Month: August 2011

New Orleans Photo Tour

[quote]The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar. I am following the river, down the highway, through the cradle of the civil war. I’m going to Graceland.
– Paul Simon, ‘Graceland'[/quote]

 

Well, kind of… We did that journey in reverse yesterday when we drove from Memphis down to New Orleans , running parallel to the Mississippi River .

The scenery was a little dull until we hit Louisiana, but with perfect timing we arrived in ‘The Big Easy’ at sunset last night, travelling over swamps and rivers for the last 50 miles or so and Jen managed to get a few nice Sunset photos.

Today we took a photographic tour round the historical French District which was lovely, taking in St. Louis Cathedral , Jackson Square , the French Markets etc. I’ve had far more practice at landscape photography than I have at street photography but I’m fairly pleased with the results. We started very early this morning though so we’re going to get some rest before our proper city tour tomorrow.

 

 

National Civil Rights Museum

Our second stop today couldn’t have been more different to Graceland: The National Civil Rights Museum has been set up in the Lorraine Motel where the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on April 4th 1968.

The museum is a fascinating look at the struggle to end segregation and bring equality to the United States; it includes hundreds of newspaper articles, photos and exhibits plus an audio tour and videos – even though we allowed over 4 hours (and I didn’t really think we’d need more than 2), we could both have spent several more just walking round reading.

Although some of the articles made for quite uncomfortable reading, the majority of the writing portrayed everything in as positive way as possible (minimal emphasis on the KKK and the Black Panthers , much more being made about the peaceful protests and JFK’s support for example)

It was interesting to see famous events,such as the arrest of Rosa Parks , told from the point of view of the actual participants but, for me, the real success of the museum was how it linked all these events into a timeline that explained how and why many of the events escalated and why ordinary people went to such lengths and took so many personal risks to claim their rights – James Meredith in particular stood out for me; the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi, his application took 2 years and the intervention of the Attourney General before it was accepted and his first days attendance was met with mobs, guns and required the National Guard and US Marshalls to stop rioting that killed two people (two armed guards protected him every day of the two semesters he attended the University). He graduated in 1963 with a degree in Political Science.

In addition, the museum itself is not without controversy…
Jacqueline Smith was evicted from the Lorraine Motel when it was bought by the foundation and has been protesting outside everyday since the 12th January 1988 – over 23 years so far. She objects to both the content of the museum and the use of tens of millions of dollars by the foundation to create the exhibits and buy the building opposite (where the shot is claimed to have been fired from – I think this makes conspiracy #4 in our current trip) whilst simultaneously displacing residents and pricing them out of their old neighbourhood… Whether or not she has a point about the latter is a discussion for another day but personally I found it one of the most interesting museums we’ve been to so far (although as cameras were’t allowed inside and it has no rhinestones, aliens, cowboys or rollercoasters, the photos aren’t quite up to Jon’s usual standard!)

Graceland

I can’t claim to be the biggest fan of Elvis. He didn’t write his songs, he wasn’t a particularly notable guitarist or pianist and although he was a ‘good’ singer I doubt many would say he was the greatest.

You don’t get to be pretty much the most successful recording artist in history without having something special though. Charisma, x-factor, controversy, an uncanny knack of picking great pop songs to record… Whatever it was, Elvis had it, lots of it, and his story is one of the most interesting in pop music. As a music fan you can’t help but be drawn to Graceland .

There’s a lot more to see than the house but we started with an audio tour of the Graceland Mansion itself. It feels exactly like you’d expect a mansion bought by a very rich young man in the 1950’s to feel. It’s lavish, opulent, completely OTT in places (the ‘jungle room’ has green grass carpet on all the walls and ceiling and an indoor waterfall), but it’s also nowhere near as big as you’d expect it to be. The main floor only has a living room, music room, dining room, kitchen guest bedroom and sitting room (the jungle room, which was built on an extension) so it’s really not that big. He did have a TV room in the basement with three televisions in it though, which at the time would have cost a fortune, but still it doesn’t feel like it deserves to be called a mansion. He did add to the house though, there is quite a lot of land with stables and a huge racquetball court housed in it’s own building which he added in the 60’s.

Also located in the grounds (in his meditation garden) is his grave and those of his family. I can’t have done much research on Graceland before going because I didn’t know he was actually buried there and I wasn’t expecting to see his grave or the hundreds of gifts, floral tributes and messages that are still left there on a daily basis by visitors. I’m not sure what I made of this memorial garden. You can’t help being moved when reading the tributes and I saw a few people crying as they stood in front of his gravestone read all the messages, but at the same time it was completely nuts and obviously incredibly tacky in places.

As I said though, there’s much more to see than the house itself. We spent some time looking round his incredible automobile museum (see the photos of his Silver Ghost, Ferrrari Dino and some incredible Cadillacs) and then had a look round his two private jets.

We finished the visit with a tour of another museum containing costumes and other exhibits that obviously wouldn’t fit into the house. I’m really glad we took a detour to Memphis to visit Graceland. You certainly get your money’s worth there and here were still more exhibits and mini-museums we could have done if we’d have had more time but we had to get to the National Civil Rights Museum which Jen’s going to write about in the next post.

