Driving Across the United States Memphis to Nashville: Day Five
Day five of our drive across the United States was our shortest drive. We toured Memphis most of the day before driving the short 3-hour trip to Nashville.
Memphis has a great deal of sites to see, especially if you are into music. Driving across the Mississippi on the I-40 we were intrigued by the Bass Pro pyramid. We needed some sunglasses so that was our first stop.
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Bass Pro is a huge sporting goods store chain. The nearest one to us is a 2-hour drive from our Southern California home, so it is still a novelty for us. This Bass Pro opened in the 321-foot tall Memphis pyramid in 2015.
Of course, I had to read up on this complex. Apparently the “Great American Pyramid” had been abandoned for a decade. Previously it has served as the home arena for the NBA Memphis Grizzlies. According to this article, many believed it was cursed because of a skull put in the complex by the owner of the Rainforest Café.
Today, the Bass Pro pyramid not only has the retail store, it also includes a hotel, a man-made swamp and a bowling alley. For $10 you can take a ride to the observation deck at the top of the pyramid.
We checked out the store, got our sunglasses and headed a few blocks down the road to a more somber site. The National Civil Rights Museum is located on the site of where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968.
Unfortunately, the Civil Rights Museum is closed on Tuesdays. Nevertheless, the site is impressive to visit. The museum is built onto the Lorraine Motel. You can clearly see the balcony where Dr. King was standing when he was shoot. You can also see the site of the boarding house across the street where the shooter fired the fatal shot.
The National Civil Rights Museum is basically in downtown Memphis. We walked a few short blocks to the Beale Street area.
Our first stop around Beale Street was the famous Peabody Hotel. There was a crowd in the lobby, and we realized it was almost 11 am, the time of an historic Memphis tradition at the Peabody.
Since 1940, the Peabody ducks march out to the fountain in the center of the lobby at 11 am. The ducks live in a penthouse on the top of the hotel. They are led down an elevator and march across a red carpet to the fountain. At 5 pm, the procedure is reversed, and they march back.
I had heard of the Peabody ducks, but had not planned to view the march. Luckily, we wandered in at 10:50 so we stuck around. There was an impressively large crowd and it was a lot of fun. I got to check off something I never knew was on my bucket list.
The Peabody also has a location of Lansky Bros clothing. Lansky Bros is known as “Clothier to the King” because Elvis Presley was a big customer. We were not planning to visit Graceland, but Memphis is known as a music town.
We wanted to get a complete taste of the music scene in Memphis, so we chose to visit the Memphis Rock N Soul Museum. This is a Smithsonian affiliate and they cover the entire Memphis music story. Admission is $13 adults and $10 for kids under 18. We probably could have gotten a discount but this was a spur of the moment visit, so we paid full dollar
We spent close to 2-hours at the museum and it was now time for lunch. I knew we had to try a greasy spoon, so it came down to either hamburger’s or Gus’s World-Famous Fried Chicken. We went with burgers because it appears Gus’s has become a mini-chain with locations in Southern California.
Dyer’s claim to fame is that they cook the burgers in the same grease they used when the restaurant started in 1912. The location has moved several times, but they transport the grease under police escort during each move. Dyer’s has been featured in two of our favorite books on roadside cheap eats, Hamburger America and Road Food.
Dyer’s Burgers is right in the heart of Beale Street. Beale Street is the central party district of downtown Memphis. It was noted as the heart of the blues scene, but today is more a tourist party site along the lines of Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
It was getting late in the afternoon and we had a dinner appointment in Nashville. However, we wanted to make two quick stops before leaving Memphis. First, we stopped at the legendary Sun Studios. This is where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lewis, Carl Perkins and others made some of their first recordings in the 1950s. You can take a tour, but we just stopped to visit the gift shop and get a t-shirt.
Our final stop was the famed Stax Records. This was the recording home for many legends of soul such as Otis Redding. Today it is home of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. We didn’t have time to tour the museum, but we made sure to buy a t-short and a 3-CD set of Stax music.
The drive to Nashville is only 3-hours. The only major town on the way is Jackson, TN. We stopped in Jackson for a break at Casey Jones Village. This is home to the Casey Jones Home & Railroad Museum. It also has a large gift shop, buffet restaurant, ice cream parlor and more.
Casey Jones was an engineer who died tragically trying to save passengers. He has been immortalized in many songs from artists such as Johnny Cash and the Grateful Dead.
We finally got to Nashville close to 6. We had dinner plans with my niece who attends Vanderbilt University. Right across the street from Vanderbilt is Centennial Park. Before dinner we took a walk around the park which contains a cool replica of the ancient Greek Parthenon in Athens. This modern Parthenon is actually fairly old in Nashville time. It was built in 1897.
While driving from Memphis to Nashville I was trying to find a hotel near the center of Nashville. I found out the Nashville is now a popular tourist attraction and hotels were going in the $200 to $400 range, even on Hotwire. The hotel I had booked in January for $99 a night was now $300.
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I was still looking into the evening when right after dinner an $83 rate popped up at the
Millennium Maxwell House Nashville. We grabbed right before it disappeared. When we got to the hotel the couple in front of house were trying to get that same rate. Turns out we were lucky. It was a flash mistake rate that only lasted for a few minutes. We grabbed it fast, the couple ahead of us was not so lucky.
Check out our guide to how to grab these type of deals.
For an overview of our day four adventures in Oklahoma City and Memphis BBQ go here.
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