Wolf Shorty

It is not just anyone who can jump into a 12-passenger van with their entire family for a 10-day adventure through the south. But not just anyone has my Mom and step-dad, Keyton planning that trip, or they’d be standing in line to get on that crazy train … or van as the case may be.

My Mom after all is where I get my gypsy feet. My inclination to live as close to the edge as humanly possibly. My belief that I’m above human limitation. And a need for salt air on my face and wind in my hair so deep it makes my bones ache. Keyton has the good humor to indulge us and that is no small task cause there’s me, my Mom and Erin. It’s a big chore. He gives us the balance to not fall over that edge we like to dance so close to and the easy going spirit not to take our adventures so seriously that we miss something. Then there is Josh who just goes with the flow and has lately taken to drinking beer, which makes for some good entertainment. We are a good team.

Mom and Keyton have spent the last 17 years planning family fun with their combine 5 children in whatever time and budget constraints life has presented over the years. They have become pros. And to our advantage seem to enjoy it so much they continue to do it every few years even though we are grown and have started our own families, now totaling 12.

So this year’s trip was not a destination to the beach but a journey through the south. My Mom is really good at that. A road trip to Florida can be exhausting especially for three children ages 7, 6 and 4. So we had two days of travel on each side of the beach with stops at attractions, historical landmarks and really big watermelons. This made the answer to “are we there yet?” nearly always “almost.”

The plan was to leave on Saturday morning at the crack of dawn and head east on I-40 to Memphis for the afternoon. Instead we got excited and decided to expedite packing and get some road behind us Friday night. No need to wait until the morning really.

In the morning we woke up at the Hampton Inn in Fort Smith and 3 hours closer to Memphis. Mom and Keyton distributed binders to the kids and Josh that they had made with maps and coloring pages for the states, landmarks and attractions we would see along the way. Geniuses!

We piled back into the van and pointed it in the direction of Memphis. I hadn’t driven that stretch in more than 10 years and was surprised that the foliage on the roadsides had grown up so much you can hardly see the nuclear reactor in Arkansas from the interstate anymore. Still if you pay close attention about an hour east of Fort Smith near Russellville on the south side of the road you can just catch a glimpse through the mimosas. If you miss the reactor the mimosas are a pretty amazing site. Even though it is just concrete and gray there is something creepy and ominous about the nuclear reactor. I find wind farms creepy too though, so maybe it is just me.

With our iPhones as our guides we learned a lot about Arkansas on our journey. Like for example, we kept passing all these fields that looked like the rice fields in Louisiana. And Mom and Keyton were debating what could possibly be growing in them. Well turns out rice is the number one crop of Arkansas. Go figure.

Nearing Memphis we consulted our iPhones to narrow down Keyton’s Memphis restaurant research and make a decision. We chose the Neely’s based on their menu, which covered all the barbecue high points from ribs and coleslaw to pecan pie. I think it is where Keyton really wanted to eat anyway. The other option was Rendezvous based on suggestions from friends and the Travel Channel. And while I’m sure their food is really good, their online menu just didn’t compare. So I clicked right on the Neely’s phone number from their website to call ahead and make sure they could accommodate a group of 10. Really I don’t know how people survived before smart phones.

When we arrived in Memphis 30 minutes later and the doors of that van opened the power of a billion degrees of heat radiated off the concrete of the Neely’s parking lot right into our faces bringing with it a smell of smoked meats so incredible that you almost didn’t even notice your skin being melted right off your bones by the sun. I did however immediately notice the “Cold Beer” neon sign in the window.

It looked everything the part of a regular Memphis BBQ joint and nothing like the overly done location of a celebrity chef. It’s just their regular old family restaurant. Nothing fancy. Quaint. Dark. Tables lined with plastic red gingham table clothes. And the service is that of a family restaurant. The Neely brother who was working came and asked us where were from and chatted with us for a long time about our trip. He confirmed that we’d made the right decision picking the Neely’s over Rendezvous. However he was humble about it. He told us they have very good food there, but that it wasn’t the same kind of barbecue. Which is what we had gathered from the menu. Apparently though, according to Mr. Neely, Rendezvous was the first in Memphis to serve ribs.

And if all that wasn’t enough to make us know for sure that we’d picked the right place for our one and only meal in Memphis the food arrived.

That right there is the best plate of ribs I have ever had. And to go with it, I got potato salad and coleslaw, because I feel those are where a good barbecue restaurant really shines. The coleslaw packed a very unexpected punch of heat. Spicy heat. I wasn’t prepared for that. In fact I wasn’t sure if I was imaging it at first. But I liked it. Loved it even. I generally feel that if something doesn’t burn on the way down, it isn’t worth eating. I am pretty sure I’ll be having dreams about that coleslaw. And the potato salad I remember being pretty good too, but it was kind of lost in the shadow of that amazing coleslaw. Which brings me to dish number 2. Jay’s. He got the bologna sandwich. Which sounded … eh. Bologna can be a little rich for me. But throw it on some butter slathered and toasted white bread and top it with that crazy awesome coleslaw and I could eat bologna all day. This will definitely make my list of World’s Best Sandwiches, when I get around to creating that list. It was a festival in your mouth. There was the creamy meaty warm richness of the bologna and the crunchy cool sweet and spice of the slaw and the soft crunch of the toasted white bread. I might have just gained 5 lbs describing that sandwich but it is a key example of something that DOES taste better than being thin feels. My only saving grace is that Memphis is 6 hours away. However I did find a recipe to their slaw on the Food Network’s website. Then found that you can purchase a jar from the Neely’s site. Nothing jarred ever tastes the same though.

Once we were appropriately stuffed with BBQ we ordered everything on the desert menu, scarfed it down and headed to Beale Street to walk it off. We cruised. We drank Big Ass Beers to-go. We found odd souvenir shops. The funny thing about kids and vacation is they want to buy everything. Everything. They don’t even know what something is. What purpose it serves. Nothing. They just want to buy it. Nola would come running across the store with some plastic thing that had green hair, buttons and a clip. It might have been a pen or whistle but might also have been a crack pipe. It was hard to tell. When we had our fill of Beale Street, we loaded back up in the car and drove to the Lorraine Motel, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

I wrote just about every book report and term paper from the time I was in the third grade about Martin Luther King, Jr. And Nola seemed to take a definite interest when she learned about him in school this year. So my Mom wanted to make sure that she got to see this landmark. We didn’t go into the museum. For starters we didn’t really have time, but also because there is a lady who sits outside the museum everyday and has for 23 months 137 days (at the time of our visit) in quiet protest of the museum. Mom and Keyton told me about her the last time they went. She feels that the museum desecrates the legacy Martin Luther King. It’s kinda hard to walk past a sign that says that and pay money to go in.

The last thing on the list of Memphis sites was, you guessed it: Graceland. We cruised past, circled the block and cruised past again. Do you really need more Graceland than that? I went when I was 12 and for some reason at the time a HUGE Elvis fan. But our kids didn’t even know who Elvis was. And I mean it’s a house that was frozen in the 70s. It would have been a stop totally lost on the three kids who’d already been patient for 4 hours of car, sitting in a restaurant and walking on Beale street. So we didn’t push it or waste the money to drag them through. However I kinda almost wish I’d been able to get Nola’s and Bob’s commentary on the decor. I’m sure they would have had some good feedback.

We found our way to Jackson, Mississippi in enough time to get a bag of tacos and let the kids swim. We had about 7 hours of road in the morning between us and white sandy beaches of Panama City Beach, FL and already almost an entire vacation behind us.