ThursdayFriday March 6/7 2025 -Tennessee road trip days 8/9 - Memphis TN - Some urban walking

Thursday we left Nashville and headed for Memphis.  We took TN-100 most of the way and it was a relaxing drive for Brian.  We stopped at Herb Parsons Lake, a favorite West TN hike for me, but there were signs about storm damage and not recommending trail use so we didn't hike.  Then I was a little confused and was thinking it was Holly Springs that was a super nice small town in Mississippi that would be good to visit.  Now I realize it's Oxford that is the picture perfect town, Holly Springs is a very small place with very little going on.  Still, we walked the town square and had a very rustic Southern style lunch buffet from a place called Southern Eatery.  I enjoyed the baked chicken, seasoned potatoes, squash and especially the black-eyed peas served in a very old building that almost felt like a saloon inside.  Brian didn't love the food overall but he did love the ice-box lemon pie he chose for desert.

It was late when we arrived at our hotel and I was totally floored when I opened the door to the lobby and booming loud nightclub music came flooding out.  The property is in the same building as the Memphis Amtrak depot but has been cleverly repurposed.  The hotel lobby is directly adjacent to a very wide staircase (like you might see in front of a courthouse or something) which leads down into the sunken bar.  Thursday night in particular must be an R&B or urban night because the music was mostly booming up tempo rap/dance music.  There were a LOT of people there that night and we felt pretty out of place because we just wanted something to eat.  As we drove into Memphis from Mississippi there just wasn't much of anything that was open or looked remotely appealing.  We placed our order for a turkey club sandwich and hummus plate around 10:15, just before the kitchen closed at 10:30.  While we waited for a food we sat and took in the ambiance and had a drink.  We took our food up into our room and, the sandwich in particular, was delicious.

The room itself was very cool and, remarkably, stone quiet.  There was a room with an actually comfortable couch, desk, very large TV and special speaker that can pipe in the lounge music.  It also had a heavy door that could close it off from the bedroom/bathroom area. The bathroom was super interesting and spacious with a tub and shower head then a tiled area next to the tub and with another shower head and then a swinging glass door.  I'm not sure why they offered two places to shower, both right next to each other and not really likely to be used simultaneously since there is no separation between the two showers.  I tried the tiled floor area but as usually happens with those oh so cool hinged glass bathroom shower doors, a lot of water made its way out into the main space and was annoying to sop up with the bath mat.

Friday I tried to let Brian sleep in while I went to an amazing bakery not far from the hotel in downtown Memphis. The entire time I lived in Memphis there was absolutely no reason in my daily life to ever go downtown and I very rarely did.  I was really surprised at the pockets of really upscale beautiful urban dining and shopping we say as we looked around later on Friday.  Unfortunately, you can't ignore the vacant buildings, broken automotive glass from vandalized cars and bars on the windows etc that far outnumber the cute shops.  Back to the bakery, it was so stylish and had such a stunning display of baked goods that it absolutely could have been from NYC or San Francisco.  We had cinnamon roll redemption after our lame Nashville roll and the bagels were great too.

 

The rest of Friday was spent bowling out in Collierville where I used to work, walking around downtown Memphis from the hotel and visiting the Pumping Station bar, my favorite bat in Tennessee that is still operating.  They had RuPaul's drag race on in the bar and there was a loud and lively but small group of people there including a roving drag queen with microphone asking patrons who they thought would get voted out etc. 

Overall, I'm very glad I scheduled our trip to have 3 nights in Nashville and 2 in Memphis.  While we could have done more in Memphis such as the civil rights museum, the overall Memphis vibe was not great.  The city continues to loose population, their roads are dreadful (but mostly not crowded) and for being a Friday night, the city seemed incredibly vacant and sleepy.  There are also just so many crappy cars driving around recklessly, many of them with temporary tags.  Overall, Memphis seems very caught up in ghetto games in a way that Nashville never was.  Demographically, Memphis and Nashville were not starkly different from a numbers perspective when I lived in Tennessee but the difference in what the populations feel like is immense.  Nashville is and was a growing city of people who seem focused on work and family and enjoy the fruits of a strong growing city with tons of opportunity.  While I know there are a ton of hard working great people in Memphis, what you see as a visitor and even as a resident is not hard working industrious people but scam artists and criminals.  Even our hotel in a great part of town had 24/7 on-site security sitting in a car just to monitor the comings and goings.  There are strobing blue lights with CCTV cameras ALL OVER Memphis and even the suburbs to provide at least some sense that crimes will be seen and pursued but clearly, from an intuitive or a numerical sense, they are failing miserably in almost every way.  I did drink a lot of their amazing tap water though.