2014XC: Day 34, July 15 – West Memphis, Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee

Beautiful morning – blue sky with a few clouds, below normal temp (which meant perfect…) and breakfast beside the river!

We were only about 15 minutes from Memphis so that was our plan for today. We did want to check out Graceland too but we found out from our “rv neighbor” that the admission tickets for adults to Graceland were $77.00 each. I know Elvis was really something, but that was a little much. So we just drove to the city of Memphis to check out Mud Island and it’s museum. We were hoping that the museum had lots of info about the Mississippi River and it’s history, including the barges. It was so cool to watch them go by the river from our campsite, and were amazed at how many barges the tow boats would be pushing sometimes. Well, the Mud River Island Museum gave us all that and more – whoever came up with this gets an “A+++” for creativity! Along the outside of the museum complex, they had a scale-model of the Mississippi River, from Missouri to New Orleans with all it’s twists and turns and tributaries and floodplains, etc., called a “River Walk”. It was amazing!

We toured the museum and it had a lot of good stuff not only above the River but also the history of Memphis, including the music…

We rode the monorail over to the city and walked around a bit. We went to the famous “Beale Street” to get something to eat. There were lots of places – Hard Rock Cafe and B.B. Kings to name a few, but we chose “Pig on Beale” for some BBQ pork. The food was good, but we wished we had chose a different place. We walked back up Main Street to the monorail and back to the museum and the RiverWalk. We walked the rest of the it to the end, and then back to the parking lot…