Blackberry Farm really is a very nice place. Nothing is a problem – except the weather.

We woke up this morning to another wet day, with high humidity and evidence of rainfall. It didn’t actually rain while we were out, but I had to dry off the seat in our golf cart and put a blanket down before we ventured out to breakfast (1) (2).

We had planned to try geocaching before lunch. Geocaching is a games where you attempt to locate a cache based on geographic coordinates and perhaps a clue. In the larger world, a cache can be established by anyone, who then publishes it. They will often leave a small notebook for geocachers to sign, and hide a trinket or charm in the cache.

Here, we were given a small stamp and a booklet to record our finds, and each cache contained a stamp and a booklet to stamp and sign. We were also given a Garmin GPS preprogrammed with the coordinates of each cache. The GPS only gets you within a couple of dozen feet of the cache. then it’s up to you to find it. The picture shows our equipment and the small metal box which is hidden at each location.

We expected to spend an hour or so, but after 1 1/2 hours we broke for lunch. It was 3:30 when we finished, having found all but one of the eight caches.

Part of the fun in this context is that you are forced to travel around the entire property (in your golf cart), as the caches are hidden by the various activity sites.

We had a nice dinner in the un-formal dining room. You’ll recall the formal dining room required men to wear their jackets into the dining room; this one does not. The food is similar, although the menu is different. The wine list is only a dozen pages long, rather than 100. The decor was old English, meaning lots of bad paintings of fox hunting on the wall. The formal room was rustic – it’s built as a large barn, with open beam construction and a very high ceiling.

Many people, including us, periodically ask for extra towels from housekeeping. This being Blackberry Farm, they just kept coming.

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(1) In typical Blackberry Farm style, our cabin comes with special hand towels to wipe down the seats, and a special blanket to place on the still damp seat.

(2) Truly first world problems, I know.

Our streak of not-great weather continued today in Walland, although it actually didn’t prevent us from doing what we wanted.

Blackberry Farm is very spread out, and our cabin comes with a golf cart. Our first excursion was last night, when we had to find The Barn (the so-called formal dining venue) in the dark, after checking into our cabin in the afternoon and not leaving until dinner. Suffice to say we made a few wrong turns.

But this morning we had no trouble driving to a different part of the property for breakfast. After a bit of thought we elected to eat outside, as did most of the guests.

After breakfast I took a soggy walk in the humidity. The grounds are beautiful, even with overcast skies.

Our planned activity for the day was a cooking demonstration with one of Blackberry’s chefs. While it is advertised as a group activity, the group today was just Sally and me. And Rachel, our chef-instructor. She gave a great explanation of how she was preparing our customized three course meal, and the three of us had a great time chatting for 2 1/2 hours. And the meals she prepared for us were delicious.

We are right on the edge of the Great Smokey Mountain National Park with it’s extensive outdoor activities and 900 miles of trails. Blackberry has their own hiking trails, about 9 miles worth. I used about 4 of them this afternoon, which was plenty for me. The hike wasn’t that hard, and the temps were in the low 70s, but the humidity was about 100%. I was soaked by the time I got back – and the drizzling rain didn’t help.

They have plenty of other activities: archery, skeet, tennis, fly fishing, biking, etc. We’ll concentrate mostly on the gourmet food. Which is how we finished the day, with another great meal in the Barn.

Marred only by having to drive the open golf cart back to our cabin in a light drizzle.

After ten days of never using the gym facilities at any of our stops, I decided to use the gym at the Hermitage. Unfortunately, the hotel leased the gym and spa to Netflix for filming today, and it was closed. Rather than take their offer to use a nearby public gym, I decided to take a walk outside. It was almost-raining, and I figured even if it started drizzling, I’d wind up less wet than if I used the treadmill.

Well, I figured right. I wound up less wet, even though it started raining pretty steadily about 15 minutes before I got back. While I was out, I did come across Nashville’s government plaza. The architecture and layout was quite impressive.

By the time we left left Nashville it was raining lightly, but as we headed east on I-40, it turned into heavy rain. Visibility was poor, the road was slick, and cars (and trucks) were staying below the speed limit. About halfway to our destination, the rain eased, the road dried, and we all resumed the national speed limit of 10% above the posted limit.

Between the rain, the 200 miles, and the one hour time change as we came back into Eastern Time, we didn’t arrive at Blackberry Farm until after 4:00. This is one of those places where they spare no effort to cater to your needs. Once you pull up and walk into reception, your car disappears and all of your bags are quietly put into one of the house Lexuses (Lexi?). You sign a bunch of waivers, payment agreements, cancellation policies, etc. on an iPad (1), and then you get driven to your cabin in the woods.

Which is very nice. But designed for the twentieth century. The room actually has a fair number of outlets, all in the baseboard along the floor, and none close enough to any table to be able to charge your devices without placing them on the floor (2).

