Road Trip 2018 #15 – Graceland

As I explained before, our road trips are always pretty meticulously planned because of the number of miles being covered and the amount we usually try to cram into each day.  However, I always have a spreadsheet full of possibilities for each stage of the journey and that includes some off-piste places, either because the place is geographically off our route or because it is random.  What we do, however, normally have pinned down is our accommodation for each night because finding affordable accommodation for six people is not always that easy.  However, on the evening after our drive through Missouri, Mr Pict and I decided to be spontaneous.  Both feeling that the second half of our road trip was hitting the skids in terms of ratio of driving to interesting places visited, we decided to rethink the last couple of days of our road trip.  Our route home was supposed to take us through Kentucky and West Virginia but this followed almost precisely the same trek that we slogged two years before.  What if, we wondered, we ditched Kentucky and West Virginia and instead drop further South and travel back via Tennessee and Virginia.  We agreed a plan and, within an hour, had booked alternative accommodation, cancelled hotel rooms, and booked tickets for Graceland for the following afternoon.

As a bonus for me, our journey to Memphis on the day took us through a little corner of Arkansas.  You know what that meant?  I could snag myself another state!  I have a mild OCD regarding odd numbers so it was irking me that I was going to be stuck for however long on a total of 39 states.  Collecting Arkansas would mean I could complete the trip with a neat 40.  As it happened, we were all hungry by the time we crossed the border into Arkansas.  There were not many eatery options so we had to plump for fast food but it filled our bellies and meant that, along with restroom visits, the kids and I got to claim Arkansas.  I will definitely come back and visit Arkansas properly some time but it felt satisfying to be ending having collected 10 new states in this one road trip and on 40 states overall.

We arrived at Graceland about half an hour before our ticketed entry time but we were permitted to begin the tour early so it was all good.  The whole place is much more expansive and commercialised than it was when I last visited in 2002.  There was a massive concourse with eateries and stores and various artefacts that had been crammed into the house were now given room to breathe in a variety of exhibition spaces.  We were delighted to encounter a family of racoons on the grounds.  I have not seen a live wild racoon since we emigrated 4.5 years ago so this was a big deal.  After a very slick introductory video, we were guided to the lines for the shuttle buses.  While in line, we were handed ipads and headphones.  Last time I visited, we had audio guides but the whole visual element was new.  Our youngest son loved having the option to play additional videos and have virtual wanders around spaces that were otherwise inaccessible to us.  In really no time at all, it was our turn to board a minibus and get shuttled across the street to the Graceland mansion.

Our 11 year old is a massive Elvis fan so he was super excited to be walking through the doors to Elvis’ house and seeing the spaces in which he lived and worked.  I was again surprised by how tasteful Elvis’ house is.  I mean, it isn’t my taste but it definitely isn’t as tacky and gaudy as some celebrity houses.  The scale of the house is also fairly modest.  Sure, it’s a mansion but is isn’t some colossal, echoey space.  Instead, each of the rooms was pretty cosy and intimate in scale.  It was, therefore, actually possible to imagine Elvis relaxing in these rooms.  The decor was definitely dated, as if it was preserved in aspic, but it still felt like more of a home than it did a museum.  The kitchen, for instance, was on a larger scale but was otherwise not dissimilar to kitchens from my own childhood.  My favourite room in the house was the peacock living room.  I love those jewel colours and liked how light and airy that room was.

The trophy room was packed with a chronological display of family history artefacts.  I particularly enjoyed seeing the carton of Crayola crayons that Elvis had taken to school.  It was somewhat poignant to see all these exhibits about Elvis’ life and family and then be disgorged out to the swimming pool and the grave site.  I realised that I was visiting at the same age that Elvis was when he died, which underscored how premature his death was.

Having been shuttled back from the house, we spent some time exploring the exhibits in the various museum galleries.  One space collected all of Elvis’ cars, from his super slick sports cars to his beach buggies and golf buggies.  My middle sons – comic book fans – were excited to spot that one vehicle, originally made for an Elvis movie, had appeared in ‘Batman’ as a vehicle driven by the Joker.  Another gallery told the story of Elvis’ time in the army and also had drawers of artefacts that could be pored over.  My two favourite museum rooms concerned costumes: one was a collection of various music stars’ costumes and the other was dedicated to Elvis’ costumes.  The Elvis clothes were arranged in roughly chronological order so our 11 year old enjoyed following Elvis through the decades and picking out his favourite costumes, from the gold suit, to the black leather costume from the comeback live tour, and then – best of all – all the bejewelled jumpsuits from the Vegas years.

