Girls Trip

Before I left on vacation, my mom, grandma (mema) and I, had a little trip of our own. We went down to Memphis, TN for a weekend. My mom and mema wanted to go visit Graceland and my mema and I wanted to go eat at the Neely's restaurant. This was the first time the three of us had ever done anything like this and we had a great time. I wasn't sure if we would survive the 6 hour drive down there...if you don't know our family and how we interact with one another, you might think we hate each other. There's lots of picking, and making jabs and calling each other names, but that's just how we show our love :)

My mom and mema were both really looking forward to Graceland, I didn't care to go, but wasn't real excited about it. My mom got us all the VIP tickets so we could see all the extra items...yeah, we were big time. They ended up being a little disappointed because they had built the place up so much before we got there, I on the other hand ended up really enjoying myself.

VIP baby!

Our VIP tour bus

This couch was either 16' or 18' long...either way, very big!

Down in the basement

Any idea what this is? That's a light switch...surrounded by shag carpeting! Yep, it was even on the walls!

This was what they wore to their wedding

$5.00 for his piano!

A picture of Elvis with his parents. He was such a cute baby!

I'm not a big Elvis fan, but that's one good looking man!!

The famous pink car we bought for his mom

And this was the outside of the mansion. It's crazy, it seems like a pretty normal house for today's standards, but I'm sure it was grand in his time. He paid $100,000 for the house when he was 21.

Before I go any further with the story I feel like I should share the events of our first night there. We arrived in Memphis sometime between 6 and 7 and we were starving. We checked into our hotel, a Marriott that was nice enough, and decided to go find some food. There seemed to be several hotels around so we knew finding food would be easy. I drove since mom had driven the whole way down and we start our search. After only a few minutes we realize we haven't seen any food places besides McDonald's and the like, and we seem to be getting into a residential part of town. In fact, it was a residential part of town that had several abandoned apartment complexes and homes that had aluminum foil in place of windows (no joke!). We quickly realized we needed to turn around. After more fruitless searching and running into areas where three females should probably never be by themselves, we ended up just eating at the iHop that was right in front of our hotel. We knew we needed gas so we asked our waitress where the best place to go would be. As she was thinking my mom smartly added "and safely" to our question. Her reply "Oh, the safest? Hhmm?" She really had to think about it! She told us if we could wait we would be better off to wait until morning and she told us which exit to go to. Then she proceeded to tell us that if we didn't need to we should probably just stay in our hotel tonight. Unless of course we had a weapon. Seriously?! I was so glad she was honest with us, but we were completely freaked out! She said where we were was okay, but just a couple minutes down the road was where we needed to watch out for (which we had already discovered on our food quest). I go back to the room and I'm telling my husband this, whose dad lives in Jackson, TN and is a police officer and who both know Memphis pretty well, and he says "Yeah, you probably should have stayed at such and such exit, it's like a whole different world." Why didn't he tell us that before we left?! He said he didn't think about it. I could have killed him!

Anyway, we obviously survived. After Graceland we had dinner at the Neely's barbeque restaurant.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of barbeque, but it was pretty good. The portions were huge! The best part about the whole meal was the dessert though. We had the Sock it to Me cake, good heavens it was huge and amazingly good!! It was also warm when they brought it out, which made it that much better. The restaurant itself was very disappointing. The walls were dirty, there were damaged ceiling tiles and just over all it was not nice looking. I really expected a little more.

The morning we were leaving to come home my mema decided we needed to get up at like 6:00, mainly because she was awake and couldn't go back to sleep. She kept yelling at my mom and I to get up and we kept pulling the covers over our heads and trying to ignore her. I think at one point she finally pulled the covers off of us and possibly use some profanity to try and make us get up. My mom and I neither one are morning people, and this sure wasn't helping. My mom looked at me at one point and said "Imagine this every morning as a kid, she's always been this way". It was kind of neat. I felt like mom and I were two teenagers trying to ignore our mom about getting out of bed.

I am so glad that I had the chance to take this trip with my mom and mema. It was great just being able to hang out with them and talk and just be together. I hope we do it again soon, just somewhere a little nicer next time!