There were other initial problems in the cabin which needed attending. There was some very nice cheese left as a welcome snack, and which contained garlic (3). The soap and shampoo were laced with lavender, which we also had to call about (4).

Dinner was at their “formal” restaurant. Formal has a silly definition: jackets required for men. Now, you’re thinking ” what’s silly about that?”. But grasshopper, you are thinking the colloquial use of that phrase, which is shorthand for something like “men should wear a jacket, some nice slacks and a button down shirt or the equivalent”. But here it means exactly what it say: the gentleman who escorted us to our room said one merely must wear a jacket. Jeans and a t-shirt with it are perfectly acceptable.

That’s what the man said.

And that is silly.

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(1) I felt like I was at the Hertz counter: “please initial the CDW, please initial here to decline buying a full tank of gas, please …”.

(2) Which they were happy to rectify by sending someone over with an extension cord.

(3) Which they were happy to rectify by sending someone over with a fruit plate, and removing the poisonous cheese.

(4) Which they were happy to rectify by sending someone over with Bars of Dove soap.

Friday we went to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

I took no pictures.

I usually don’t take pictures in museums, not because they don’t let you, but for one of two reasons:

– the scenes are usually uninteresting

– taking a picture of a picture (or sculpture, or …) doesn’t appeal to me

The museum itself was moderately interesting. If you are a real fan, then they have a pretty solid collection of artifacts related to your favorite artists: guitars, shoes, boots, belts, costumes, hats, suitcases, etc. There are a few interpretive displays to help understand how the blues combined with Irish music to create traditional country music. There’s little interpretation of how country morphed into today’s blend of country, pop and rock.

In the evening we went back to Broadway to see some more music in the bars. Like last night, what we heard was far from the music that used to be broadcast from the Grand Ole Opry. The song we heard more times than any other was (wait for it …) Don’t Stop Believing. I always liked this song back in the day (it was released in 1981), but I’m suffering from severe over-exposure now. It’s everywhere – weddings, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, Memphis, Nashville, on my Pandora mixes. Enough already!

Here’s some more of the playlist from last night:

• Play That Funky Music (Wild Cherry)

• Country Road (John Denver)

• My Girl (Tempations, Rolling Stones, and everyone else)

• Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Tears For Fears)

• Drops of Jupitor (Train)

• Sweet Caroline (Neil Diamond)
• You Shook Me All Night Long (AC/DC)

There were also straight country songs, but they were outnumbered by the rock and pop stuff

I really don’t mean to criticize the musical tastes of people around here. I liked most of the music I heard, country and not-country. I just find it amusing that Don’t Stop Believing is the most popular (by the number of performances I heard) song in the home of country music. In one bar, the band (who were very good) asked the audience “do you want to hear more country, or pop, or rock” and rock won by a substantial margin.

It was crowded Thursday night (don’t these people have to work?), and Friday even more. And by 11:00, people were losing their inhibitions somewhat.

Many years ago, we visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Israel. We subsequently visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Last year we visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Today we visited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Human antipathy and cruelty to “others” is universal and endless.

This museum is built in, and alongside, the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered 50 years ago on April 4. He joined a long list of Americans murdered because they fought for civil rights, or were simply African American. His death was sadly not the last.

Slavery in the Americas was massive and pervasive. By 1860 55% of the people in Mississippi and South Carolina were slaves. Louisiana, Florida and Georgia were all mid-40s. Overall, 13% – about 1 in 8 – people in the US were slaves.

The battle for freedom and equal rights began before the African slaves ever reached our shores, continued on the plantations, through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century, and to today.

The Uber driver taking us back to the hotel asked if we enjoyed the museum; “enjoy” doesn’t really describe it. But we were very glad to have gone.

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After resting up for a bit, I went out for a walk. It was 95 degrees, sunny and humid today, so I wasn’t expecting to get far. But here’s what I found.

There’s a Gibson guitar factory here which gives tours, but I had no reservation and couldn’t get in. But the showroom was a colorful cornucopia of guitars.

There is a city beyond Beale Street’s three blocks. For instance, Main Street is a long pedestrian mall served by electric streetcars. There are, however, almost no pedestrians to be seen. Is it the heat? There are restaurants and discos, shops and offices. But I saw extremely few actual people.

The Mississippi River is only a few blocks away. Other than a tourist riverboat, and a barge train heading up-river, there was no one there either.

After dinner at a nice restaurant on Main Street, we walked back to Beale Street to get another music fix.

What we found was the Bike Night on Beale. Hundreds of bikes and bikers completely fill Beale Street’s three blocks every Wednesday during the summer. There was a competition of glitz, and a competition of volume between the bikers and the bluesmen.

If you not only like music, but like to know about how it came about, then there are two must-see sights in Memphis: Graceland and Sun Studio. The two are intertwined: Sun Studio is where Elvis auditioned for Sam Phillips and where he recorded his first earth shaking albums.

