Day Three

Yesterday was the first day that we did a lot of stuff, and almost all of it was completely awesome. (We did about 385 miles of driving, according to Google.)

We woke up at the Heartbreak Hotel, packed up and headed down to breakfast, where I had grits for the first time. (Even though they're instant grits, and no self-respecting Southerner eats instant grits.) Also, they had greasy, buttery biscuits which were great.

Then we headed over to Graceland itself, and some nice ladies wearing "Elvis is my Homeboy" t-shirts took our picture in front of the Graceland sign.

Graceland is awesome. It's unbelievable that this was/is a house. The coolest part (and most famous part, I think) is Elvis' jungle room:

Also, his billiards room had really insanely cool wall/ceiling decoration:

We also went to his Racquetball Building, which is the last place he performed music (in front of his friends and family) before he died. The place was overhauled to be one of the three or so places that are literally filled with awards and honors that he received.

I'm glad it was a nice day (day two was really crappy weather) because it let me get some good pictures of Elvis' and his family's graves, where flowers are delivered almost daily from fans around the world.

That wrapped up the Graceland mansion tour. They shuttle you back across the street where you can check out his garage and plane hangar. There were (I think) 33 cars on display and 2 planes. THE car is the Pink Cadillac, obviously.

The Lisa Marie plane is really cool, too. (The seatbelts are all gold-plated, and Elvis' bed on his plane is bigger than most of the beds I've ever slept in.)

That pretty much wrapped up Graceland. We drove down the street to a place called A&R Bar-b-Que, which isn't pictured cause it wasn't great. The sauce on the ribs was good, but that's about all it had going for it.

We hopped in the car and drove about five and a half hours south to New Orleans. About four and a half of those hours were in Mississippi, where there is pretty literally nothing to look at. I mean, a lot of highway driving everywhere is sorta boring, but there was NOTHING to look at in Mississippi.

But then we were in New Orleans!

This is a cathedral that was the basis for one or more Disney castles:

But enough about architecture! Let's talk about tater totchos from a place called 13 -- nachos with tater tots! Mmmmm...

Or how about beignets from Cafe du Monde -- fresh-made doughnuts covered in powdered sugar.

There's also so much music coming from everywhere in this city. We were on Frenchmen street, where there are tons of bars and basically every bar has pretty good live music coming out of it. But then there are street performers, too, like these guys who were outside for a few hours as we walked away then walked back past them.

But, by far, the coolest thing in New Orleans was the band Glen David Andrews performing at a bar d.b.a. They were AWESOME. Apparently Jazz fest kicks off today, so all these crazy good blues, folk and jazz bands are in town, along with writers and other celebrities and stuff. Good time to show up.