I attended a funeral several weeks ago for a relative by marriage. On the few occasions where we had interacted at holiday parties and other big family events, I found him generally likeable. He was soft-spoken and genial. But I didn’t know him well at all.
During the luncheon after the funeral service, a number of his friends and associates stood up to offer eulogies. I learned a lot about him from the stories they shared and the honest affection for him that they expressed.
Apparently, he was an avid sports fan. He loved to read. He was always willing to help his friends when they needed it. He was a devoted alumnus of his high school. He had great ideas. And he loved his wife and children.
I found myself wishing that I had made the effort to get to know him better. He sounded like a truly great guy.
And I couldn’t help but wonder what would be said about me at my own funeral. Would near strangers find themselves wishing that they had known me better? Would my life sound interesting? Would people speak about me with affection? Would they be glad that they had known me? What would they remember about me?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It is the spring, after all.
Since it was raining yesterday, Greg and I took ourselves off to the movies to see the latest Avengers iteration, Thunderbolts. It was fun.
Today, we took a tour of the Kentucky Derby Museum and Churchill Downs.
It was fun to imagine all the people in their fancy clothes and hats milling around on race day.
A couple of photos from our visit to the museum:
2024’s winner, Mystik DanA replica of the Kentucky Derby trophy.
And a couple of photos from our visit to Churchill Downs:
The famous twin spires.Mint juleps are “the thing” at the Kentucky Derby, apparently.Gate #17 has never had a winning horse. I feel sorry for whoever draws that unlucky number!
We managed to get into the car before it started raining, but by the time we got back to the campground, it was pouring.
This morning we did our second tour of Mammoth Cave. This one was called the Domes and Dripstones tour.
Oh. My. God. It was awesome.
As usual, my photos will not do it justice. The first section of the tour was of the domes, which are deep vertical shafts.
The entrance to the cave was something out of Doctor Who. Just a steel door in the middle of the woods.We descended hundreds of steps down the narrow vertical shafts.
Once we had gotten to the second level of the cavern system, we entered what our tour guide called the “and” portion of the tour.
When we got to this room, I took an ignominious tumble off a step and fell on some poor little Indian lady before landing on my back. How embarrassing!That ceiling is natural rock, not man-made.
Eventually, we arrived at the “dripstones” portion of the tour.
Mammoth Cave is mostly a dry cave, which means that there aren’t that many stalactites, stalagmites, and flow stones, but this section does have them.
Lost River Cave
I talked Greg into one more cave experience before we leave Park City, Kentucky. So after lunch, we headed to Lost River Cave.
This cave tour involved a boat ride on an underground river. Unfortunately, the cavern was so dimly lit that almost none of the pictures from that part of the tour came out.
The first section of the boat tour involved an exceedingly low ceiling.
Tomorrow we head to Louisville, Kentucky.
This ends the cavern portion of our trip. There is another cavern in Louisville, but Greg refused to take a tour of it. 😆
We are here in Park City, Kentucky, specifically to tour Mammoth Cave. Today was our first of two tours of the longest cave system in the world.
We did the history tour today.
Mammoth Cave is unlike any cave I’ve been in previously because it lacks stalactites or stalagmites — at least the section we saw today. Plus, it’s huge.
The entrance for today’s tour.
It’s almost impossible to get a decent picture in a cave using my camera phone, but here are some of the better shots I got of Mammoth Cave today.
You can see how it got its name.
Not all of the areas were wide open. In some places, we needed to duck quite low.
And this area, known as Fat Man’s Misery and Tall Man’s Agony involved squeezing ourselves through a particularly tight section.
And there were steps. Lots of steps!
And deep gorges.
Diamond Caverns
We are staying at a campground right across the street from the entrance to Diamond Caverns, so it seemed like a no-brainer to take a tour there, too.
See those white stairs inside the building? They lead to the entrance of the cave.
I have to confess that I enjoyed this tour more than the one of Mammoth Cave. There was so much more to look at.
It was another overcast day with the threat of thunderstorms.
After several days of touring museums, Greg and I were eager to get some exercise. Once the thunderstorm threat diminished, we headed to Shelby Farms Park to walk the Hyde Lake Loop, which is a 2.4-mile loop around a man-made lake near Memphis.
The trail was a little boring, but we enjoyed seeing a variety of birds.
