We took a break from dealing with our van headache to check out Memphis today.  It was great to get out in the sunshine and give our legs a stretch after being cooped up in a motel for the past day and a half.  We began our day with a trip downtown to see the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  It was more emotional than I was expecting given that the motel looks just the same as it did when he was killed.  The images of that balcony from that fateful day have been burned into most of our memories, so it was surreal to find it looking just the same.  We were looking forward to seeing the civil rights museum that is associated with the Lorraine Motel, but it is currently under renovation, so we made do with a moving visit to this historic but upsetting location.

We wandered around downtown, checking out Beale Street, The Peabody Hotel and its fountain-dwelling ducks, and several other areas that looked interesting.  Van had a ball waving to every trolley driver that drove by.  I’m pretty sure every single trolley driver waved back – and so did many of the passengers.  Aside from the fact that Memphis will always be the place our van died, this is a mighty cool city.  Definitely a great place to be stuck for a couple extra days.

We followed up our walk around town with some amazing barbecue.  The sauce was good but the pork was phenomenal and not much more costly (if any) than a value meal at the nearest food factory.   The banana pudding (of which I’m now a huge fan) wasn’t quite as delish as what we ate in Nashville, but it was a great dessert for only $2.50.  If you find yourself in Memphis (and hopefully it’s under different circumstances than ours), you should definitely mosey on over to Cozy Corner.

Across the street we saw this – definitely a sign…

Our evening ended in the lobby of our motel with beers and snacky-type dinner food.  The place we’re staying provides breakfast and snack/dinner food with three alcoholic beverages per adult per evening.  You can bet we’ve been getting our fill.  Van makes friends for us quickly down there, so we’ve been able to meet lots of other folks traveling through Memphis.  Tonight we had a long conversation with Grandpa Harrison, a retired dairy farmer from the panhandle of Oklahoma.  We met a few other folks from Oklahoma, all of whom were on their way back from a rainy, cold vacation in Myrtle Beach.  If these folks are a good representation of the residents of Oklahoma, it should be a very friendly state to visit.  I’m just hoping we get there at some point this year.

And that brings me to what you’ve probably all been waiting for, news on our travels.  We were able to get a much better assessment on the van today, enough to tell us that it is not a quick or inexpensive fix.  While we continue to sort things out, we’re going to rent a van to drive us and our things (that van sure could fit a lot of our belongings) to Arkansas for six nights and then drive straight from northwest Arkansas up to Denver in one long day.  We’ll finish sorting things out once we get there and reassess how we’re going to continue traveling at that point.  We will continue traveling – it’s just a matter of how we’re going to do it and what we need to do before we can get back on the road.  Regardless, we’ll have lots of visiting to do in Colorado with family and friends and we’ll take some trips here and there to places we’ve been wanting to check out as we firm up our plans.  While the situation is not ideal (let’s be real – it sucks), I am so glad that the van died when we were crawling out of a parking lot instead of hurtling down the interstate.  And even more important, no one was hurt.  Perhaps the van died to protect us from something even more catastrophic.  We’re learning a lot of important lessons, something we’ll likely write about once we’ve had a little time to reflect.  In the mean time, thanks so much for all of your supportive messages and words over the past couple of days.  It’s meant more to us than you will ever know.