distance views on the summit there was plenty of close-up eye candy as well:

As the sun set we headed southeast to exit the park on the North Carolina side. We’d had quite an adventure, but Sam was still a little upset that we hadn’t seen any wildlife besides the butterflies. And then, just before the park exit, there it was: a gang of elk enjoying a picnic dinner in the dusk.

It was a perfect end to what turned out to be a damn near perfect day.

Considering the ups and downs of the past couple of days, it seems like that drive through Tail of the Dragon is a microcosm of our entire trip: full of twists and turns and rather worrisome at times but ultimately exciting and fun and a great experience we won’t soon forget.

Well, that sucked.

Today started out so promisingly. We woke up early, got packed up and out of our motel in record time, and made it to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky in time to get onto exactly the tour we wanted. And the tour was great. It’s a dry cave, which means there are few interesting formations or colors, but the cave is truly collosal (it’s the longest in the world, but many of the rooms are also mindblowingly huge in all dimensions). As we walked and gawked, the immense scale of the cave had a couple of lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” kept echoing in my head:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Aside from its size there were some particularly fun parts of the tour, like this really old graffiti:

Ironically, Sam’s favorite part of the biggest cave in the world were it’s smallest parts, such as a long passage so narrow that it earned a descriptive nickname:

Fat Man’s Misery was immediately followed by a section called Tall Man’s Agony because of ceiling so low that even the 4’10” Hamster had to crouch, which he enjoyed even more. And at the very end of the tour, our Ranger revealed that he is a direct descendant of the two teenage slaves who were first sent in to explore and map the cave in the 1700s, which was an interesting twist and certainly helped explain his reverence for the cave and its history. The whole experience was pretty great.

The plan for the rest of the day was a 4+ hour drive ending at Lost Sea Adventure, a cavern in Sweetwater, Tennessee with the largest underground lake in the world. First, however, we needed an oil change so we stopped in at a Wal-Mart, where we dropped off the car and then ate lunch and did a little shopping while the oil and filters were being changed, and we were right back on the road.

That road was not an interstate. We drove exclusively on winding, hilly, country roads through rural Kentucky and Tennessee, which was fun for a while but after more than a hundred miles of hills and turns we were pretty desperate for a major highway. When we finally got to one it was about 4:45 pm, so I called Lost Sea to find out when their last tour leaves. The good news was that the last tour doesn’t leave until 6:30. The bad news is that we were still a little more than an hour away, which would have been fine except that Sweetwater, Tennessee is in the Eastern time zone, and we were still in Central Time. A few minutes later 5:05 became 6:05, and there was no way we’d make it to the Lost Sea.

We also missed out on one of our destinations yesterday, a museum of wacky cars in Nashville that we were both excited for but turned out to be closed on Tuesdays. And there was that cool park in Memphis that was closed Monday. And tomorrow we had been planning to spend the day at Dollywood but starting this week Dollywood is closed every Tuesday and Thursday. I never heard of an amusement park being closed on Thursdays, but that just seems to be the way our luck is going lately. Clearly my meticulous planning is on the fritz.

On top of all this, I’ve apparently contracted some sort of extremely itchy rash, and being 1,000 miles or so from my doctor means I’m reliant entirely on hydrocortizone, which offers little relief and I’ve been physically uncomfortable all day with no end in sight. I can suffer through the itching if it means Hamster and I can do cool stuff like take underground boat rides, but it’s a lot less tolerable if we’re just spending all day in the car. By the time we check into tonight’s random motel I was in a pretty pissy mood and felt like the whole trip is starting to fall apart.

Sam, however, thinks we had a great day. He absolutely loved Mammoth Cave, he spent half the car ride watching The Lorax again in the car, and he’s amazed at how nice our motel is. (So am I: an indoor pool and an outdoor pool, a decent gym, a room that doesn’t smell musty, and a very impressive free breakfast, all for only $55!) We even had a nice dinner (leftover roast chicken reinvented as chunky soup) in our motel room and managed to end the day on a positive note. I’m just really hoping that tomorrow goes better.

One thing I’ve learned about traveling is that no matter how much research you do online, locals often know better. So when there’s any question about what we’ll be doing in a particular city, I come up with a plan but then sometimes I’ll ask the person behind the check-in counter at our hotel for a recommendation, just to make sure there’s nothing incredible that I’ve missed. Usually this is a waste of time and has yielded almost no useful results but it usually makes me feel better about the comprehensiveness of my research and planning. In Nashville, however, I finally hit the jackpot.

