Elvis has left the building

Welcome to Graceland! Home of Elvis Presley. Regardless of the fact that we live only 2 1/2 hours from Memphis, we rarely go there. In fact, this was only my second time there since we've been here (sad, yes I know). Thank you to Ken and RaNae ("Kin and Nae" in Lana language) for letting us come and spend a day of vacation with them! Before you go looking at the pictures I must apologize for many of them. You can't use flash anywhere on the inside of the property and for the life of me I couldn't figure how to get a non-blurry picture without my auto-focus/flash button on. So just don't enlarge the pics and you'll be fine.

"Graceland Mansion" - A little disappointing since you only get to see half of it, but interesting to note the style in which it is decorated. I think every surface that could be covered was covered. The house tour only took about 25 minutes. Cloth ceilings, many rooms had shag carpet on the ceilings. Even the entry/exit way from the house to the carport ceiling was covered in carpet. Is this what rich people did to decorate their houses in the 70's or was it just Elvis' taste (which after touring Graceland I've deduced to be very weird)?She was such a trooper throughout the entire time we were there. We almost had a meltdown over Lisa Marie's play swings because she couldn't go swing, but thankfully she found more interest in some sticks on the ground before I could think of a good excuse as to why we couldn't use the swings.

So I'm trying to take a picture of Lana and I'm telling her "look at mommy!". She would turn real quick and say "cheese!" and before I could snap a picture she'd be back to her original position.

Tanner was very good, only crying when hungry. Thankfully no blowouts as well, except today he had 3 big poopy diapers. He's such a considerate little guy!

Here we are in the meditation garden where Elvis and some of his family are buried. Our fun fact for the day that none of us knew was that Elvis was actually born a twin. The twin was still born and buried in Tupelo but had a memorial plaque in the gardens. Here's Lana trying to pluck a teddy bear off of the memorial plaque. I purchased her an Elvis themed teddy bear at one of the gift shops.Today, when I asked Lana what her favorite thing she did yesterday she said it was throwing the coins in the fountain. It took Ken probably 5 minutes to convince her how fun it was and I forked over 3 pennies for her to throw in. She even remembered how many coins we tossed in (4).


Funny story: We ran into the same Graceland worker twice at two different exhibits. Nice guy but he told us his life story each time we saw him. His name was Robert. He'd never been to Graceland before until his friends suggested he go. He got his job at Graceland through a job fair 4 weeks ago. He likes his job. After he got that far I started to tune him out.
Ah, the jump suits. They had an exhibit of the many jump suits he wore and they were all pretty hideous. He had such a weird sense of style. Granted much of the 70's was full of weirdness (no offense to you who grew up then).

Lana's highlight of the tour I think was the airplanes. They were the first thing we saw going into Graceland and the last thing we toured before we left. I have no idea what the kids are looking at in this picture. The only thing above my head were trees, but apparently it was interesting.