Memphis Photos

Beale Street during the day before it got busy.














Peabody Ducks, not the best photo ever but there is a duck swimming around in there.

An Antiques shop in the Ozarks.

This was the only photo we took of the drive through the Ozarks but most of the roads were single carriageway and windy.

Memphis

Memphis is about a 5 hour drive away heading down through the Ozarks National Forest. It was actually a very interesting and beautiful drive - for the first few hours anyway, after that we got a bit fed up. It seems that everyone here thinks of a 5 hour drive as absolutely nothing whereas to us it seemed a bit epic. Having recently arrived here it was our first real introduction to what is often referred to as the 'real America'. Lots of tiny little scatterings of run down trailers and static mobile homes (not sure I can call them towns) with piles of junk/scrap in their yards and no apparent source of employment nearby. Nearly every home or sometimes community had a 'yard sale/flea market' set up on their drive where it looked as is they were probably offering their entire wordly possessions to the highest bidder. And all of this set amongst dense woodland, rich fields (with some very nice looking farm houses), hiking trails and rivers.

After driving out of the Ozarks we drove through miles and miles of flat nothingness before arriving into Memphis on the Friday afternoon. It was kind of strange, we could see Memphis for miles before we arrived, it was a smallish collection of highrise buildings in the middle of nowhere with seemingly very limited suburbs. After checking into the hotel we decided to head straight out and were immediately struck by the fact that we seemed to be pretty much the only people there, it was kind of creepy, like somekind of ghost town or perhaps a wild west town about to have a shoot out!

It is too long ago to remember the exact order we did things in so I am just going to list them.

We went to the Peabody Hotel to watch the famous duck parade. At 11am the ducks are escorted from their duck house on the roof of the hotel by the duck master, he leads them into the lift and then from the lift, along a specially laid red carpet to the hotel water fountain in the centre of the lobby where they swim around until 4pm when the duck parade is reversed. It was infact pretty busy in the hotel and at 4pm we jostled for space and watched the ducks jump out of the fountain and waddle across to the lift. Mini Monkey enjoyed it but would have liked the show to go on a bit longer, we enjoyed it too in a 'bit of a novelty' kind of way.

We then headed to Beale Street, famous for its 'blues' type bars and cafes. The weather was still warm enough for us to sit outside and we stayed for several hours listening to live bands, drinking Blue Moon beer out of 'Big Ass Beer' cups (which must be approx equivalent of 1.5 pints) and eating deep fryed cat fish for me and smoked ribs for Daddy Monkey and surprisingly Mini Monkey enjoyed the ribs too.

Next morning we got up early and headed to Graceland (and then realised why the streets were so empty, all the people for miles around must have been here only to pay tribute to Elvis). We queued to buy tickets, then queued to get onto the bus which took us across the road to Graceland. We did an audio tour of the mansion with its extreme decor and opulent fitments and then out to the grounds before being bussed back across the road to the Elvis car museum which was impressive, and a couple of small clothing and other items 'museums' which were not that good, we saw the main clothing collection in Graceland. Graceland it probably better described with photos which I will post, along with comments, later.

We then tried to go to Sun Valley Studios but they did not allow children under 5 on their tours and after driving around a bit more we decided we had seen enough anyway.

That night we went back to Beale Street which was absolutely heaving. There were Police checkpoints at either end of the road checking people in and out, street acrobats, stalls etc, etc. We stayed there for a bit and then heard from other people that there was a free jazz festival a few streets over, we headed across and listened for a while but to be honest it was just one band at a time on a stage, they were good but there were good live bands in every bar on Beale Street. We then wandered up and down the large collection of stalls selling stuff and ate some very nice Mexican food at one of the stalls before heading back to Beale Street.

The next day we went to the Zoo. We love the Zoo and it is always a good day out for us because mini monkey enjoys it so much. This was a well laid out Zoo with lots of animals of every kind, large enclosures and plenty to see and do. Our favourite thing was the grizzly bears, at feeding time the keeper stood above a pool of water with a glass side/wall cutting across it. He rang a bell and the 3 grizzlies came running across and all jumped straight into the water. He then threw large pieces of fruit such as peeled melon and apples into the water which the bears ate right in front of the glass with all of us stood right the other side of the glass watching them. Finally the keeper threw a large ice block with fruit frozen into it and the bears went and lay at the far side of the pool in the shallows and gnawed at their treats.