For starters, our hotel room was free thanks to all the rewards points I’ve been racking up. That was a nice welcome to the city, and it got better when we got there and it turned out to be a much nicer Comfort Inn than most of the ones in which we’ve stayed. And when I asked the check-in guy for a recommendation, he didn’t hesitate to point me enthusiastically to Ryman Auditorium. I had never heard of it until he mentioned it, but it was the home of the Grand Ole Opry for 30 years before it moved to its current home, the Grand Ole Opry House. Ryman is still an active concert hall and even hosts the Opry for a couple of months each winter when the Opry House is being used by the Rockettes. And it’s right smack in the middle of downtown–from the corner we could see the football stadium in one direction, the hockey arena in another, and bars and restaurants all over the place.

If I can digress for a minute, Nashville has a great downtown area. It’s well-laid out and easy enough to navigate, it’s clean, there’s public transportation and not-too-terribly priced parking lots, and the midday traffic is bad enough to let me know I’m in a real city but not so bad that I want to hurt somebody. It’s not too big to walk around but there’s still lots of variety, sometimes even on the same block. The eclectic mix of banks and government buildings and restaurants and churches and concert halls and sports arenas all jumbled together gives the neighborhood a vibe that’s kind of serious and kind of fun at the same time, which is great. I never really thought about it until today but Manhattan, where I’ve spent many a midday, is far more segmented: restaurants over here, offices over there, music clubs somewhere else, etc. Nashville’s mashup is kind of refreshing and unifying in comparison.

Anyway, before we headed downtown, we started the day at the historic Belle Meade Plantation, whose business used to be horse siring and whose horses sired dozens of Kentucky Derby winners. I didn’t know that going in–I was just happy that after screwing up the timing of our planned plantation visits in Charleston I was finally able to tour an authentic antebellum plantation. The grounds were impressive, the plantation house was absolutely stunning, and our tour guide was in full period costume.

Sam, however, was bored out of his mind. “The civil rights stuff was like an amusement park compared to this,” he said as we left.

Note to self: don’t take Sam on anymore plantation tours.

Our next stop was definitely the strangest of the day: a big, beautiful park a couple miles east of downtown Nashville that houses … wait for it … a full scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens.

There’s a plaque next to the entrance that explains that it was built in 1897 to celebrate Nashville’s 100th anniversary, but it does not explain how such a building celebrates such an event, or why the Parthenon was chosen as the building to replicate instead of, say, the Coliseum or the Sphinx or the Taj Mahal. Inside the replica Parthenon is a replica statue of Athena, just like the one that was once inside the real Parthenon, because when you’re replicating an ancient Greek building in the middle of a city famous as the birthplace of country music, you simply don’t cut corners.

Our next stop was Ryman Auditorium, and Sam and I both had a great time there. I was a little worried that he might not appreciate the history behind a show he’s never seen and a musical genre he doesn’t listen to, but he recognized a few of the names and I think most of all he really appreciated the backstage–and on stage–access we had during our tour.

The tour guide was not in period costume but she was lively and entertaining and told some cute stories about the backstage antics of some of the Opry regulars.

Our last activity in Nashville was yet another backstage tour, this time at the current home of the Opry. The order of our stops in Nashville was determined more by geography than anything else, but I’m glad it worked out as it did because it made a certain karmic sense to see the old home of the Opry before seeing the new home of the Opry, and it also gave the Hamster and me a better appreciation for what we were seeing. And once again, the best part was being on stage, especially because there was a show starting just a couple of hours after our tour ended so everything was already set up.

Unfortunately we’re not spending the night in Nashville (we’re already well up into Kentucky so that we can take a morning tour of the Mammoth Cave) so we couldn’t stay to see the show live, but we did listen to a bit of it in the car on WSM 650 AM, the same station that’s been broadcasting the Opry since it started in 1925. It was a nice way to take a little bit of Nashville with us even after we’d left.

As I was busy thinking about how grown up Sam is getting, he asked me if he could write today’s blog post. So, in his words, here are his thoughts on today’s events, and on the trip in general:

Just like we did last year, every day of this trip we buy a postcard from the most interesting place we go and send it to Abby at camp to keep her updated on our journey and make her feel like she’s part of it. This morning I pulled over next to a mailbox so we could mail yesterday’s postcard. Sam jumped out of the car to mail the card, and as he walked back he looked … older.

