Vacation - Day Eight

This entry will be short as it is 12:20am and we just arrived in Tulsa after driving in from Nashville, TN. We would have been here earlier but we made a stop in Memphis, TN to tour the Civil Rights Museum and see the Lorraine Hotel where Martin King Jr. was shot. It was very interesting and another chilling moment being at the motel and seeing the famous balcony. I remember, as an eight year old, seeing the news and that balcony after the shooting had taken place. I remember my dad pointing it out to me and the significance of it. I am glad that we stopped and glad that our kids saw the museum. It is about the entire struggle for civil rights in America and not just about Martin Luther King. It was all the more interesting as we had just seen the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and The Hermitage in Nashville.

There was a protester outside the museum complaining about the "gentrification" of either Martin Luther King Jr. or the entire subject of the civil rights struggle. I plan on studying this complaint further as I am not real sure that I have a grasp on what the protester meant....plus I just finished a ten hour drive so my mind is a bit mushy (or more than usual at least).

Andrea and the kids are now laughing loudly, poor Papa who goes to bed before 9:00pm and trying to sleep now, with stories about the trip which are things that I had completely forgotten. Stories about me falling on the snorkeling boat because Andrea was wearing my water shoes after swimming to shore in her dress, and about her getting sicker on the dock because of the fishermen gutting their fish right off the boats.

It reminds me of our first day in the water when I was sure that I had found a severed human head floating past me. I chased after the head with full intentions of picking it up, something that now concerns me, all the while thinking that this was going to make a very interesting post on my blog....a fact that concerns me even more. It turned out to be a baseball style hat carrying the logo for "Paradise Farms (or Ranch)" in Texas on it. I had plans to keep it and wear it as a cool souvenir, Andrea and Grace thought otherwise and threw it away without my knowledge. Although it concerns me that my first thought was the entertainment value, you have to admit it would have been a story of a lifetime.

Our money has run out so the remainder of our vacation will be spent at Grammy and Papa's. I am sure that the irony is not lost on them that our vacation will mean more work for them. But, I am still on vacation, only now it will mean a lot less driving.....cool!

Here I Dwell,
Rick