Red-winged blackbird This great blue heron let us get so close we could almost have touched him.These fellows are apparently called American avocets.Mr. and Mrs. Mallard duck.One of several gaggles of goslings.
Beale Street
No trip to Memphis would be complete without an evening spent on Beale Street.
After our walk around the lake, we headed to Beale Street for dinner and some live music.
I had read that Memphis is famous for its barbecue, so I did a little Google search to see which bar on Beale Street had the best barbecue, and the winner was BB King’s. So off we went.
As expected, the barbecue was fantastic. Greg and I split a full rack of ribs.
The music was good, too. We learned something interesting about Beale Street. Unlike Broadway in Nashville, where the live music starts as early as 10:00 a.m., Beale Street doesn’t really come alive until after 7:00 p.m.
We were lucky that BB King’s had a band that played from 4:00 p.m. until 7:00 p.m.
After finishing our dinner, we moved on. Our next stop was the Rum Boogie Cafe, which we had been to once before on our Mississippi Cruise.
I stepped out of the bar to get this photo, and the guy guarding the door wouldn’t let me back in without paying a cover charge, which I couldn’t do because I had left my purse inside the bar!
Since it wasn’t yet 7:00 p.m., we chatted with a British couple that we met while we were waiting for the band to take the stage. They were also doing a tour of Tennessee before heading to New Orleans, so we had fun exchanging notes about what we had seen and enjoyed on our various travels around the state.
When the band finally took the stage, we were amused to discover that two of the three band members were either from Pennsylvania or Philadelphia.
It was an enjoyable evening, but I have to admit that I don’t feel as comfortable on Beale Street as I did on Broadway. Beale Street has a much grungier feel, partly because there are fewer tourists and more folks just loitering.
Anyway, we headed back to the campsite early because we have a long drive tomorrow.
No trip to Memphis would be complete without a tour of Graceland.
I guess?
This is another activity that had not been on my schedule, but the ladies in Nashville, the same ones who had recommended the National Civil Rights Museum, said that Graceland was worth a visit.
The Graceland website recommended 4 hours to complete the tour, and that was about how long it took us. It would have taken even longer, but we were both starting to feel drained. We skipped the section of the tour that included Presley’s planes.
The tour began with a visit to Graceland Mansion itself.
We wound our way through the rooms on the first floor and the basement. Happily, the tour guides allowed us to go at our own pace.
It was interesting to see what a celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s considered fashionable.
We also got to see the meditation garden, where Elvis and his family members are buried.
There were rooms upon rooms of memorabilia. It was actually overwhelming.
After a tour of the mansion, we went back to the main facility to tour some of Elvis’s collections… and view even more memorabilia.
There was his car collection…
His costume collection…
This display wrapped around three walls of the room.
And rooms dedicated to his costume designers, the artists influenced by his work, his military service, his record label, his movies… There was literally no moment of his life that had not been recorded and preserved for posterity.
I found myself wondering how he would have been remembered if he had lived another 20 or 30 years. Would interest in his life and music have continued to be so fervent?
And would his music have changed with the times? Would he have been able to stay fresh and original, or was his music only perfect for that single moment in time in which it was created? Would interest in him have slowly faded as history moved beyond the 1970s?
Despite the fact that I have only ever had a mild interest in Elvis Presley, I did enjoy the tour. It was worth the quite exorbitant cost that we paid for it.
After our tour, we went to a local laundromat to get some laundry done, and then Greg made us filet mignon for dinner.
We started our first day in Memphis at the National Civil Rights Museum.
This activity had not been on my original plan since I am not a huge fan of museums. However, some ladies we met in Nashville had highly recommended it, so we decided to trust them.
I’m so glad we did.
The museum is part of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
However, the museum is not solely about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is a fairly detailed recounting of the African American struggle for equality from the early days of slavery in the 1700s all the way until the 1970s.
It was incredibly moving and informative. As I was making my way through the exhibits, I marveled at the strength, persistence, incredible courage, and resiliency demonstrated by African Americans in this country as they have fought for basic human and civil rights.
And I couldn’t help thinking about what it could teach me as I struggle to oppose the destruction of human and civil rights by the Trump Administration.
I learned that violence is not necessary to effect change.
I also learned that it is important to hold true to my values and not let an unjust, immoral system keep me from doing what is right.
I also learned that there is power in numbers.
