Category: Tennessee

Grandma and Ammar

I wouldn’t not generally suggest sending grandmas off alone in the dark in an Uber through a desolate area.  It seems they get nervous about this sort of thing.  And, while we are at it, apparently so do Uber drivers.

In celebration of my sister Lisa’s 40th birthday, both my sisters and I were driving from Cincinnati to Knoxville, Tennessee to pick up our Mom from the airport and then continuing the hour or so from there to the Mountain Harbor Inn, a lovely resort on Douglas Lake in Tennessee.  The problem is that it was Memorial Day Weekend, so, due to the volume of traffic, what should have been a 4-hour drive turned into a 7-hour drive, leaving my mom stranded and waiting for us at a small local airport in which everything was closed by 8pm.  We were in phone contact with mom, and as she described the small, empty, closed, airport, we decided to go ahead and call an Uber to get her to the resort where she could at least get to somewhere populated instead of wandering around like the last person in Knoxville for the next two hours.  Mom agreed.  Now sadly, there have been cases of women getting into an Uber alone and ending up a tragic statistic.  We were sending mom into an Uber alone at closed airport at night to take her on a 45-minute drive to an isolated resort.

Safety and Comfort Rating: low.   

My sisters and I had decided on a plan – keep Mom on the phone and make sure the Uber driver knows that we are tracking their every move. 

However, confidence in our plan dropped a bit when it turned out that the Uber driver, Ammar, did not know where the Mountain Harbor Inn resort was. 

Safety and Comfort Rating for Mom dialed down a little bit. 

After about 10 minutes of Ammar trying to figure out the location of the resort on his map, I felt a little better.  I mean, that’s quite a bit of time commitment and brain power for someone who is just going to turn down a random dark road to kill a grandma.  My sister Lisa assumed command for operation “Don’t Let Mom Get Murdered on my Birthday Trip” and relayed our plan via the phone to our mom.  Mom was skeptical.

Mom became more skeptical as the driver turned off the highway and onto a random dark road.  Lisa went into GPS mapping mode like a steely NASA worker calmly crunching the numbers while watching life support data come back from Apollo 13.  She assured mom that the random dark road was indeed on the route to the Inn.  My sisters and Mom kept up conversation the entire route, my mom describing all that she could make out along the dark route; no houses to be seen, except for an occasional ramshackle one with what looked like a perpetual yard sale out front.  No businesses except for one bar with a blinking Bud Light sign.  Ammar, for his part, who apparently did not have grandma murder on his mind, was actually a little nervous about this ride as well.  None of the roads en route to the resort looked alive. 

Safety and Comfort rating low.  For Ammar.  

After an hour of driving, Ammar was just as perplexed as my mom by the rough and abandoned surroundings as they arrived at the entrance to the resort which was seemingly closed.  Knoxville’s outlying areas are not the big city, folks. The office was locked, not many lights on, no apparent activity nearby, but there was an envelope on the door with the room key in it.  Ammar actually offered to stay a minute to make sure she got to her room, probably in disbelief that this woman’s children would send her alone to this remote and seemingly closed Inn. 

After another hour or so, my sisters and I arrived to find our mom in a cheerfully lit suite at the charming Mountain Harbor Inn, our mom neither abandoned at an empty airport nor murdered on a rural Tennessee back road after getting into a car with a man she did not know. 

Safety and Comfort rating: high.

Graceland

So.  Graceland.

My family has no particularly strong feelings about Elvis – we can take him or leave him, so there was no particular draw to see Graceland. It felt like a “if you build it, they will come”, kind of thing.  It is there, we were there, so we went.

We arrived at Graceland expecting to see Vegas-like drama and impersonators and kitschy shops.  What we found was a busy street of shopping centers and car dealerships and among them was the rather modern Graceland ticketing building with a lobby, a gift shop, and a couple of quick bite shops. We bought our tickets, including audio tour, and lined up for the shuttle to the mansion.  

We queued up in the shuttle line.  

We loaded onto the shuttle. 

We were driven across the street. 

Literally. 

I’m using the term “literally” correctly.

It’s across the street.

We disembarked the shuttle. 

What?   

After our confounding trip across the street, we gathered outside at the bottom of the stairs to Graceland – a rather modest and homey mansion, really. Decidedly un-Kardashian like.

So the trick to touring Graceland is to hang back at the end of the tour group, letting all the other people trickle ahead and then you can see what you want to without the big crowd around you.  And what we saw, surprisingly, I liked:  Green shag carpet?  Yes, please.  White laminate kitchen counters with silver glitter flakes embedded in them?   Yes, and yes again.  Carpet in the kitchen?  Wise.  The place is at once both wonderfully gaudy and surprisingly homey. It was very fun to see, especially after touring other, more historic type homes.  Graceland was quirky, and a great snapshot of 1960’s modern living. I especially loved the TV room – with three TVs set up so Elvis could watch all the networks at the same time.

The audio tour was self-paced, so you could enter the code that corresponded to whatever you were looking at whenever you wanted, allowing you to linger at certain focal points and hurry through others  – and it helped keep my 6 year old busy because to her, it didn’t really matter what she was looking at.  She just liked punching in the code numbers and looking self-important. If you’re an Elvis fan, it is a great tour, informative about Elvis’ life both at Graceland and during his career, as a good portion of the tour goes through the grounds, offices, and trophy room; not just the mansion itself.  If you’re not an Elvis fan, it was still well worth a visit to get a glimpse of the iconic home of an iconic performer.