HiJenx

We left our not so stellar motel in Dickson (the guy next door smoked and drank in his doorway most of the night while listening to horrible music) and had a look at Memphis, Tennessee. I was keen to find out what it was really like because it has so many contrary considerations. It is famous for its music and having its own unique style of barbecue, but makes most of the most violent cities in the US lists, like this one and this one.

We did really enjoy their style of barbecue. If you eat pork and go to Memphis, we do highly recommend it. It was honestly amazing, and I am not even normally that into pork other than bacon. Chris, as a big pork fan, was very very happy. We highly recommend Central BBQ:

After chatting to some lovely locals at the bbq place, we checked out the city. The houses seemed to indicate some big disparity between the best and worst off in Memphis. We saw a lot of houses in this sort of condition:
But also many like this:

We also saw things like this (not the writing in red on the right hand side):

There also seemed to be an attempt at a parking scam, which you can check out in the video:

We didn’t feel that safe in the city, so we carried on toward Graceland. This is as close as we could get. It was 10 dollars just to park. In theory, you could walk up to take a photo of the house, but you would have had to park far away. It would have cost around 100 dollars for both of us to go in the house with the parking, so we decided to give it a miss. The house was in no way visible from the road, nor was his grave:

We decided to leave Tennessee and get into Arkansas a bit. It was one of the many river borders, so the crossing was a bridge:
We stayed in Forrest City, which was honestly quite awful. It was clearly on a primary route for truckers, so none of it was very nice in terms of accommodation. That said, it was dirt cheap and they do have a good Chinese restaurant which had such truly massive portions, even by American standards, that we saved half for then next day.