SAM & EMILY'S TENNESSEE TACK TOUR 2006

Yes, I've been back for two weeks now, but I have roughly 300 pictures (no exaggeration) from my trip. SO, I think I'll try and tackle this day by day (good thing I kept a journal)...HERE GOES!

DAY ONE- Thursday, August 3rd 2006

I flew out of Laguardia at the butt crack of dawn. I got an aisle seat, but roughly 47 people hit me in the head with their bags on their way to their seats. The obligatory screaming child was seated in my row. Thank GOD US Airways has Relax-0-Vision. No kidding. They had these TV monitors hanging down from the ceiling playing new age tunes over "soothing" footage of deserts, water lilies, and black swans. I took my personal Relax-O-Vision pill (aka Dramamine) and was out for the whole flight. I had a brief layover in Charlotte, NC. People were already talking in Southern accents...it suddenly dawned on me that I was about to willingly spend two weeks in the land I feared most: The American South.

Now, I've always had a deep-seated fear of the south. I'm not exactly sure when it began, but I think it had something to do with seeing a Dateline about some teacher in Texas that punished his students by locking them in a box. I also felt like every two seconds a new statistic came out damning the south (50% of girls in Arkansas are pregnant by the age of 16- was that one?). Soon I assumed that everyone with a southern accent was just a little bit dumb. Oh, and there was that whole slavery thing...The irony: My father is Robert E. Lee III. I am practically royalty down there. It was about time this Lee girl reconnected with her Southern roots.

I arrived in Memphis and Emily picked me up from the airport. We decided to just drive downtown to check it out and buy some maps. We discovered pretty much every ghetto in Memphis on our way, but we finally made it to Peabody Place (home of the Peabody Hotel, where they have ducks that parade around the lobby). We picked up some maps in Tower Records because there were zero book stores to be found and the cashier told us to go to Blues City Cafe for ribs. And so, having been in Memphis for approximately an hour, we sat down for a large meal of ribs and beer. Definitely set the tone for the rest of our trip.



We strolled down Beale Street (which was pretty much empty except for us) and settled in at Silky O'Sullivans for a couple beers in the warm southern sun. They had lots of handprints and signatures in the cement from famous country singers (God knows if they are authentic).



My friend Meredith worked at Silky's in college and had told me they had goats. I had to see for myself and, indeed, they had two live goats that would climb up and down a tower in the courtyard. Very bizarre. True to Memphis, a blues band started playing and we got a nice afternoon private concert.



It was a pretty lazy day. We dropped our stuff off at Nichole's (where we stayed in Memphis) and she sent us off to Corky's for BBQ nachos and pulled pork. On the way, we saw these giant crosses on the side of the road. Something we'd see a LOT more of as the trip went on.



We grabbed a table where we could watch the X Games (Emily's the only person I know who loves X Games as much as I do) and ate till we were comatose.



In short- Day one can be summed up by two words: Pork and Beer.