1,500 Miles in Five Days

Back home again. An approximately 1,500 mile trip in five days, taking in the sights of Broadway in Nashville, Beale Street in Memphis, Graceland several times for different events, a tour of Sun Studio where rock and roll began, the Tina Turner Museum in Brownsville, Tennessee, she was born and raised in nearby Nutbush, hours of traffic jams around Atlanta, Nashville and Memphis. It seems we hit the right time for construction on I-75, I-24 and I-40. Arrived safely home, whew.

Local Monticello girl made good, Trisha Yearwood, will be hosting a cooking weekend at Graceland in November. The event is called, “Graceland and Trisha Yearwood Present Southern Food and Cocktails: A True Memphis Experience”.

By now, our kindergarten to high school students have faced reality and back to school means back to school. Ah, some of us remember when school did not start until after Labor Day. While touring around in Memphis, I found my old elementary and high school were now just some slabs of concrete with cranes on top.

Having spent 12 years there, it was very sad to see the old brick buildings gone. Lots of memories. Hope our schools here will give our students some lasting memories and they will want to return for visits. Change is the one thing you can count on.

As always, it is truly amazing how many foreign visitors you meet on trips, many from Germany, Australia, Japan, Great Britain, Denmark and of course from all over the United States. We talked to a young woman at the Graceland gates who was from London and had flown to New York City with her father and drove to Memphis for Elvis Week. Surprise, she was the Elvis fan. I took her picture in front of the gates and welcomed her to my hometown.

Small world, my cousin, Barry Presley, writes a weekly column for the Brownsville Tennessee News. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.