Gettin’ Out of Memphis

After recovering from the assault of zombies and frozen drinks in plastic trumpets we still had a little bit of the morning in which to explore Memphis. We wandered down to the Civil Rights museum, which is -next door to the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.

They’ve restored the hotel, and brought in a pair of cars that are identical to the ones that were actually there. It feels odd standing there - different than the other historical site I’ve visited. Usually historical sites are vague and fuzzy – a battlefield, a building, even a city. I’ve never been to one where you know that the precise spot where history turned is right up there, on that balcony. It makes the event a more concrete.

They have a large museum there, but we didn’t have time to see it. Instead we hopped the streetcar back to the hotel just in time for checkout. Afterwards we spent a little more time wandering Memphis.

I discovered they’ve got a thing for big shiny metal sculptures. Like pyramids.

And… um, whatever this thing is. I have no idea what it’s called. It looks like the kind of bizarre shape a cosmologist would use to describe the shape of a closed universe in 42 dimensional spacetime. Or like two witches’ hats joined at their tops by a tornado. In any case, it big, sinuously curvy and made out of shiny. So whatever it may actually be, to Wendy & I it’s your basic photographic playground, a veritable cornucopia of wacky reflections and abstract shapes. Hmm, actually it looks a bit like a cornucopia too…. oh whatever.

Anyway, the kids seem to spend more time playing with it than thinking of weird ways to describe it. Which probably makes them smarter than me.

Unfortunately it’s also a little warm. OK, a lot warm. Actually, I think it may be a prototype for a solar power plant – the kind where they focus a thousand mirrors on one spot until you can boil sodium. You can also use it to get a sunburn in roughly seven seconds.

After reluctantly leaving the pretty, shiny thing behind (there are more photos!), we headed south out of Memphis. Not long after we got onto I-55 someone carelessly left a mattress lying on the freeway. The car in front of us had the misfortune to cross paths with it at about 75 mph. A sudden gout of stuffing blew up over the top of the car, like they had hit an entire flock of geese. They ran over part of the rest, which I narrowly dodged. Still startled, I blew past them at full speed – they had dropped to perhaps 35 and were still pushing a skeletal frame of wires in front of them while trying to find a way to escape the middle lane with cars flying past at 75 MPH on both sides. It must’ve been an interesting call to the insurance company.

 

 

Washout

Another one from the 2010 Worldwide Photowalk. Mostly I just liked the warm areas of color in this one. Some sort of message was chalked on the sidewalk – it’s been partially washed away. Sunset light is reflected in the remaining puddle.

Photowalk 2010

Last weekend was the 3rd annual Worldwide Photowalk. This was actually my first one. It was a blast, I wish I could’ve caught the previous two!

We started near the Pepsi Center and wandered toward the Auraria campus. For such an urban area it has a surprising amount of plant life in a series of small gardens and plantings. It’s really quite nice.

The Memphis Zombie Blues

The second day of our trip we managed to escape Kansas. After a brief trip through Oklahoma and a turn onto I-40, our directions simply said "Pass through Arkansas." That's it, for an entire state. And that pretty much sums it up. Sure, we saw some pretty landscape, made a few jokes about stopping off at the Bill Clinton Presidential Library to see if it was anything like what Frank Caliendo said.

Our destination for the day was Memphis. We were only there for an evening and a morning, but it was a heck of a good time. We headed down to the party district, Beale Street and snagged a nice patio table outside BB Kings. After some tasty Memphis barbecue, the place was overrun with the undead!

Through a bit of luck and a lot of good research & planning on Wendy’s part, we were in the perfect spot to catch the Memphis Zombie Massacre. They put on a great show – it was even bigger than Denver’s Zombie Crawl.

Suffice to say we took a photo or two. Thousand. Anyway, I don’t want to go overboard here, but click through to the gallery and there are a ton of zombie photos.

The police seemed unconcerned about the zombie hordes. Unconcerned enough to strike a pose full of attitude, anyway.

Afterwards we wandered Beale Street. It’s a mini-Bourbon Street, minus the porn shops and about 95% of the stench. Most importantly, they do have walk up bars with bigass frozen drinks. Through another luck/research/planning confluence it was the tail end of the Memphis in May music festival. The street was packed with musicians, party people, and street performers.

There was a stage down every alley, or at least every alley we walked down. This particular one had a good blues band (with a keyboard player from Wisconsin!) Part way through the singer you see here came up from the audience and sang a couple songs. She was actually really good! The girl’s got some soul!

At some point we stumbled back to the hotel to prepare for day three of vacation. Yes, I know, at this rate it’ll take me until roughly Halloween to make it through this vacation. I’m trying here, OK? In the mean time, check out some more photos.

Rolling (Through) Hills

IT’s time (well, was time) for another road trip! Our longest yet, down to New Orleans – 1600 road miles from Denver.

There’s some really interesting terrain between Denver and New Orleans. There’s just not a whole lot of it. We spent the first day just getting to the other side of Kansas – it’s a damn big state!

Although it’s maybe not the single most interesting bit of the US, I actually enjoyed Kansas. It’s actually pretty in a wide-open sort of way, and not quite the Cartesian plain everyone says it is. The only real downside was that the sun turned the car into a greenhouse. After a while we were cruising along shirtless. But I’ll spare you those photos.

But we did get to see a little bit of roadside Americana in Kansas. We just happened to pass by this big (12 foot?) Buffalo Bill statue so we pulled off on a whim. They’re actually very nicely executed sculptures, and they look right at home on the Great Plains.

We also stopped off at the infamous Dodge City. Dodge City is not the archetypal Wild West town it once was, but they do have the Boot Hill Graveyard Museum and Tourist Trap. It was mildly interesting, but also unsettling. Not due to the (now empty) graves, but because there were three times as many staff as customers. Every time we went into one of their little shops there were a bunch of bored employees in Old West period dress staring at us. It’s gets unnerving after a while.

After escaping the vortex of tourism we continued across southern Kansas to Wichita. Along the way we got some pretty decent barbecue in a dusty no-name restaurant, and some miserably bad Mexican at a crappy “family” chain. Not the most exciting day of vacation ever, but not too bad. And they only got better from there.

 

A few more random photos:

City Park Fountain

I ran over to City Park the other night for a quick sunset shoot. The clouds didn’t deliver, but just after sundown the fountain really lights up.

 

In other news, I was planning to get back to posting more regularly this week. Then my laptop decided to become really unstable – it’s crashing randomly. So I haven’t been able to get any real work done. Hopefully I’ll get a new machine soon and be able to get back to posting. Fingers crossed!