2 Days in Memphis

We left Texas yesterday and drove all the way through Arkansas to Tennessee where we’re spending 2 nights in Memphis .

We’ve got more updates to come from Memphis but I thought I’d put a quick post up with a few of the photos we’ve taken so far. The night time photos are from Beale Street which is famous for being the “Home of Blues”. These days it’s still full of blues clubs and bars and looked like it would have been buzzing on a Saturday night but unfortunately it was a bit empty on a Sunday.

Anyway, I’ve just eaten a full rack of BBQ ribs so I’m off for a lie down.

 

 

Sixth Floor Museum

From Roswell to Dallas , and the scene of the assassination of John F. Kennedy , we’ve covered two of America’s biggest conspiracy theories in two days.

We arrived in Texas last night and so far it’s fulfilling every stereotype I had of it. The landscape on the drive towards Dallas is littered with “nodding donkeys” (oil pumps) and you can actually smell oil in the air as you drive past the oil fields. There are also plenty of billboards advertising gun shows in Dallas and Fort Worth.

We visited the sixth floor museum today, located on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository , where Lee Harvey Oswald sat when he shot the president on November 22, 1963.

I’ll be the first to admit I knew very little about the assassination until today and I knew very little about JFK, but that possibly made it even more interesting. Because of the nature of the event the museum doesn’t contain any physical artefacts or exhibits, just newspaper clippings and photographs presented with an audio tour which told the story perfectly. The tour was comprehensive and covered the history of the man himself, the lead up to the event, a timeline of the day, the aftermath and the subsequent conspiracy theories. The highlight was visiting the corner of the floor and the window (still propped open) when Oswald hid.

Although the audio tour and the photos and clippings were great, I think what made the experience so special was being able to look out of the windows on the sixth floor and see exactly what Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen that day. We took a walk up on to the grassy knoll , where conspiracy theorists think more shots were fired from and looked towards the spot where the shooting happened. Then we drove our car down the route his motorcade took, right over the spot in the middle lane of Elm St. where he was shot. What was interesting is just how close the shooting, book depository and grassy knoll are together, a triangle not more than 100 yards wide.

It may have just been the bias of those who curated the museum and it’s unusual to feel sorry for politicians, but I left with the feeling that JFK was one of the good guys who still had a lot to offer when he was shot down. He’d  been president for just over 1000 days but in that time he made a promise to send a man to the moon within 10 years and diverted billions of dollars into the space race. He also diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis , forcing the Russians to back down and signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty . He created the Peace Corps and was a big supporter of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement , introducing the Civil Rights Act which was passed after his death in 1964. I may be wrong, but it makes you wonder what he might have done if he’d have served longer.

Anyway I’m rambling. We’re off to Memphis tomorrow and we’re keeping an eye on the news because there’s a big hurricane heading towards the east coast. It’ll be long gone by the time we get there but I hope it doesn’t leave too much destruction behind.

P.S – Not many photos today I’m afraid as the museum has a photography ban inside…

 

 

 

Roswell UFO Museum

Driving into Roswell at night is spooky.

It shouldn’t be because it’s just a city like every other we’ve visited, but it’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the desert and there’s nothing else on the road to Roswell than military bases, missile ranges and border patrol checks (even though it’s a fair way from the Mexican border). Add in a pretty spectacular lightning storm and I don’t mind telling you I was spooked before we even got there.

In the light of day Roswell looked fairly normal so we started with a trip to the UFO Museum and Research Center . The museum contains a large collection on newspaper clippings, testimonials, photos and other “evidence” of the UFO crash that some say happened on 4th July 1947. There is so much to read you could spend days there.

Now, obviously I don’t believe in UFO crash landings, but the sheer number of people involved in the incident and some indisputable facts about cover-ups, threats to individuals from the military and “deathbed confession” from some that had stayed quiet about the incident their whole lives all point the the fact that ‘something’ definitely happened. There are so many reports from those who either saw the crash, the military cordons or debris from the site etc. that it’s either the best organised hoax ever (involving hundreds of people), or the military were definitely trying to cover something up!

Given Roswell’s location, very close to Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Testing Range , and given that the US were testing all kinds of post WWII technologies in the desert including nuclear weapons delivery delivery and airborne radar tracking equipment, the obvious explanation is that some top secret defence technology crashed to the ground and the military came and took it away. That explanation is dull though and I’m glad there are still thousands of crazies out there perpetuating the conspiracy theories, most of them in Roswell.

So, having seen the (comparatively) serious stuff, we set out to find some of the craziness and we weren’t disappointed. We started with the worlds only UFO themed McDonalds and then visited ‘Alien Zone’ which was absolutely nuts. I won’t try to explain it but I hope you enjoy the photos.

 

 

 

Tombstone and OK Corral

Tombstone, Arizona   is most famous for being the scene of the gunfight at the OK Corral in which Wyatt Earp , his brothers and Doc Holliday tried to run ‘The Cowboys’ our of town, but there are several threads of history running through the town, from the silver rush which bought everybody to the town, to the gunfight, to the creation of the courthouse where several men were hanged at the gallows.

