Day 2, July 4: Knoxville to Memphis

This morning in Knoxville, the wireless connection worked fine for Bill. Go figure. At this point you may be asking why in the world we need two computers even on vacation. You must not know us.

Another Wimbledon final -- and a great one, we understand -- but we had to leave just as the third set was getting under way. First stop: Nashville, where we had lunch, as planned, at the Belle Meade Buffet Cafeteria. The Roadfood people were right: This is a gem. A time warp (born in 1961, the same year as Bill) in a strip mall on the edge of a breathtakingly tony enclave. Bill picked up liver and onions, pickled beets, Waldorf salad, a yeasty dinner roll, and a slice of chess pie. For Jacqueline, fried chicken, creamed corn, cornbread stuffing and peach cobbler. All very good, though where Bill's family's Waldorf salad uses mayonnaise, this one used whipped cream. Mmm, whipped cream.

Then to Kroger, a supermarket chain we don't get to see much. There's a history there, though: Back in Michigan, Bill's mom worked at a Kroger in the early 1970s. It was there that she met Gary, who became her husband. Our goal was seltzer, and the Big K store brand was excellent.

Middle Tennessee. You have to love a place where the word "central" is considered too highfalutin'.

But we weren't much smarter as we headed west to Memphis. The less said about this the better, but the holiday and the need to valet-park the land yacht and our essentially laziness combined to turn what could have been an evening of world-class barbecue and revelry into a small, not-so-good early dinner and hours of hotel-room TV. The few allegedly decent barbecue establishments downtown, close to the hotel, were closed for the sabbath or the Fourth of July or both, but Bill found some kind words about one nearby barbecue place as well as a Roadfood endorsement of a burger joint a block from that, and so we made the quick walk to the legendary Beale Street. Quite a street scene, though we really didn't fit in with the NASCAR crowd. The barbecue place looked crowded and hopelessly touristy, and so we went with Roadfood and tried a burger and a fried-bologna sandwich at Dyer's.

Let's just say Roadfood isn't always right. We'll console ourselves with the probability that the best of Memphis's barbecue places were probably closed.

The next-best attraction, an 1800s dry-goods emporium still in business, wasn't in business on Sunday, July 4, and the museum at the Lorraine Motel, the site of Martin Luther King's assassination, was just afar enough away in a scary-looking area that we didn't walk it. The Mississippi River was far enough away that we wimped out on that too. We'll get them in the car tomorrow. The rest of the evening was notable mainly for Bill's continued problems getting wireless access to work.

At least there were fireworks (see below).