On the advice of someone we met earlier today, we gave ourselves about 4 hours to go through the museum. We needed every minute.
One of the last exhibits in the museum was the original room where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr stayed the night he was assassinated. It was eerie to look over the balcony where he was standing when he was shot.
Sun Studio
After touring the National Civil Rights Museum, we headed to Sun Studio for a tour.
This studio tour was similar to the Studio B tour that we took in Nashville.
In fact, we heard the same story about Elvis Presley’s first studio recording session, which prompted me to ask our tour guide which studio that event had actually taken place in. He assured me that it occurred here, not Nashville, and I believed him.
Apparently, Sun Studio is still in operation today. Our tour guide is one of the musicians, and he named some of the famous musicians who have recorded in the studio within the last few years. Pretty cool.
Rain and more rain. I swear Nashville is trying to drown us.
We met up with Greg’s sister Debbie and her husband Paul in the early afternoon to tour the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
The website says it takes 1 1/2 to 2 hours to complete a tour of the museum. I disagree.
I think it would take a minimum of 3 hours to do a reasonable tour. There is so much information, and it is very well presented.
Also, I should have paid the extra money for the audio tour. It’s impossible to gain an appreciation of music history, artists, and styles of music without actually hearing the music, and I’m not that familiar with country music, honky tonk, hillbilly, bluegrass, and rhythm and blues to know the difference between them.
RCA Studio B tour
Included with our admission was a tour of RCA Studio B, where Elvis Presley, Charlie Pride, and numerous other country music singers recorded their songs.
The building was not particularly impressive, but one would expect that from something built in the 1950s for $37,000.
Paul is standing on the X that marked the spot where the lead vocalist would stand because that spot was the most acoustically perfect spot in the room.
Bar hopping on Broadway
After our tour of Studio B, we walked over to Broadway to get something to eat and listen to some live music.
We started at Luke Bryan’s, where Greg and I had been a few days earlier.Our next stop was the Whiskey River bar.I was so tempted to get on the dance floor and try out my new line dancing skills, but I chickened out.Our final stop for the evening was Ole Red, Blake Shelton’s bar. This was the first floor. We ended up on the top floor, where a different band was playing.
Most of the bars on Broadway had a different band playing on each of their floors.
I get the impression that Nashville is a popular place for bachelorette parties. We saw a number of young brides-to-be during our bar hopping.
Broadway is loud and energetic at any time, but I think Saturdays must be particularly wild. Every bar was jammed, and every building had a rooftop bar that was packed.
After a quick trip to the grocery store this morning, we headed back to Stones River Greenway for a second attempt at a bike ride (see yesterday’s effort). This time, we went to the trailhead at the Kohl’s parking lot.
The view from the bridge
Stones River Greenway really is a lovely multi-use trail. But… the weather while we have been in Nashville has been terrible. And today was no different.
We got about 5 miles down the trail when I looked at the skies and decided it might be risky to continue. A check of our weather app confirmed our fears, so we turned around and raced back to the car. The pedal assist function and the turbo boost on my bike got quite a workout.
It started to rain while we were putting the bikes on the bike rack, and by the time we were on the road, we were in the midst of a deluge.
Dinner at Tennfold Brewing
Debbie and Paul joined us at the campground today. They had just come from Mammoth Cave. We decided to have dinner at Tennfold Brewing, a popular bar and restaurant near the campground.
I woke up yesterday morning feeling unusually tired. Greg finally managed to drag me out of bed and away from my book around 2:00 p.m. for a bike ride.
We headed to the Percy Priest Lake trailhead and got on the Stones River Greenway. It is a lovely paved multi-use trail.
After 2 miles, we hit a snag. The bridge was out.
We turned around and headed back to the campground to get ready for our next adventure of the day.
After our backstage tour of the Opry House yesterday, we concluded that a trip to Nashville would not be complete without actually attending the Grand Ole Opry itself. ( I still can’t figure out what to call it. Concert? Radio show? Event?)
Anyway, Greg bought tickets online, and off we went.
It was a blast.
There were seven artists performing. Each one did three songs, so if you weren’t particularly fond of one artist, their performance didn’t last very long. These are the best of the best of country music, though, so there wasn’t a bad performer in the bunch.
As I was listening, I had what to me felt like a revelation. Good music is good music, regardless of the genre.
Meanderings & Mind Munchies 