I guess when we’re at home I’m usually so busy trying to get him to do something, or to stop doing something, or to get dinner on the table or kids to wherever it is they need to go that I don’t often just look at them. And just as I was thinking about how grown up he’s getting, he did a silly little wiggle that showed me he’s still a little boy. The whole thing lasted just a second or two, but it made me realize that he’s starting to transition from little boy into–what comes after little boy? Preteen? Yeah, OK, preteen.

I don’t know what his teenage years will bring or how our relationship will change, but I know that I’m running out of time with my little boy. So today I gave in to him.

Normally while we’re on the road I try to avoid activities that we can do at home, like zoos or aquariums. The Memphis Zoo claims to have been voted best zoo in America, but I still hadn’t planned to go there until Sam saw billboards for it all over the place and started asking if we could go. He loves animals and thus loves zoos, and since we had some spare time I gave in to the little boy in him.

The zoo turned out to be just OK. I’m not sure who voted it best in America but I’m guessing they’ve never been to the Bronx Zoo or the San Diego Zoo or the Miami Zoo or the St. Louis Zoo, because all of those are clearly better zoos. But all Sam cares about is seeing animals, so he had a great time, and I had a great time watching him have a great time.

Plus they have pandas, and pandas are always worth a few bonus points when ranking zoos.

I had wanted to take a tour of the Gibson guitar factory before we left Memphis but Sam wasn’t interested, so again I gave in. In retrospect I think he would’ve enjoyed it and I probably should’ve insisted, but I’m running out of time with my little boy and I didn’t want to spend any of it arguing about a guitar factory. Instead we hit the supermarket to stock up because Memphis is the last place we’ll find kosher meat before we get home next week, and then we headed east.

Knowing we would arrive in Nashville too late to do anything interesting, we took our time on the way there, stopping off to buy some supplies and a copy of The Lorax on DVD, which Sam had been begging for and which I figured he could watch as we drive to pass the time.

We also took a detour to drive several miles down the Natchez Trace Parkway, a National Scenic Parkway that runs about 450 curvy miles from Natchez, MS to Nashville. We were only on the Natchez for maybe half an hour but we saw some incredible things. The first was a complete surprise: a flock of turkeys wandering along the side of the road.

The second I knew was coming thanks to a little research: the Natchez Trace Arches, a hunormous bridge built about 20 years ago to help the parkway cross a valley about 20 miles southwest of Nashville.

A few minutes later we found an empty parking area long the highway, and as the sun went down behind some trees we grilled dinner and enjoyed the quiet and the view. All day I’d been thinking about these moments with him, and how they’ll change in tone and in content but that I hope that trips like this one and the experiences we’ve shared will strengthen our bond to a point where it can survive his coming adolescence and adulthood. We didn’t do anything that exciting today but it might be my favorite day of the trip so far. As we sat and ate dinner I watched him, and I tried my best to savor the moment while I couldn’t help wondering what’s to come.

I should start by saying that the Hamster and I are not big Elvis fans. We both like a fair amount of his music, and I certainly appreciate his musical innovations and his vast influence generations of musicians of all genres. Neither of us, however, worships Elvis as a god or thinks he was superhuman in any way, and that is what differentiates us from most of the people who were at Graceland today.

Part of this is my fault: I unwittingly timed our visit rather poorly, as the 35th anniversary of Elvis’s death is this week and that event tends to bring far more lunatics than usual to what they clearly view (without exaggeration) as their Mecca.

Approximately one-third of the people at Graceland today were ordinary tourists like us. The rest were clearly trying to out-ugly each other by dressing head to toe in Elvis paraphernalia: Elvis T-shirts covered with Elvis vests, topped with Elvis hats that bore Elvis pins, accessorized with Elvis earrings and Elvis handbags, backpacks, and tote bags. Some eschewed the memorabilia and just went right ahead and dressed like ’70s Elvis:

By comparison, the mohawk kid in Chattanooga looks like he works on Wall Street. Graceland is like the Olympics of people-watching. I cannot say enough about how constantly amusing it was just to look around me. Sam had a similar reaction, and was clearly struggling with balancing his impulse to call my attention to particularly ridiculous freaks with his understanding that basic rules of public behavior prevented him from doing so. Occasionally he was so amazed by someone that he had to grab me and whisper despite the danger in doing so.

Meanwhile, none of these tacky wackos could even come close to touching the unbridled gaudiness that is Elvis himself. Thanks to the worshippers we had to wait an hour and a half just for the privilege of getting on the half-hour-long line to board a shuttle that would drive us all the way … across the street to the Graceland mansion, so we spent that time examining his private planes and his car collection. The gold sinks and faucets in the airplane bathrooms, the yellow leather seats on the smaller plane, and the purple Cadillac convertible gave us only a hint of the garish tackiness that was waiting for us inside the mansion. Yes, you read that correctly, I said yellow leather seats.