I was really impressed with how Graceland had evolved from my last visit.  It had definitely become more Disney-fied but this was actually to the betterment of the experience.  Spreading all the visitors out across a bigger space and deploying ticketed entry times meant we never felt swamped by people even though the place was clearly hopping.  Furthermore, moving out all the costumes and gold discs and memorabilia to designated spaces meant the actual mansion could go back to showcasing the domestic spaces rather than being overstuffed and difficult to imagine living in.  The kids all declared that Graceland was a highlight of the road trip.  We parents felt vindicated in changing plans and relieved we had experienced tourism success again.

Our Halloween

On the basis of better late than never, this is how our Halloween unfolded this year.  It was a super-busy, hectic, exhausting day and I still have not caught up with myself but at least all the stuff keeping me on my feet (literally) was fun stuff.  I spent the morning working at the preschool dressed up as the Cat in the Hat which included a parade and a party.  Then I dashed to my kids’ Elementary School for the first of their three Halloween parties, watched the school’s Halloween parade, and ran between two classrooms for the other two class parties.  Then it was home to prepare for the evening – finishing touches to the house decorations, including setting up our giant jumping spider, and getting dinner cooking for the guests we had coming over.  My reward was that after all of that hubbub of activity all day, my friend and I got to sit on the porch handing out treats while quaffing some deliciously cockle-warming Autumn apple cider sangria.  It was a wonderful, fun-filled day of festivities and friendship.

Costumes!  Halloween for my kids is more about the dressing up than it is about candy.  My oldest son was undecided as to whether to go trick or treating or not.  Ultimately he decided to accompany his brothers around the streets while wearing a super-creepy-gross mask but without earning any candy.  That was his compromise with himself.  My youngest dressed up as the Grim Reaper.  He changed his mind dozens of times about what he was going to dress up as and then ended up picking something quick and easy from a store shelf.  My 11 year old cobbled together his character and costume from various bits and pieces we already owned.  As soon as he saw the metallic red mask in a store, he knew he wanted to build a creepy character around it.  He spent all day being asked what he was dressed up as  but he didn’t care.  He just wanted to do his own thing.

My 9 year old, meanwhile, had had his costume designed and planned for months.  He is into Steampunk so was determined to have a costume that worked with that aesthetic.  We spent a lot of time scouring thrift stores and crafting accessories, adapting shop bought items to make them work.  Probably a more crafty and capable parent would have been able to construct the whole costume in a matter of a couple of afternoons or evenings but, with my sewing skills and my lack of experience with jewellery making, it took me ages.  It was a labour of love for sure and I am adamant that he will be wearing this costume until I see fit.

Halloween 2015

My kids absolutely love Halloween in America.  They started talking about plans for costumes during the Summer and the middle two have been literally counting down the days for months.  Although this is now our third American Halloween, the novelty of the experience has not worn off on my kids.

Festivities began on Friday with parties and a parade at school.  The school has rules about gory costumes, face paint and hair spray so there was much angst over needing different costumes for school than for actual Halloween.  Happily, since my younger kids love dressing up, we have two sacks full of dressing up gibbles for them to dip into and everyone got something together.  I went in to help with the First Grade party and was assigned to a room full of fairground type activities on a Halloween theme.  By far the most popular activity with the kids was one involving hitting a wooden frame with a mallet and thwacking frogs in the air.  The objective was to get the rubber frogs into buckets in order to score points but the kids much preferred seeing how high and how far they could propel the frogs across the room.  Ceiling tiles were battered, I had to drag frogs down from overhead projectors, and crawl behind bookcases to retrieve them.  Some groups invented twists to the game such as goal keeping and using the sticks from a hockey type game to bat the frogs as they flew through the air.  It was exhausting and I had the sound of the mallet hitting the wood ringing in my ears for hours afterwards.  Good fun though.

Then – after a very quick dash home to get some laundry in the dryer – I was back to the school to watch the parade of kids and staff all dressed up in their costumes.  It was great fun seeing them all, especially the kids who had made their own costumes.  The parade was immediately followed by more parties, this time for my Third and Fourth Graders.  Last year, I was a Room Parent so all my party time was spent in one classroom with one of my kids and I rarely saw the other two participating in festivities.  I was very glad of the opportunity this year to spend time with all of my kids during their parties even if it meant speeding up and down a corridor to pivot between classrooms.