We only had a couple of hours in Tombstone today but it’s impressively preserved and we had time to tour the town, visit the courthouse museum and see a slightly strange re-enactment of the gunfight just yards from the scene of the original gunfight (strange because the original gunfight lasted only 24 seconds and they managed to stretch the show to about half an hour).

We’ve just arrived in Roswell. Haven’t seen any aliens yet but we’ll see if we can find any tomorrow morning.

 

 

 

Titan Missile Museum

What better way to follow our slightly bizarre morning touring a US military base than to visit a decommissioned cold war nuclear missile launch site?

The Titan Missile Museum is an underground facility around 15 miles south of Tucson housing a 103ft Titan II missile which used to contain a 9 megaton nuclear missile aimed at Russia. We were taken on a guided tour of various underground rooms and corridors including the control room and the missile silo which still contains an inert Titan missile.

There were 18 of these missile sites located around the Tucson area and each one was manned in 24 hour shifts and ready to launch a missile within 58 seconds that had a range of over 5000 miles and could hit a target within 1 mile, which seems incredible even now, let alone in 1963 when it was built.

Being able to tour an actual cold war nuclear missile launch site was a privilege in itself, but being shown round by Steve, an ex-employee at one of these sites and taken through the launch sequence in the control room was pretty special. Steve uses a walking stick these days and can’t take the stairs, but his enthusiasm for the site was matched only by our fascination. I asked him if the job was scary, he replied “No, but it could get quite tedious”.

As you can probably tell, we’ve been pretty excited by our last couple of trips .Our last few days visiting meteor craters, airplane graveyards and cold war missile sites have been great fun. It really does seem that the weirder this holiday gets the more interesting it gets, which is good because after visiting Tombstone tomorrow we’re off to Roswell!

 

Airplane Boneyard

We arrived in Tucson, Arizona last night and we’re staying at quite a nice golf resort just outside town thanks to Expedia and their secret deals (rack rate $170/night, our price $56/night, bargain!). They’ve left us a nice leaflet warning us about the local wildlife; scorpions, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, coyotes and gila monsters . I can take or leave the wildlife, but the desert landscape is gorgeous. We’re only 40 miles from Mexico and you can’t move for cactii.

It’s been a busy day today. We started by visiting the Airplane Boneyard and the PIMA Air and Space Museum .

The Airplane Boneyard is an aircraft storage facility located at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. It’s a real working military base so you have to be security checked first before boarding a tour bus for about an hour long tour of the facility.

The Airplane Boneyard is over 2600 acres in size and it’s where over 4000 military aircraft have ended up now that they are no longer needed. Instead of being destroyed they are mothballed and covered in protective plastic so that they can be put back into service, used for parts, or sold to other countries when needed. The location was chosen because the lack of rain, humidity and wind in the desert means that the aircraft will last a very long time without too much effort.

The facility is home to an impressive array of aircraft, from fighter jets like F-14’s (think ‘Top Gun’), 15’s and 16’s to bombers like the B-29 and helicopters like the UH-1 “Huey” famous for it’s use in Vietnam). The thing that impresses most though is the sheer size of the park and the billions of dollars worth of aircraft just lined up in rows for as far as the eye can see. It’s a bit of a shame you’re not allowed to leave the bus but it is a military base after all.

We also go to spend a short amount of time at the PIMA Air and Space Museum which organises the tours. The museum is home to hundreds more historic aircraft and allows you to get up close and personal with them.

I’ll post later about our trip to the Titan Missile Museum this afternoon.

 

 

 

Meteor Crater

We’re properly on the road again now, having covered another 345 miles through Arizona from Flagstaff to Tucson via “Meteor Crater” .

Meteor Crater is about 3/4 mile in diameter and formed 50,000 years ago by a meteor travelling an estimated 26,000 miles per hour. It sticks out like a sore thumb in the surrounding Arizona desert which is flat for hundreds of miles.

I hope the photos convey how big it really looks. I realise it is much, much smaller than the Grand Canyon where we were yesterday (the Grand Canyon is around 260 miles long), but there was something astonishing about standing on the edge of a crater formed by something  from outer space. Not only were we allowed to stand right on the rim, but the attached museum had real fragments of the meteor which you could touch and lift up (it’s much heavier tan normal rock!), along with lots of interactive exhibits and an excellent film about the formation and geology of the crater, as well and how it came to be discovered and preserved.

It was also interesting to hear how the crater was used as a training ground by NASA astronauts because the floor of it is so similar to the moon. Many well known astronauts like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell trained there and equipment like the moon buggy was also tested there.

This might be controversial, but we were more impressed by the Meteor Crater than the Grand Canyon. Learning about how meteorites have shaped the solar system, killed off the dinosaurs and even created the Moon by smashing up the Earth certainly makes you feel small.

Our trip to the Meteor Crater also took us onto “historic” Route 66 , just for a few miles so we got to see a bit of the craziness associated with one of America’s first highways.