Memphis!!

After eight hours of driving to Memphis for the Iowa State vs. Tulsa Liberty Bowl game, we arrived at the hotel, unpacked and went to a really cool restaurant called Blue’s City Café, which had a really cool pink Cadillac hanging on the ceiling and really nice and funny waiters. I had really good chicken tenders with amazing barbeque sauce.

The next day we went to Graceland and got a tour of Elvis’s house. After my dad forced us to listen to about three hours of Elvis radio on the way to Memphis, I wasn’t really looking forward to going to Elvis’s house, but I was pleasantly surprised. He got headphones which told fun facts about elvis’s life, his house was decorated very interestingly and we got to go into his two planes. We saw his funky looking outfits, his rooms which were very gaudy looking (one had crazy patterned carpet on the floors, ceilings and the walls), and after spending a few hours there I can say I am now a fan of Elvis. After we visited Elvis’s house it was around 1:00 and we were starving so we drove around and found this restaurant called the Butcher Shop, which happened to have one of the best burgers in town and we didn’t have to weight very long at all for them. Then we went back to the hotel, relaxed a little, visited a couple little shops, and got ready to go to the rodeo. The rodeo was a blast! It was extremely entertaining (except for this annoying clown that was supposed to entertain you, but just made dumb jokes and interrupted the actual rodeo). That was the first time I have went to a rodeo and I would love to go to another one!

We started the next day by going to the Peabody hotel to watch the ducks walk in. Every day at 11 am five ducks ride down the elevator from the roof of the building to the fountain and walk back to the elevator and back to the roof every day at 5:00 pm. So we waited a while, some guy gave a brief history about the Peabody and the ducks, and then watched five adorable ducks wobble down to the fountain. After watching the ducks we rode a trolley down to a restaurant called Central Barbeque. I got barbeque pork, which was extremely good and possibly the best barbeque I have ever had. Afterwards we went across the street to the Civil Rights Museum. The museum was interesting, but I think it focused too much on Martin Luther King Jr.’s death rather than his inspirational life. After the museum we went to the mall Wolf Chase Galleria and shopped a while. That night we went to a place called Silky O'Sullivan's, where we enjoyed some appetizers and then spent a couple hours singing songs, listening to the band, and cheering with the other Iowa State fans, which were starting to take over Beale Street.

By our fourth day in Memphis we were starting to get tired and there were cyclones everywhere. For every Tulsa fan we saw we saw easily over 50 cyclones (all wearing red and Gold). You could not go anywhere in downtown Memphis without seeing a bunch of fans. Restaurants on Beale were even running out of food and beer, because of how many cyclone fans there were!!! We decided to go to BB King’s, which is a pretty famous restaurant, at 11:00 am, because we figured that would be our only chance of actually getting to eat there without a two hour wait for food and not getting a table, and we were probably right. We had to wait a little less than an hour and I ended up getting to taste by far the best fried chicken, which you dipped in a mouthwatering gravy sauce. After we ate we walked around Beale street, I bought a really cool hat, and then people started lining up along the road for the parade, which didn’t start for a couple of hours, so we lined up along the road too. This was probably not very smart, because even though we got a really good spot for the parade it was freezing, we were tired and after the parade (which lasted way too long) we didn’t even feel like going to the pep rally. We lazily walked over to where the pep rally was taking place and saw how packed it was. I heard someone say that they weren’t allowing anyone else in, because there wasn’t enough room, so we walked around with numb feet looking for a restaurant that we didn’t have to wait over an hour for a table. We found a little restaurant where we could sit down right away and soon realized that it wasn’t crowded, because it was quite expensive. We ordered appetizers and headed back to the hotel, not even attempting to party on Beale Street, because of how cold and tired we were and how crowded everything was.

The next day was game day. We headed down to a really cool stadium and tailgated for a few hours and then headed into the stadium, which was almost as cool inside as it looked from the outside. The Iowa State side was almost completely full, while the Tulsa side was almost empty. The game started out really good. Iowa State was winning 17-7 by the end of the first quarter, but then it took a drastic down turn and we ended up losing 17-31. After the game we ordered Aldo’s pizza, and ate some very delicious and unique pizza’s.

Although the game was very disappointing, I am glad we went up early, had fun, and ate extremely good food.

 

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