Ben Strano

Yesterday Katie wanted to go on a drive until we are lost excursion. 

We took four different poker chips (doesn’t everyone keep poker chips in their car?) designated each of them north, south, east, or west and picked one out of a bag.

West it was.

I’ll spare you the details but somehow we wound up on the Natchez Trace.  I had heard of the legendary road before but never had a reason to check it out.

We started driving… it was a beautiful day… we had no expectations. Well we stopped at the first of many “sites” and looked at the map of the trace.  Well… Tupelo Mississippi didn’t look THAT far away… let’s go there.

When a map is so focused on one thing… nothing looks that far away.

Well we stopped at a few more sites, went to take some pictures with our fancy camera… dead battery.

Continuing on our journey, listening to NPR, talking, doing stupid stuff, laughing.  All of a sudden I got cell phone reception and received five text messages at once.  All telling me that Steve McNair had been killed.  The Sirius went over to the NFL channel and the wind had been taken out of our sails a bit.

A lot of famous people have died recently.  Most of them expected, some of them past their prime, one of them just weird.  McNair still had a lot to give.  He was 36 years old and while at the surface it seems like he was not being the most moral person… he was still a good dude.

Ok… enough of that.

We turn it back to NPR and hours later hit Tupelo.  Tupelo is one of those cities where you are not sure if you are actually in the city or not.  According to the iPhone we were… um… ok.

Well… we find the birthplace of Elvis.

They were unclear if this was THE exact spot.

Baby Elvis pooped here!!!

Katie being Katie.

Well… after about ten minutes we were thoroughly bored so we decided to get something to eat.

Driving around we found “Eli’s BBQ”.  Ordered our food, sat down and pulled the phone out to see how we were going to get home.

The whole time we had it in our heads that we would be able to jump on a highway and be back in nashville in two hours tops.  Well… as I looked at the route the phone gave me my heart sank.  It told us to head back the exact same way we came.  A four hour drive.

I zoomed out… there has to be a place we can grab 40 or 65 and head back driving a reasonable speed!!!

Nope.  

We are exactly halfway between i40 and i65.

We ask who I assume was Eli.  He was shocked that two people would drive from Nashville, eat some barbeque and head home.  Well… ya… we do that stuff.

He told us to drive 90 minutes to Memphis and head back via 40.  I know for a fact that Memphis is around 3.5 – 4 hours from Nashville.  That wasn’t gonna save us any time.

So we jump back onto the Natchez Trace, go 50 miles per hour, and watch like hell through the fog for any deer that might jump out.

We had a blast.  Stopped at steak and shake on the way back.  We are going to keep an atlas in the car so we can at least think our destination through a little next time.

Happy Girl.