Sam Phillips was a Memphis recording engineer who got tired of seeing other record labels make the big money off the records he recorded, and started his own record company in the 1950s. What is arguably (1) the first rock-‘n’-roll record, “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston, was recorded there in 1951. Ike Turner composed the song and played keyboard. The list of artists who recorded there includes Howlin’ Wolf, BB King, James Cotton and Junior Parker. Later, rockabilly and country artist such as Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis came through.

But it was a 19 year old kid who pestered Phillips for a year that set off a chain of events and changed the music world in 1954. Elvis Presley, playing with two musicians that Phillips had hooked him up with (5), cut “That’s All Right”. And the rest is history.

Sun Studio itself is tiny, and the studio is lined with vintage instruments and equipment still used several days a week for recording sessions.

After lunch we went out to Graceland. The “Mansion” is a large house which wouldn’t look outsized in a lot of upscale neighborhoods in the New York suburbs. It is incredibly glitzy, in a 1960s and 1970s kind of way. The property contains a number of outbuildings, including a horse barn, racquetball court, a garage for golf carts, etc. All the trimmings of someone who had no constraints on what toys to buy.

Across the road, there is a large museum/theater/shopping/eating complex. We watched a bit of one of Elvis’s terrible movies, where he played the singer in a band who also is a race car driver (2). We saw a lot of glitzy costumes. There are rooms dedicated to Lisa Marie Presley, his only child and heir (3).

We also saw glitzy clothing in Lansky Brothers, the so-called “Clothier to the King” (4). While Sally encouraged me to go for it, I resisted.

This being Memphis, I couldn’t resist going back downtown Beale Street to hear some more blues.

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(1) The argument is made by Sun Studio and Sam Phillips.

(2) Spinout, (1968), also starring Shelley Fabares as a romantic interest.

(3) Lisa remains owner of the Mansion itself and 15% of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which owns all of the licensing rights to Elvis and his work.

(4) So-called by Lansky Brothers.

(5) Scotty Moore and Bill Black, who would perform in Presley’s band for many years.

The last post told you about the Peabody Duck March: a bunch of ducks swim around in a small lobby fountain all day, then the hotel sells a ton of drinks as tourists hang out in the lobby for upwards of an hour before to watch them walk down the red carpet to the elevator.

Yes, the ducks walk down a red carpet and take the elevator to their living quarters on the roof.

We happened to get back to the hotel from our afternoon excursion at exactly the right time, so we bellied up to the rope to watch them walk, I mean March, up close. Little did we know that we were in for a special treat today: there was an Honorary Duckmaster assisting in the ceremony.

Christine Williamson, Miss Tennesse 2018!

She successfully helped to herd the ducks down the carpet and into the elevator. We were very excited to be there to witness this historic event!

Monday we took the longest one-day drive we’ve ever done: 420 miles, going from Lexington south and west to Memphis. While we left in the rain, it was pretty uneventful except for when the iPhones’ clocks all changed an hour. I didn’t realize that the line between Eastern and Central time runs through the middle of Kentucky and Tennessee. This actually gave us an extra hour on a day when we could use it.

The Peabody in Memphis is an institution, and they have their renowned Duck March in the lobby twice a day. As the name suggests, a bunch of semi-trained ducks walk from the elevators to the lobby fountain in the morning, and back in late afternoon. We managed to arrive and snag a choice (although not prime) viewing spot among the crowds for what is ultimately watching some ducks walk for about a minute. But the hotel gets to sell a load of drinks while everyone is waiting.

The lobby is quite nice and ornate. The room itself is not up to (our) modern standards – only a tub shower, no minibar, ugly carpet, no obvious color scheme other than “all”. We can see the Mississippi River a few blocks away from our window, and both Arkansas and Tennessee across it. And there is a concierge on the floor, along with a nice buffet breakfast and afternoon drinks (1).

But we didn’t come to Memphis for the hotel – we came for music and music history. In the evening, we walked over to Beale Street, a few blocks away. Beale Street is three blocks of bars with a lot of music, mostly blues. We settled into one and had dinner, and wound up staying for the first hour of the show. The Eric Hughes Band was rockin’.

After walking Sally home (2), I came back to find some more music and watch the people in the street. Despite Memphis being 63% black (3), The people I saw were 95% white, and 50% old (4). We were pretty much all tourists, as further evidenced by the big busses parked a couple of blocks away.

None of that stopped the musicians, however. I heard everything from blues, to great funk/soul, to three white boys playing acoustic guitars, to a poor black woman singing Hotel California by reading the words from her phone and making up the melody as she went along.

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(1) The afternoon drinks don’t start until after the renowned Duck March, as they wouldn’t want to stop you from buying drinks in the lobby.

(2) Like a good southern gentleman.

(3) 2006-2008 American Community Survey, via Wikipedia.

(4) My eyeballs.