I didn’t get much chance to sit down or stand still in one place during Halloween itself either.  It was another hectic day.  We also reached a bittersweet milestone as my oldest son went out Trick or Treating with friends.  It was the first time we had not had all four of our kids with us to go guising but we are very happy indeed that our oldest son has made such good friends here that we wanted to spend the evening with them.  My oldest was dressed as a plague doctor.  Apparently only one adult on his whole trick or treating tour had a clue what his costume was but, even though we had assumed everyone would get it, he rather liked being a tad obscure.  My other three went trick or treating around our neighbourhood with our next door neighbour kids and the children of our friends.  My 10 year old was the Joker, my 8 year old was Robin and my 6 year old was Frankenstein’s Monster.  The kids walked and walked until their pails were so full of candy and other treats that their arms were getting a bit orangutan like and their feet were sore.  We visited haunted houses, met Chewbacca on his porch, and my little Frankenstein’s Monster even got to meet his biological parents.  Then it was everyone back to my house – where we had left the dads on the porch to hand out treats to visitors – for steaming hot bowls of soup and hot dogs.  It was a long and busy two days but filled with so much fun and laughter – and sugar.

PS  If you would like to read a comparison between Scottish and American Halloweens, I covered that in my first Halloween post.

PPS If you like all things monstrous, then you might be interested to check out my altered book project over on my art blog, Pict Ink.

Our Halloween

My kids were giddy with anticipation over Halloween this year.  Their experience of their first American Halloween had been a wonderfully positive introduction to life in America for them. They loved everything about it and were eager to repeat the same fun experiences this year.

Having selected a pumpkin each when we visited the pumpkin patch, the boys settled on imagery and I set about carving them.  The reason I did the carving is that, with the exception of the smallest pumpkin, which really was tiny, the skins and flesh of the chosen pumpkins was extremely tough.  I resorted to using exceedingly sharp kitchen knives in place of the carving tools and, of course, the children could not be let loose with kitchen knives.  That really would have been a Halloween horror!  So we ended up with a large Minecraft Creeper, a baby Creeper, a galloping horse and the head of Jack Skellington to place on the steps leading up to our front door.

The younger three boys had Halloween celebrations at their Elementary School.  They each had parties full of crafting, snacking and games and were all involved in the Halloween parade.  The High School band played while all of the costumed children walked in a large square on the playing field.  As a member of the first Kindergarten class, our 5 year old was actually the leader of the entire parade.  He was clearly loving it, waving to the crowds as he passed them, though his Iron Man mask meant he could barely see where he was going and he had to be steered in the right direction by his teacher.  That morning I had told the children that I was going to levy a tax on them of one piece of their Halloween candy for each Elsa, Anna or Olaf costume we happened across on the day.  There were five Elsas in my youngest son’s class alone.  My kids said no dice to the tax proposal.  There were some really inventive costumes on show and it was fun to see all of the kids enjoying themselves.

My boys had daytime costumes, appropriate for school (Iron Man, Boba Fett and a weird Dark Knight Ninja combination that my 9 year old insisted on cobbling together) and different costumes for evening.  I got the majority of their costumes from thrift stores and the younger ones like to play dress up throughout the year so I don’t mind the costume changes at all.  My oldest son was a Clone Trooper, the 9 year old was Star-Lord (because he is obsessed with ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’), my 7 year old was a Werewolf (he has been longing for a werewolf costume for years) and the youngest was Frankenstein’s Monster (his favourite classic monster).  I also dressed myself up as a Vampire, complete with pallid face and bright red lips.  Thankfully I was not the only adult wandering the streets in costume or I might have felt like a total pillock but the kids appreciated my efforts and my get-up entertained them so any embarrassment factor was worth it.

Together with one of the boys’ friends, my monstrous mob traipsed the streets of our neighbourhood for two hours. Mr Pict had devised the route as if he was a military General manouvering troops.  At first they were part of a pack of neighbourhod kids but gradually they pack drew out into a long line which was probably easier for each household to manage instead of having to open the door to a dozen kids bellowing “Trick or Treat” in unison.  The majority of houses in our neighbourhood were participating in Halloween and handing out edible treats but some had gone to incredible effort to entertain the little ghouls.  One house had set up their garage as a den of horror.  My 9 year old and his friend refused to even enter and the 7 year old came out howling, but the other two loved it.  Another house had set up three rooms in their house to be a haunted house full of spooky props and people in costume.  My 9 year old again didn’t go in but everyone else had fun on their spooky tour.  Our neighbours had set up their porch with elaborate decorations including a zombie baby doll, Frankenstein’s Monster sitting in an electric chair and the Bride of Frankenstein standing alongside them.  My boys loved going up to the Monster, especially the little one who declared he was Frankenstein Jr.  It was a really fun night and my kids came home with their Halloween buckets full to beyond the brim with sweeties, chocolate and crisps which they then spent half an hour trading up.

And they never did give me my ‘Frozen’ tax.