Welcome to Mississippi, the penultimate state on my journey to 50 states! Phil and I flew to the Golden Triangle Regional Airport, which was a bit of a stressful journey because it was in the midst of the government shutdown and this was the weekend where they started cutting the numbers of flights that airports were allowed to run in an attempt to keep everything from coming to a screeching halt. I had to switch to an earlier flight to Atlanta to get there, and my flight home got cancelled and switched to a route that took me through Charlotte, but I did successfully make it to Mississippi and back.
A funny thing happens when you tell people that you’re almost done going to all 50 states. They inevitably ask which ones, and then weigh in on what they thing of those. I got a lot of people telling me that a certain state would be “nicer than you expect,” including West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Unfortunately, no one said that for Mississippi. Instead, in Arkansas, a man I met at a bar winced and told me, “maybe you should just drive through Mississippi really fast and count it that way.”
….ominous.
Here’s what I will say. I don’t think Starkville is the nicest town in America, and probably not even the nicest one in Mississippi (which is probably Oxford, from what I’ve heard). But the experience of going to a football game at Mississippi State was awesome. It was everything I wanted in a proper, Southern, college football experience. The stadium is intense and loud. The fans bring in cowbells and are capable of producing an absolutely deafening noise. They were playing Georgia, who was pretty unfazed (and ultimately won), but I can imagine it could be pretty intimidating as an opposing team. I had a great time.
After the game, we headed out of Mississippi and up to Memphis. Memphis, like Mississippi, has an interesting reputation. I’ve come across discussions online that make it sound like an active war zone. In fairness, it does have the highest crime rate in America, and while the next few positions are disputed across different lists based on how the various statistics are weighted, Memphis always seems to take the #1 spot. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got there.
I loved Memphis. As anyone could tell you, I love a misunderstood place. Personally, I didn’t feel unsafe there, even after Phil left and I was walking around downtown on my own. And I think the history and culture surrounding Memphis is top tier.
During my various travels across the South, I’ve been going to a lot of museums and monuments focused on Civil Rights. I think this one was the best one I’ve done. It was comprehensive, it felt as though all of the exhibits had been refreshed recently, and decidedly NOT fun fact, it is the site of MLK’s assassination. While that is a pretty bleak moment in history, they built a section where you could go into the hotel room and learn about the assassination, which was really well done.
Of course, the most important part of my impromptu walking tour of Memphis was the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid. You know I love a weird place, and this is one of the weirder ones out there. Depending on how you measure, it is the tenth-tallest pyramid in the world. It was built in 1991 as an arena, and used to host all kinds of events, including but not limited to basketball games, concerts, WWE, and high school graduations. After a attempt to turn it into an NBA arena ended in abject failure, it was taken over by Bass Pro Shops and developed into some sort of sporting goods fever dream. I didn’t go inside, but I was excited to see it in the context of the Memphis skyline.
I went to one other museum in Memphis, which was the Rock n’ Soul Museum. Memphis is inexplicably linked with Elvis – I didn’t quite have enough time to do a proper tour of Graceland, although I certainly would have if I’d had one more day in Memphis. I spent a lot of time on the musical history when I visited Nashville, and it seemed only right to give Memphis similar consideration. My favorite part was the audio guide, which…. if you didn’t want to listen the explanations, you could go find a jukebox and have it play you some of the best and most significant music that was produced in Memphis, which was an awesome soundtrack to my visit.
One other quirky place to talk about in Memphis, which was the Peabody Hotel! Phil assured me that it was “the only place to stay in Memphis,” and as usual, was correct. The Peabody is historic. It opened in 1925 and it is best known for the tradition of the ducks.
The ducks were brought to the hotel sometime in the 1930s by the General Manager, after a hunting trip where he and some friends had taken along call ducks. When they got back, they left the ducks in the fountain, where they quickly became fixtures of the hotel. Later, a bellhop who had been a trainer at the circus decided to up the ante, and he trained the ducks to march into the hotel lobby in the morning and back up to the penthouse in the eventing, where they sleep. It’s so charming! It was very chaotic to go and watch in person, since it felt like the whole hotel was lining up to try to see the ducks, but I’m glad I got to see them.
All in all, a solid weekend. And the following weekend, I had a big celebration planned – I was heading to New Orleans for my 50th state!