…the image is one thing and the human being is another…it’s very hard to live up to an image.

–Elvis Presley, 1972

This quote would make a whole lot of sense if it were said by just about any other celebrity. But I’ve been in Elvis’s house now. I’ve been in his private planes. I’ve seen the yellow leather furniture, I’ve seen the purple cars, I’ve seen the Bedazzled jumpsuits and the capes. I’ve seen the stained glass peacocks, the shag-carpeted walls, the bathroom sinks covered in gold leaf, and the mirrors on every conceivable surface. And I can say that the image and the human being were one and the same. It says a lot about a person when the room in his house known worldwide as the Jungle Room is only the third or fourth most ostentatiously decorated room in the house. It’s not that I don’t have the words to describe the never-ending spectacle, it’s just that my mouth is still so agape that I can’t physically form those words. I think the best thing for me to do at this point is to show you some of the most glaring examples.

I’m not sure what owning all these things says about a man, but I never want it said about me.

Still half-blinded from the Graceland decor, we traded Elvis Presley for Mark Twain and took a steamboat ride down the Mississippi River. We crossed the Mississippi on last year’s trip but it’s infinitely cooler to float down the Mississippi on the same kind of boat that was popular in Twain’s day.

It was a little touristy, sure, but short of finding work in the shipping industry it’s the best way to get on the country’s most storied river (and the fourth longest in the world). Plus it gave us an interesting perspective on the city.

On the left side of that photo is a huge stainless steel pyramid that was the Memphis Grizzlies’ home arena for a couple of years until they decided to move out. The Pyramid then spent some time hosting concerts and other big events, but it has been given new life recently when it was leased to … Bass Pro Shops. Yes, a former NBA arena and the most noticeable building in the Memphis skyline will soon be reopening as a sporting goods store.

Incidentally, the boat ride featured the mohawk kid’s newest rival: a kid with the logo of Elvis’s backup band freshly shaved into the back of his head:

See, there’s beauty all around you if you just know where to look.

By the time we were back on dry land it was after 4pm, but Elvis had not yet left the building. We took a brief tour of Sun Studio, where Elvis recorded his first song and the first record label of eventual music giants Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The recording studio hasn’t been touched since, and we got to stand where Elvis did–and sing into the same microphone he did–when he recorded his first single.

After Sun, our plan was to visit the five-block-long scale model of the Mississippi River on Mud Island, a long skinny island just a few yards from the Memphis riverfront. However, when we arrived at 5:20 pm we were told that the park was closed. I’m not sure what kind of public park closes two and a half hours before sunset but to make matters worse we were told that the park is closed on Mondays, so we won’t be able to see it tomorrow before we leave town, either.

Sam was pissed, but as long as we were right near the river I distracted him by suggesting that we hop on one of the nearby bridges and cross into Arkansas, just to say we did. We stopped for gas while we were there, because simply driving through part of a state doesn’t really count as having been there, but certainly purchasing something in that state counts. So now we’ve been to Arkansas. Sam counted up and has now been to 37 states. By the time I was his age I had been to maybe 5.

Sam’s happiness was short lived, though, because I told him we were going to the National Civil Rights Museum next. After Montgomery and Birmingham the Hamster is understandably suffering from a bit of civil rights fatigue. But the museum is housed in the same Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was killed, with the room he stayed in preserved as it was that evening, and I didn’t want to miss it. We came to a compromise: we’d go to the museum but we wouldn’t go inside–we’d just look at it from the street for a minute or two. I know this seems like a dumb activity but it was totally worthwhile.

Our original plan was to leave Memphis at about this time and spend the next two days in Nashville, but after doing a bit of research Saturday night I realized there’s much more to do in Memphis, so I flipped things and decided to spend another day in Memphis and less time in Nashville. The best part is that we didn’t have to pack up all our stuff and check out of our hotel early Sunday morning. Sleeping in the same place two nights in a row becomes very attractive when you go a whole week without doing it. So for dinner, instead of having to scour the state for a place to grill, we picked up takeout, brought it back to our hotel room, and ate as we watched the Closing Ceremonies and joked about redecorating our house with the wallpaper in Graceland’s billiard room.