On the Monday we headed back home.

Update!

Ok, so I have been totally rubbish at keeping up to date with my blog so I am going to try and catch up over the next few weeks by giving a bit of an overview of what we have been up to and where we have been.

Daddy Monkey gets 10 Federal Holidays a year which are basically our equivalent of bank holidays and his training establishment add on an extra day (training day) to each of these which means that we get a 4 day weekend nearly every month (with the exception of March and April). We have tried to focus in on these as being a great time to visit places closer to us (close by US standards anyway) and to build holidays around without using up all of his annual leave.

I will sign off now and start composing an overview of our first long weekend to Memphis, all the way back in September on the Labour Day weekend.

Photos of Missouri

The front of our house.

From the side you can see how the ground slopes and gives us a lower floor. This is our new trampoline!

Preying Mantis on our balcony.

Lots of stick insects over here!

mmm... red sugar syrup, my favourite!

Quilting!

Initial Impressions of Missouri

I am not really sure if it is possible to write about everything we have done since arriving here in Missouri. We have only been here for a few weeks but we have been so very busy that I cannot possibly cover everything. So I guess I will try to give you an overview.

I am sat curled up in my enormous circular, cushioned rocking chair looking out at my balcony, the dense woodland behind our house and the selection of bird feeders we have set up. This includes 2 syrupy red hummingbird feeders, a birdseed holder and a peanut and suet block that is hung from suction cups and attached to our window. The barometer is reading 99 F/39 C and it is 2.30 in the afternoon (this is not the hottest day we have had), hence the fact I am sat inside in the air conditioning.

We arrived at our new house in the dark, feeling absolutely shattered and were met by our predecessors. They chatted to us for a bit and then left to let us get some rest. Because we only overlapped with our predecessors by 2 days they had set up a pretty punishing schedule for us. This included getting our ID cards, setting up all of our bills, driving around the area, meeting far too many people to possibly remember their names and generally trying to sort everything out.

We were told before we moved over that our house was not one of the best in our road and I will admit that from the outside it is not all that impressive but inside we really like it. The outside of our house looks like wood panelling but it is actually a sort of plastic/carbon fibre. Inside we have a large open plan kitchen, dining, sitting room area. A u\tility room that leads into our double garage, 2 decent size single/small double bedrooms, a bathroom and our master bedroom which is very big and has the most enormous wardrobes ever and I am totally in love with them and an en-suite. Then downstairs we have 2 more double bedrooms, a bathroom, storm shelter and a very big ‘family room’. To be honest the downstairs still doesn’t really feel like part of our house, I don’t go down there very often and somehow it feels a lot bigger and emptier than upstairs but Daddy Monkey has big plans for the space which includes a pool table, darts board etc. We have inherited a jumbled selection of furniture that is owned by the embassy but has been purchased by various different people over the last decade or so. There is a mix of styles, quality and condition but luckily we have enough stuff that we kind of like to furnish upstairs and then all of the other stuff is either downstairs or stacked up in the storm shelter. This area is quite hilly and most of our garden is on a reasonably steep slope. The hill from our house up to the main road is very steep (I have walked up pushing Mini Monkey in her pushchair a few times and regretted it as I was dripping with sweat by the time I got to the top) and apparently in the winter we will not be able to get our car up the hill in the icy or snowy weather. We have been advised to make friends with someone who lives at the top of the hill and park our car at their house.

Our local town is called St Robert and is basically a long string of large shops widely spaced along a busy dual carriageway. Lots of towns around here seem to be similar in that the shops are placed along a busy road and so far apart that you have to drive between them. It is not pretty and there is certainly no character here. Being so close to a military instillation the majority of the shops seem to be martial arts studios, pawn shops, hunting and fishing shops, tattoo parlours, hardware and DIY stores, car/pick-up retailers and restaurants/fast food outlets. There is an absolutely enormous Walmart that pretty much sells everything that you could ever want, outdoor stuff, indoor stuff, rifles – yes rifles, clothes, food, electricals, opticians, hairdresser, photographers etc etc. In reality it is the only shop that I really use around here.

