I am writing tonight from Memphis.

We left Baton Rouge this morning and drove to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to meet my sister and her husband. Then we began the trip to Memphis.

Now, if the point of the trip was to get to Memphis, we would have taken the interstate and arrived in Memphis at about 4:00 in the afternoon. Not the point.

My grandmother died when I was very young, so my grandfather was a fairly young widower. When he would go on trips I would travel with him to keep him company. I would bring my ukulele or guitar and we would sing in the car as we traveled. And we would stop at anything that looked interesting. Or if we got hungry. Or if I had to go to the bathroom. Or because it had been an hour since we last stopped. 

It took forever to get anywhere, but we always had a blast. My father used to refer to this as “traveling like Ike.”

Today we reveled in traveling like Ike. We drove the “Blues Trail” up highway 61. We left at noon and stopped an hour north of Vicksburg to eat lunch at the Onward Store. We saw the (alleged) birthplace of Muddy Waters. We saw the Ground Zero Blues Club and went to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksville, MS. We even stopped again for dinner at the “famous” Como Steakhouse in Como, MS (it really is famous and it really is good!).

We finally rolled into Memphis about 11:00. In the snow.

It was the perfect end to a perfect day of traveling like Ike.