Southern States Road Trip Day 2: Little Rock and Memphis

Looking back on today, it seems like we've been up forever! We started today in Little Rock, AR and went to Little Rock Central High School, one of the first schools to desegregate which caused an uprising in the city, and country for that matter. It was really eerie to think that so much violence and anger could have happened in this tiny little neighborhood. The visitors center was neat and had a ton of good information. I didn't know too many details surrounding the event so I spent a lot of time reading all of the information. I wrote down several book titles in the gift shop to check out b/c I didn't feel completely satisfied with the entire story, maybe because it was so unbelievable. The Gov of AR at the time sounds completely crazy, he even canceled school for an entire year so as not to have his schools forcibly integrated....crazy!!

Front of Little Rock Central High School (still a public HS)

Little Rock Nine sculpture outside the Arkansas State Capitol

We drove to the state capitol to take pictures of the "Little Rock Nine" statues and then headed to the Clinton Library. It is a very unique building that overlooked the river. It was a neat museum and had a lot of cool artifacts from his presidency. He had his daily itineraries for each day he was in office. It was neat to look and see what he was doing on election day in 1996 and inauguration day in 1997 and my birthday. He also had many great letters from famous people and some neat gifts from foreign leaders. Overall it was a neat museum, but would have been cool to see some stuff from his life before he was president. (I know I use the word "neat" way too much, but I'm too tired to go back and edit at this point....)

Outside the Clinton Library

We drove back to Memphis with the intention of going to the Gibson factory but the tour was sold out. We were a little bummed, but realized that all of the workers are off by that tour so we wouldn't have seen anyone making guitars anyway. We killed time (waiting for BBQ) by walking around Beale Street and visiting the Peabody Hotel.

The ducks at the Peabody were cute. We didn't stay to watch them do their walk, but we did watch them while they were in the fountain and went on the roof to see where they lived when not in the fountain. We were there an hour before their walk and at 45min before the place was starting to fill up with people, good thing we had BBQ plans or we would've been in a huge crowd after a while. The Peabody is super nice and even has Francis Scott Key's piano! I thought it was neat because it looked like the piano my family had when I was growing up.

Francis Scott Key's piano

We ate BBQ at Rendezvous BBQ and had two full slabs of ribs, yes two! It was the only meal we'd eaten today (except for our banana and cracker lunch on the road) so we were really hungry. We also ate BBQ Chicken nachos, which were really good!

Our first slab of ribs at Rendezvous BBQ

We are now in Huntsville, AL spending the night and will head home tomorrow, after seeing some space stuff, of course. I was going to leave you with a cute video of ducks, but this internet is excruciatingly slow so maybe tomorrow...