There is an abundance of wildlife around here and I will have a quick go at trying to remember them all. Obviously the dreaded snakes and spiders, luckily the only evidence I have found of these is a long dead and dried-up snake and several yuckily large but not poisonous spiders. We asked our landlord to move a large pile of old railway sleepers from our garden and he found a snake in there but I didn’t see it. There are wild tortoises (the Americans call them turtles) that like to sunbathe on the roads, I have seen several. Armadillos I have unfortunately only seen as road kill but there must be a lot of them, skunks and racoons – generally regarded as pests, I am yet to see them. Stick insects, crickets, preying mantis, frogs, cicadas I have seen lots of. There are lots of beautiful birds, I don’t know all of their names but there are woodpeckers, bright red birds, mustard yellow birds, bright blue with red tummy, grey with pink tummy and my favourite is the humming birds which are tiny and brilliant green when they catch the sunlight right.

Apparently there are deer in our woods but usually they are closely pursued by hunters; deer hunting and shooting animals of all types is very popular over here. There are adverts up for the thanksgiving turkey shoot. There are also a lot of people who hunt with cross bows, our neighbours had a plastic deer outside their house the other day and were showing their children how to shoot it with a cross bow. There are also lots of very realistic plastic rifles and guns for young children to play with. At a neighbour’s house Mini Monkey played with a yellow and red rifle that you could cock, load cartridges in, aim and actually fire!

The camp is 7 miles in a straight line from our house and is huge. There is pretty much every type of facility you could want. Child care, full size hospital with A&E, shopping, sports pitches, several gyms, airport, playparks, rivers etc. It is around 17miles to drive straight through the middle of it and apparently takes around half and hour due to the speed restrictions.

The international community of other exchange officers has been really friendly and welcoming and we have been invited to several functions at their houses. We have often found that our weekends are so full of watching their children play American Football, going to BBQ’s and parties that we have just not found the time to explore some of the other towns that are 40-90 mins away which apparently are much more interesting than where we live. We have however managed to get over to the large retail outlet about an hour from here and hit the Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger shops, in fact we were so impressed that we decided to go back the next day whilst the sales were still on. Designer family here we come!

I have taken up quilting, it is really popular over here, and I have bought myself a sewing machine so that I can make some quilts. I am making a sampler quilt first which consists of 9 blocks of fabric each constructed differently using a different technique of sewing and cutting. Not sure that I will manage anything much more complicated than that just yet though!

About 2 weeks after we arrived it was Labour Day weekend and Joe had a 4 day weekend so we decided to head off to Memphis!

The Journey to Missouri

At 8am on the Monday morning, after a very full weekend of sightseeing we attended several briefings from the Embassy. They were about lots of different things like pay, allowances, American culture, housing, driving etc. The man giving the lecture said that some of the locations you will be living in are going to be very different to what you are used to and far more remote than the UK, I believe that we even have a family going to Missouri! From that point on we were referred to each time they put up joke slides of horrible trailer park accommodation etc ‘oh yes, that will be in Missouri, haha’, kind of funny but also a little alarming. I must say I began to worry about exactly what we were letting ourselves in for if even the Embassy staff were laughing at us and wondered if it was too late to change our minds! I didn’t get the chance to ask because Mini Monkey took this opportunity to run away, around the room, behind the power point and up to the speaker. Daddy Monkey then politely suggested that I remove both myself and her from the room. The guys then went off for further briefings and we had lunch and waited, and waited and our taxi for the airport arrived and Daddy monkey still wasn’t back. He eventually arrived a bit flustered (they had run over) and we dashed off to the airport – late – and hurried to the check in. The individual bag allowance turned out to be a strict 50lb limit. We were obviously travelling with far more bags than any normal holiday and whilst they had all been accepted onto our international flight with no problem it turned out that when they were weighed for our domestic flight they were all around 54-56lb and this was unacceptable. Therefore with not that long to go until our flight, feeling a bit stressed to start with and with a long queue of people behind us we had to open and re-pack all of our bags. Mini monkey took it upon herself to grab items out of our open cases and run off with them, easily slipping under barriers and gliding around other passengers’ legs with Mummy Monkey in awkward pursuit and Daddy Monkey steaming away by the cases and trying to find small heavy items to put into our hand-luggage. Luckily the strange system they had was that you were given the bags back after they were weighed and then took them somewhere else to check-in so I was able to start sneaking things taken out of the bag being weighed and put them into the weighed bags. Eventually they were all sorted and the lady even let us off with the final bag being 1.5lb over weight, only because I think she was probably fed up with us by then. We rushed straight through to the plane and it was tiny, it had propellers and everything! Inside there were 2 seats on one side an aisle and 1 seat on the other. Daddy Monkey sat with Mini Monkey on one side and I sat on my own, about 2 minutes later I sat on one side with Mini Monkey and Daddy sat on his own. Mini Monkey would have liked this to continue indefinitely however the fasten seat belt sign came on and off we went. They kept the seatbelt sign on for the first hour with me trying desperately to keep squirmy, screaming Monkey in her seat and the nasty airhostess walking up and down telling me that Mini Monkey needed to be seated properly with her seatbelt correctly fastened (yeah, you try and keep her still!). When the sign eventually went off I practically threw Mini Monkey at Daddy (she had been crying for him the whole time) only for the airhostess to say that Mini Monkey could not sit with Daddy because there was only one drop down oxygen mask on that side of the plane. Simple; Daddy and I swapped seats. Mini Monkey then started screaming for me (typical!) so I moved over and we all sat together. Oh no, this was also unacceptable because despite the fact that there are actually three oxygen masks on that side apparently some flight law says that a child of 2 and over has to be in their own seat. After a particularly awful flight during which Mini Monkey did not stop screaming we eventually arrived in St Louis (pronounced St Lewis as I keep being corrected) at around 7:30pm, picked up our hire car and drove the 2 hours to our new home.

