Day 2- Memphis, TN to New Orleans, LA

On Saturday, we reluctantly dragged ourselves out of the comfy Memphis bed around 9 a.m., showered, packed up and headed out to explore the area a little before we got on the road to New Orleans (NOLA for short). Call me corny, but I laced up my blue running shoes (on purpose) and started humming the Mark Cohen tune as we walked the sidewalks. We explored a few blocks of this quiet area of the city before deciding to pack it in and try to find Graceland.

Even without directions, we were eventually able to find Elvis’s humble abode (thanks to the help of a Walgreens employee and a not-so-helpful one who had no idea Graceland was a block away). We parked along the service road and took photos in front of Graceland’s gate—when I was taking my picture I leaned up against the gate and at the same time the security guard’s phone rang loudly and I thought I had set off an alarm. Needless to say we took our cameras and ran. Before we left we did take a moment to sign our names on the famous wall outside the mansion—“Kim and Ally road trip 2011.”

The whole experience was kind of surreal—the mansion is in the middle of the city, sitting back from a busy mini-highway. It was weird imagining that the musical icon used to live there and how popular he was, knowing that people write some crazy things on the wall about him, and come out in droves to tour his home and see his grave (the line for tours was ridiculously long). His private, big ass plane, the “Lisa Marie,” is parked across the street for tourists to admire as they wait for their tour.

After a brief walk in Memphis and through Elvis history, I changed out of my blue sneakers and into flip flops as we bade goodbye to Tennessee. The drive from Memphis to NOLA was much more interesting than the previous day’s drive. Instead of flat corn fields, we enjoyed admiring the rolling hills sprinkled with the occasional cow and horse farms. We even stopped in Jackson, Miss. to see the Capitol building on our way through. A little over six hours later, we made it to NOLA.

As soon as we arrived in the Big Easy, we changed and headed out to Bourbon Street with our friend Christiana. Christiana graduated from DePaul’s journalism program last year and is the person who introduced me and Ally. She is originally from outside NOLA and moved back last June. On Saturday night, she had a friend’s bachelorette party to attend downtown so we tagged along.

We started the night off at Pat O’Brien’s, where we got a hurricane to go (this was something everyone told me I needed to do) and continued to walk up and down the street. On our way to Pat O’s, I caught a set of big gold beads, which would have knocked me out and given me a concussion if I hadn’t caught them as they were thrown from the balcony. From there we followed the bachelorette party to a dance club called Gold Mine, and stayed put for several hours.

The highlight of this bar was the Flaming Dr Pepper shots we had. What is this you ask? Well, it’s a half glass of beer with a flaming shot of something dropped in it, which combined really tastes like a Dr Pepper! Yum. I also high-fived and made friends with several Celtics fans who were dressed in jerseys and straight from witnessing Boston’s victory over the New Orleans Hornets a few blocks away.

Our last stop of the night was to some place for slices of pizza and frozen daiquiris to go. Half of it is still sitting in Christiana’s freezer. Snack for later.

Talk about a great first impression. I think I’m going to like NOLA!