The alarm goes off early today, because we have to check out from our little palace and we have Ultimate VIP tickets for a quarter to nine and we have to report fifteen minutes in advance. This turns out to be with Page, a fantastic quiet guide who has all the time for our group and the six others who have booked this tour. And as she says herself, this early, first tour has the advantage that we have the mansion all to ourselves. And it shows, until 10 we don’t see anyone but Page and the other six of the tour. We are first taken with a van from the visitor center on one side of Elvis Presley Boulevard to the mansion on the other side and dropped off at the door. There we get plenty of time for photos and then we go inside and she leads us from room to room, the living room, the kitchen, the man cave in the basement, the jungle room, and then to the terrace outside, where also a number of buildings stand. And finally we go to the Meditation Garden where Elvis and his parents, but also his daughter Lisa Marie and his grandson Benjamin are buried. She then takes us to an area reserved for Ultimate VIPs only and shows us some of Elvis’s personal items, and we are allowed to gently hold one of them, a boot, with white gloves on. Then we go with a van to the other side and she shows us the different self-guided exhibitions to finally say goodbye to us at a quarter past eleven with the words, take your time and view all self-guided tours at your leisure. That’s what we’re going to do, but not before we’ve tasted a peanutbutter banana sandwich at Gladys Diner, Elvis’ favorite sandwich. We then decide to split up so that everyone can spend as much time as necessary wherever they want. We visit and see everything we want to see and meet at half past two at Vernon’s, another restaurant on the park. We have a delicious meal there, including Ribs, and decide that we have seen everything and can go on our way to the next overnight stay, the Shack Up Inn in Clarksdale, an hour and fifteen minutes drive south of Memphis. We have a rest day built in here tomorrow, so I’ll tell you a bit about this Shack Up Inn then.
The video of the day could of course have been any Elvis song, but it became for personal reasons:
