This is Oklahoma? Where's Nicole Kidman on a horse?

Day 3

We had thought we’d swing by Graceland this morning, look at the house, then drive onto the Civil Rights Museum. However, the Elvis, Inc. people are crafty, in that you can’t get anywhere near the house unless you pay the $20 charge and take the official Graceland bus over to the place. We figured, what the hell, we just came all the way out here, we’ll do the tour thing. Graceland is… not all it’s cracked up to be. Apologies to my sister and everyone else who told me to go, but… eh. It was tacky, but not quite as over-the-top as I could have hoped. I liked the pea-green shag carpeting on the ceiling, though. That and the large number of very ornate posters that were left by his grave site. I'm talking days of work were put into these things. I don't know if that's touching or weird.

Unfortunately, this left us with no time to go to the Civil Rights Museum, which looked extremely interesting. It’s housed in the former Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated in 1969 in room307. That part of the hotel is unchanged, and looks exactly the same as it does in the picture taken minutes afterward, with all the people pointing towards where the assassin was. It was really, well, creepy, and gave a slightly more sobering portrait of Memphis. I recommend it to anyone who is there.

So, Arkansas is…. Flat. The Eastern part, that is. Pretty dull. However, it is the start of States That Kelly Has Never Been To. We stopped in Little Rock for lunch, where we had to ask the question, where are all the people? Ben? Did you see anyone where you were there? It’s a good sized town, and there’s lots of buildings and cars, but not a single person anywhere in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. We felt like we were in the middle of 28 Days Later, and Bill Clinton’s former mistresses were going to come out of closets with bright red eyes, going for our brains.

The good part of Arkansas is the Ozarks, about 2 hours northwest of there. We found Altus, which is the wine capital of Arkansas, found the one vineyard that was still open, woke up the one guy working there, and I checked another state off my list of places to drink wine. We also drove through Alma, Arkansas, which is apparently the spinach capital of the world. That’s at least what it says on the statue of Popeye on Main street (let’s just say one-horse town is a little too big to describe Alma). We of course got our pictures taken with him for posterity.

Ok, Dawson, I will back you up right now when you say Oklahoma is pretty. Because, at sunset, where there’s trees and lakes and a sky that these city girls haven’t seen so colorful in years, it is really pretty. Unfortunately we were also hungry, and there ain’t much to find in Eastern Oklahoma. We tried Checotah, which the sign helpfully told us is “Home of Carrie Underwood, winner of American Idol,” but apparently Carrie left town for a reason. I have no other tales to tell for today, unfortunately. We’re holed up in a cheap hotel in Oklahoma City watching reruns. Life is exciting sometimes.

Photo explanations: Us going down a trolley-only street in Memphis, a sign near Graceland, Erin and Adina frolicking with the cows in Arkansas, and photos with Popeye in Alma