Graceland

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post to bring you this live update...we went to Graceland today.

Thursday night we were in Oklahoma City looking at the map. We have until Sunday the 19th to get to our location for the Amazon jobs so we decided to do a long drive yesterday (over 450 miles) and spend two nights in Memphis at the Graceland RV park...right across the street from you know where.

The Heartbreak Hotel is right in front of the campground...both are located "At the end of Lonely Street."

When we made the trip to NM, I was a newbie and didn't know anything about campgrounds or RVing. Now, I've got 3 months of campground customer service under my belt so I'm paying attention. The young woman who checked us in last night was really bad. Completely indifferent to whether we were there or not. I could have stood at the counter and made dookie in my pants and her expression still would have said BFD.

Needless to say, that didn't give me the best impression of the area. Our campsite was okay, rather close to the others and there's no cable. (We'll be w/o cable for our whole time at Amazon too...stay tuned for more posts on how Chris deals with this...). But the weather was great and we took a nice stroll down Elvis Presley Blvd.

A few days ago there were two RVs of Australians traveling together who stayed at the KOA. They were a lot of fun and I remembered that they'd said they were going to Graceland. But, really, what are the odds?

Well, as we were leaving the campground a man walked up next to us and it was one of the Australians. I pointed and said "you're one of the Australians". Like he didn't know.

He didn't seem to recognize us w/o our yellow KOA shirts (common) but he played along.

This morning we walked over to get our tickets and take the tour of Graceland. We did the basic tour of the mansion which did not include a "bonus room", the car collection or the airplanes. That was fine w/me.

What I found most interesting about the mansion was that it really wasn't that big (we only saw the downstairs). It's still the way it was when he died in 1977, but I'm sure a few of you have bigger kitchens and living rooms. However, you probably don't have your own racquetball building that has been converted to display gold records and your different jumpsuit/cape combos.

If you do have such a room, why haven't you told me?

The good news about the jumpsuits is that they were linen, not polyester. Still, you can't avoid sweating when you wear a cape, unless you are a super hero.

The tour was very nice. Everyone got their own iPad and headphones for an interactive tour w/extra features on the iPad like home movies or movie clips.

As I looked at all the photos and film clips, I couldn't help but notice just how darned good looking he was in his youth and how charismatic he was.

I remember when he died. I was on vacation at the Jersey shore with my friend Karen O'Sullivan and her family. Her dad came in w/the newspaper that said Elvis had died and he was really rattled by the news.

What about you? Do you remember where you were when you learned that Elvis had died?