Southern hospitality is no joke. Just about everybody we’ve encountered on this trip has been super friendly and helpful to the point where I’m starting to feel indebted. Birmingham, though, seemed to take it up a notch. I’ve already mentioned the kind lady at the Civil Rights Institute who pointed us, unsolicited, to the fantastic McWane Science Center, and the kind lady at McWane who let us in for free. What I haven’t mentioned yet is the kosher food fiasco and how it got resolved.

We spent shabbos in Memphis, but the plan was to get to Memphis pretty late on Friday afternoon, so I didn’t expect the kosher places to be open when we arrived. That meant we’d have to pick up food for shabbos in Birmingham, which the Interwebs says has an Israeli restaurant and a takeout place called Marie’s Sweet Cakes with prepared foods of all kinds. Just to be sure, while we were on the road from Montgomery to Birmingham Thursday I called the Israeli place. No answer. So I called the takeout place and asked Marie when she’d be open on Friday. She stammered before explaining that she’s not a storefront but a caterer who only cooks to order and was completely booked already for any weekend orders. She also explained that the Israeli restaurant closed down recently. Instead of ending the conversation there, she asked my circumstances so she could figure out a way to help. She said she could make me challah, and that a friend of hers in Memphis would pick up food for me there Friday morning and hold it for me until I got into town. I was blown away and didn’t feel comfortable asking strangers in another state go grocery shopping for me but Marie insisted and I didn’t have much other choice.

An hour later we arrived in Birmingham at Vulcan Park. While Sam looked around I made a few calls. As it turned out, a supermarket with a robust kosher counter in Memphis was going to be open longer than I thought and we’d be able to make it there Friday before they closed. I called Marie back to let her know she could tell her Memphis friend to stand down. Before she hung up she gave me directions to Memphis.

Friday morning our first stop was to pick up challah from Marie at the Chabad Center where she does her cooking. She wasn’t there, but the chef who was insisted on making us wait a couple of minutes so he could give us challahs that he was about to pull from the oven. (OMFG our car smelled incredible the whole drive to Memphis!) While we waited I told him everything that had happened, and he pulled a container of soup from the freezer and insisted on giving that to us, too.

Up next was the Birmingham Barons. The team is on the road all week, but the ballpark is one of the oldest in the country so I was hoping we could take a tour. When I called to ask the guy I spoke to said they don’t do tours but we could just come in and look around if we wanted. So we did. One employee let us in, led us around wherever we wanted to go, told us about the new stadium opening next year, and answered our questions. Another employee opened up the team store just for us and, after I asked the price of a mini helmet that turned out to be just for display, managed to find a second one and gave it to me for free.

Maybe because of their similar roles in the civil rights era or maybe just because I’m an idiot, I was expecting Birmingham and Montgomery to be pretty similar cities. I was very happy to be wrong. Birmingham is not only much bigger but also much nicer to look at and much more fun, and we were sad to leave.

Meanwhile when we got to Memphis (after a brief stop in Tupelo, Mississippi to visit the house where Elvis was born), we headed straight for the kosher supermarket counter. Another shopper pegged us for out-of-towners and showed us around the kosher stuff. Pretty soon we were well stocked for shabbos and at the checkout lane, but not before I found the greatest prize of all: a copy of Friday’s New York Times!

Shabbos was a bit of an adventure. Our hotel room, while nicer than any other on this trip, is laid out in such a way that left leaving strategically placed lights on impossible, leaving us largely in the dark. Also, we discovered Saturday morning that the stairs down to the first floor lead out of the building, and the only way to get back in is either with our electronic key or through the electronic sliding front door. So we were stuck in our mostly dark for much of the day. After lunch we were getting cabin fever and decided to head out to the outdoor pool and just hope for the best in terms of getting back inside when we were done.

For once the weather was fantastic: sunny and warm with little humidity. Helped in part by the long drive from Birmingham to Tupelo and Memphis, my body finally figured out on Friday that I haven’t been to the gym for two weeks and I haven’t been treating it very well, and it started falling apart. Sitting poolside for a few hours with a good book helped quite a bit. Meanwhile there’s a big family reunion staying at our hotel this weekend and a bunch of the reunion kids were in the pool with Sam. Lucky for him there was an odd number of them, so they quickly included him in their games and after a trying morning the afternoon turned out to be great for both of us. Even better, we didn’t have to wait long before someone came along to let us back inside.

The past few days have had their challenges but worked out pretty well, thanks in large part to some friendly, giving people we’ll never be able to adequately thank. So if you’re ever in Birmingham and in need of something to eat, call Marie. Just make sure to call her a couple of days in advance.