Drove my Chevy to the Levee, but the Levee was Dry

March 28, 2023 – Day 41

I was planning on titling this with a lyric from Paul Simon’s Graceland, something like this:

[Verse 1]
The Mississippi Delta
Was shining like a National guitar
I am following the river down the highway
Through the cradle of the Civil War

[Chorus]
I’m going to Graceland, Graceland
Memphis, Tennessee, I’m going to Graceland
Poor boys and pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland

But that’s way too long and then the Chevy showed up, but now we have to back up all the way to the morning.

We had a great pack out and hit the road pretty early, early for us. Looking at a 1:15pm arrival time, before stops, at the Tom Sawyer RV Park, yes, that’s it’s name, in West Memphis, AR (as in Arkansas). It would be an easy 200-ish miler day with a driver’s change at pretty much exactly the halfway point.

About half an hour in or so we realized we really should be playing Elvis songs, so we queued up a bunch. Man, they all sort of start sounding the same. (susan here: like there were 3 or 4 of them, with recycled lyrics. Nothing against The King but repetition repetition repetition got him famous and wealthy.)

Gas was easy to find but I swear, we need to stop going to Love’s. The are always such a confused, tangled mess. It was difficult to maneuver around all the other cars, but we managed gas up and find a place to park and eat a very quick lunch. (If that was you we blocked from the air pump, sorry!) We decided that maybe it was possible to have too much Elvis so we changed that.

Traffic was light, winds were low and then Susan said, “It is going to be an easy trip.” I glared at her.

Soon we saw the smoke, not us, just a grass fire, but a fairly nice size one right alongside the highway (it really was big and the shoulder had flame on it). The highways have signs saying to dial *SP for the state police. So we called, wrong number, tried again, wrong number. Well, what can you do? It isn’t a 911 situation.

(I thought, that’s odd, most states have *SP for the State Police. Later I realized that it was *ASP. )

Oh well, hope everyone is ok.

But to continue the jinx, traffic slowed down, then stopped, and there was a car, wrecked, sitting in the median strip.

Oh well, hope everyone is ok.

We pulled into the campground pretty much at 2pm, which is a record for us and really, really nice.

We’re lucky we weren’t here in 2011.