Graceland

November 15, 2007 – 5:31 pm

Last month I had a chance to visit Graceland –Elvis Presley’s home/’museum’. I admit that I don’t know much about Elvis for various reasons (I am not into Rock & Roll music and I didn’t move to the USA until 2000 to know much about it). I am not alone though, lot of the ‘new generation’ do not know much about him. I have often seen replicas, or copy-cats if you will, of Elvis roaming about, the most recent one in Niagara Falls, NY.

So the reason I visited his house was because I often travel to Memphis for work and apart from Graceland and a couple of other places, there is not much to see in Memphis. So my work colleagues decided that since our Memphis trips will probably cease, and if we don’t visit Elvis’s place, it would be a shame.

So the Friday afternoon, before our flight back home to Chicago, we went to Graceland. And boy it was some sight in the middle of nowhere. You wont find a lot of tourists in Memphis, except may be downtown, but Graceland was packed full with out-of-towners. At that point I remembered from a couple of months ago, when it was Elvis’s 30^th anniversary and I had seen on news that the streets around his house were packed full with hundreds, if not thousands of people.

So we go through the line to purchase tickets for various ‘shows’.

First we went to see his private planes. There were 2 planes on display – one of them Lisa Marie (named after his daughter) was a decently sized plane with all the luxuries and amenities you can ask for in a private plane – leather sofas and chairs, dining tables, beds, TVs nice bathrooms etc. All of these ‘artifacts’ were covered with a transparent lining to preserve and protect them against any spillovers or fading.

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The second plane, Jet-Star, was a significantly smaller plane which didn’t have much to see except the passenger seats, which were blocked off anyways.

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Next off we went to Elvis’s jumpsuit exhibit. There were about 100 of his jumpsuits displayed that he wore throughout his career. I think all of them were custom tailored for various performances through out his career and for his wedding.

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Next we went to the car exhibit which had quite a few cars and carts on display that Elvis or someone in his family had driven. I bet if those cars are put up for bidding, they can easily fetch somewhere in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Our last stop was the ultimate place-Graceland-the house where Elvis had lived. We lined up at the shuttle stop where people board to get the house across the street from the rest of the exhibits. We were handed out small personal audio tour guides, which we control ourselves depending on the location in the house.

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The house itself was not that big but the yard around the house, the inside decoration and the outside amenities were truly spectacular. For example, almost all of the basement CIELINGS were carpeted; which looked beautiful, there was basement lounge with big screen TV and record player, a pool table to entertain his friends etc. Elvis also had a small shooting range in his back yard, as well as a stable for horses (although we didn’t spot any during our tour).

Our last stop before we hurried to the shuttle was his grave. He is buried next to the swimming pool, with about 3 other graves on his side. We walked across from people who were paying tribute to him, since we had to catch our flight, but we did get a decent enough glimpse of his grave.

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I can say I have a little more knowledge of Elvis than I did before I visited Graceland, although I wish we had more time to really look through everything and listen to the audio tour. As I said, since we had to catch our flight back home, we rushed through quite a few places in the house that needed a little more time.

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Although I can say now that I have been to Graceland.

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