Washington

We have been pretty busy since we arrived here in the US and I am going to try to remember everything so here goes…

We flew around 7.5 hours from Heathrow to Washington. Mini monkey was pretty good on the flight and quickly made friends with several other small children and played nicely in the aisles. We had a fairly bumpy landing which made me turn white and quite literally grab the sick bag just in case and mini monkey throw her arms up in the air and shout weeee… typical. The weather in DC was hot, even in the evening when we arrived. The hotel was lovely and in a great location – thanks Embassy. That night we just went for some food and then crashed out in our room, we were all shattered and jetlagged.
We spent the first full day walking, walking and walking some more. We got sunburnt (not mini monkey), blistered feet (again not mini monkey) and bitten pretty mercilessly by the mosquitoes (all of us but especially me). We loved Washington; it is great; grand and green. However I was surprised at how small and relatively unimpressive the white house is in comparison to its neighbours. In fact when we first saw it daddy monkey and I spent some time discussing firstly if it was actually the white house and then if it might in fact be the side view we were looking at (as we busily turned the map round and round and did lots of frowning); but it wasn’t, it was the front. I think my favourite place was definitely the Lincoln Memorial and the wonderful view across the reflecting pool to the obelisk.



































We then headed to the Smithsonian museum area via a variety of other monuments and landmarks, and had a look in the air and space museum and the museum of the Native American. If we had more time and did not have a small and easily bored child we could easily have spent several days looking at all of the museums, there were a mass of them and they are all free and really excellent.

Day two we decided to get a day pass for the metro and head to a few specific locations like the Arlington Cemetery, The Pentagon, and the Library of Congress etc again a long and tiring day. We decided to get off the metro one stop before the cemetery and walk down to it but as we got up into the station it wasn’t obvious which way we should go so we asked the ticket lady who looked at me as though I was stupid and told me that to get there ‘ya’ll need to head on all back down and ged’n the blue line for one more stop’ I explained again that I had chosen to get off here and wanted to walk; with the same expression on her face she said ‘but why, why ya’ll wanna walk’ I explained, she said ‘no, ‘arl tell ya what ya’ll wanna do, ya wanna get back on the metro, ‘arm not een sure it’s possible to walk tut cemetery from here’ I finally convinced her to give me directions and she walked away muttering and shaking her head. About 7 minutes later we arrived at the cemetery, on foot, and I can now confirm that yes, it is possible to walk there from the metro station.

We were totally amazed and impressed by the sheer scale of everything over here. They are such a patriotic nation and have invested such thought, effort and money into commemorating every single conflict they have been involved in and every president who has ever been. Even the walls of the metro contained quotes and references, every spare inch of space has a memorial of some type and I think I respect their attitude and outlook in these matters. Overall we had a fantastic weekend in Washington and I would definitely like to go back at some point and visit all of the museums and institutes we didn’t manage to see. However by the time we got on the plane to St Louis we were exhausted and very stressed, more on that in the next instalment.

(I'll have mine to go please)