Miss Me Yet?

Why is Daisy all fired up about getting out of her cage? Because...

...we are in Tupelo, Mississippi.

And the '04 Tundra with crew cab and Vista snugtop camper shell, pulling the all new for 2010 2285 Lance travel trailer with side slider (not seen here), was not about to miss the chance to roll into Tupelo because...

...this is THE BIRTHPLACE OF ELVIS.

This town is all about Elvis and years after his premature demise, he is still the big draw.

Here's the simple little house he was born and raised in and that his dad built for just a couple hundred dollars.

Later his dad installed this powerful, 40-thousand watt air conditioner for $12,000. So powerful it blew all the windows out of the house and blew Elvis all the way to Memphis.

Here's a statue of Elvis with his first guitar at 13. This would be 1948. In the foreground you see me holding Daisy who by this time is already getting over the Elvis thing. She's more focused on a squirrel over there.

With the price of gas going up, we couldn't afford to go into the house. It was the only part of the walking tour with a fee.

And, then there's even an Elvis "Walk of Life". I was most curious about this plaque noting that Elvis's dad was in prison in 1938. Wuh?

And over there is the Assembly of God church where Elvis learned to sing gospel. Out front are typical Elvis fans in their late 60s and 70s, stumbling around, taking it all in. Not unlike ourselves.

And out back, the outhouse, foreshadowing things to come since Elvis met his end, so to speak, sitting on a toilet at Graceland in 1977.

Here's the Tupelo hardware store where his mother bought him his first guitar. He wanted a gun but she bought him a guitar instead. What if he'd received the gun? Hmmm...one wonders. We sure wouldn't be in Tupelo.

Where Chicago had painted statues of cows on parade, Tupelo has painted guitars. Another tribute to The King.

Here's where Elvis attended elementary school.

And yes, Tupelo even celebrates where he received his first library card. Do we really need to know this?

But here's the best. Just down the street from where he was born is Johnnie's Drive-In...

...where he ate his fill of bbq, burgers and fries.

Johnnie's is commemorated with a plaque saying that Elvis would wash it all down with an RC cola. He'd call it an R.O.C. Huh? Elvis wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.

We stopped just to get a picture when a carhop came to the truck, the 04 Tundra crew cab with Vista snugtop camper shell, and demanded that we order something. So we decided, yep, we'll have some lunch.

We said, "How about a couple of hamburgers and fries?" She asked, "Do y'all want the 'all meat'?" And Paul said, "What else would you put in a hamburger?" She said, "We specialize in the doughburger, which is dough and water mixed in with the meat." A real cheap hamburger helper. Locals call it a "slugburger". I couldn't stop laughing.

It turned out to be sort of a so-what mess (see above)...

...but a good burger nonetheless. And here you start to understand how Elvis ballooned up to 600 pounds and dropped dead on the crapper.

But Tupelo's not all about The King. Explorer/conquistador/whatever, Hernando de Soto and his band of gay blades marched through here in 1540 on their way west. De Soto is given credit for having discovered the Mississippi, only to discover that them darn Indians discovered it about 10,000 years earlier.

Tupelo's one of those conservative, bible belt places where MSNBC is blocked on the cable system because it was mean to this man who asks, "Miss me yet?" This billboard is on I-45 between the old and new parts of town. Anyway, Paul's answer to this question was a resounding "noooooooooo". He sounded like a man jumping off a cliff. I just rolled my eyes at the whole thing.

Tupelo's other claim to fame is that it is the headquarters for the Natchez Trace, a four-hundred-mile long scenic parkway that follows a path first traced by migrating animals, then Indians, trappers, pioneers moving west and that fellow De Soto. And since they all followed the path of least resistance, that's where today's two-lane road (the Natchez Trace Parkway) was built. It's administered by the National Park Service and is free-of-charge.

It really is quite interesting and driving it beats the heck out of freeway travel. More about it in our next blog.

Here's a stop right outside town.

You can hike back into the woods....

...to curious sites such as this. The headstones of 13 confederate soldiers. How they died and why they're buried here is something of a mystery.

And while Daisy was sniffing around Paul picked up a tick on his hand and that was the end of exploring. Had to get back to the trailer to de-louse.

In the newer part of town, there's a monument honoring the Civil War Battle of Tupelo.

Many on both sides were killed but the monument is simple. It's directly across the street from the actual battlefield...

....which the city somehow, in its infinite wisdom, covered over with a super WalMart and a parking lot. That's progress. One wonders when all the old Elvis fans are dead and gone and Elvis is little more than a footnote, twenty or thirty years down the road, what then? Demolish the WalMart and recreate the battlefield? It seems hallowed ground is far more important than 24-hour access to cheap stuff from China.

And how we love to explore and take in the local fare. On the Gulf Coast last year we ate at Hooter's. In Tupelo, Applebee's. Paul ordered fish and chips and asked for malt vinegar. The waitress had never heard of it. Wondered why on earth we'd put vinegar on fish and chips. Time to move on...



Let us add, parenthetically, that Tupelo is a cool place to spend a couple of days. It's clean, has beautiful well-preserved historic neighborhoods and a thriving downtown, two WalMarts, a Sam's Club and is very much worth your time and effort to get here.

But down the road we go. And if you think the birthplace of Elvis is something to see...just wait until you see whose birthplace we find next.