Back From Vacation

We just returned from vacation yesterday. We spent a week in Memphis with my wife's sister and her family. Our niece is three. She bossed our kids around all week. It was pretty funny.

We ate some great Memphis barbecue at Jim Neely's Interstate Barbecue. It was magnificent.

We saw Graceland, the home of one Elvis Aaron Presley. My eight-year-old son went to Memphis with no clue who Elvis was. After touring Graceland, he wanted to be rich like Elvis. Later that day, he asked, "Dad, why didn't you name me Elvis?" My response, "Because, we didn't want you to get beat up." The one thing that surprised me is that Graceland was smaller than I thought it would be.

We went to the Shiloh Battlefield. It was only the second American Civil War battlefield that I have been to. (The other is Gettysburg.) I cannot even think of the words to describe it. There is a sense that so many men died there. It is almost as if they blood still cries out from the soil.

We went to the National Civil Rights Museum, which is on the site of the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. Most of us fail to realize the struggle that so many African-Americans went through to attain equal rights.

We went to Mud Island, which has a scale model of the last 1000 miles of the Mississippi River and a museum of the Mississippi River.

We went to the Pink Palace, which was the home of the founder of Piggly Wiggly, the first modern grocery store. The kids had fun doing a treasure hunt for which they won a bunch of junk.

It was a great time, and very relaxing.