Let the music play in Tennessee

What do you think when you hear Memphis? Probably "Graceland". We don't consider ourselves being Elvis fans but we do like his music well enough, so here we are! In the meantime hubby downloaded 50 of his greatest hits. There's definitely more to Elvis than jailhouse rock, in the ghetto and love me tender.

No flash photography allowed!
So I can't show you what the jungle room, trophy room, etc. look like.
Just think extravagant ;-)

Airplane "Lisa Marie" - used for business or a spontaneous quick trip to Colorado,
because the little one had never seen snow before!

We avoided this crowd by doing the mansion tour the night before

If you are interested you can read more about Graceland tours
Colin wanted to know if Elvis was the President of the USA at some point? With all the JFK talk he must have thought we'd see lots of passed away ex-presidents on our trip ;-)

Getting out of Graceland, we tapped on our GPS for a dinner destination.
Again, we are travelling totally unprepared. When we planned our trip from Houston, TX to Chicago, IL, we had these main goals:

visit new states
visit hockey stadiums we had not been to yet
enjoy shopping and food
take pictures of gateway arch

So what a nice surprise we experienced when we found a parking space close to HRC Memphis:

Live music coming from every other bar or restaurant, a pedestrian zone with outdoor seating, artists,... welcome to Beale Street!

Colin was also very fond of FedEx Forum's ball collection - I especially liked the Christmas tree ball:

He was beyond tired (or else the chef at Hard Rock Cafe must have put something in his Mac'n'Cheese!?) because he was dancing in the streets and laughing like crazy. Or maybe he was just enjoying life to the fullest :-)

The next day we drove from Memphis to Nashville and stopped at a freeway exit in Jackson where we enjoyed some more block house / western good old times.

Arriving in Nashville, the first thing our hockey fan wanted to do was checking out Bridgestone Arena, home to the Nashville Predators. Well not tonight it wasn't. Tonight it was home to "One Direction" and thousands of dressed up, glitzy girls!

Wait for me, I wanna see them, too!

Fans spare no efforts!

The guy at the hotel lobby said we were lucky to get a room at all with all the events going on. Obviously the night before "new kids on the block" were playing! How knew they still existed!

Fortunately boygroups don't do to accommodation what basketball does. I remember one night almost 15 years ago. I was in the Tampa, FL area with my ex-boyfriend. I don't remember where we came from, but we had been driving the whole day and stuck in the worse possible traffic jam for the last 2-3 hours, and all we wanted to do was taking a shower and going to sleep. It had never been a problem to just walk into a hotel and ask for a room. Well, that night it was. And we were going to learn that some basketball finals were responsible for every hotel, motel, b&b and private accommodation being "fully booked" within a radius of 50 miles. That explained all the cars and TV vans making their way into the city! The receptionist who told us this, must have felt sorry for us and started making phone calls to his fellow receptionists, and they were all laughing at him. It was getting late and I came close to accepting that we would just camp out in the parking lot when he was starting to make signs while still listening to somebody on the phone. It turned out one of the basketball players didn't show up at his suite and they were giving it away!! We gave the guy a fat tip and hopped back in the car to get to our once in a lifetime accommodation. Never mind it was a bit overpriced!

So thank you, One Direction fans to share rooms and leave one for us! After a long day out and about we were happy to just "come home".