October 22 - Day 20 - Gator Island to Memphis, TN!

The thing I hate about alarm clocks is the snooze option. What is the point? It is a false hope. A temptation. You lie there for 5 minutes simply dreading what you know its going to happen as it will go off again and you'll have to get up. Unfortunately, my sisters are not of the same mindset. At home it is not uncommon for my older sister to hit that evil snooze button dozens of times in a morning as Jenny and I try to salvage what little rest we can with her obnoxious alarm ringing through our heads. I almost thought I was back home when I heard the alarm go off once, and just as I started falling back to sleep - again. Jenny must have sensed the danger she would put herself in if she tried to do it again and got up. Its one thing to have to get out of bed to exact vengence for a disturbed sleep, its quite another when your sleeping with the offender and can easily lash out at her while still under the warm covers... It was 6:55 and Jenny and Wade had us underway by 7:15.

The deal we've made with each other is taking turns waking up early for the morning shift. Well, Jenny and I made this deal. Since we usually camp, we have to cross waters outside of the buoys to get to and from our chosen campsite and there is no gaurantee that we will be safe from shallow ground, rocks, logs, submerged trees, etc. and hence Jenny and I do not feel comfortable traversing through these dangers alone. Once we're in the buoys its a piece of cake, though. Therefore, no matter who gets up early, Wade has to get up too and help us get underway and back in the buoys before he can attempt to sleep again. Usually, he doesn't even try.

I believe this was the case this morning (I'm not sure, as I was alseep myself) and I awoke to Jenny exclaiming that there were bridges up ahead and she wanted to know if we had the proper clearance to go under. All this information is in our Army Corp of Engineer maps we got online, so it was just a matter of looking up where we were at. Maybe I'm a control freak, but it seems like whenever someone else touches the maps they all get mixed up (and I have had to organize them serveral times now) - so I'm very possessive of being the keeper of the maps and got up to check it out before someone else tried to. Clearance was a-okay and we were just entering Memphis so I didn't bother going back to bed.

Of course, as it was Jenny's shift she woke up to the pitter-patter of rain on the deck of the boat (which contributed to the snooze button decision) and it continued for the hour and a half that she drove. It was only 8:30 when we got to Memphis, and after a brief arguement on where the marina was (the GPS -Wade's method of navigation, and my Army Corp maps do not always say the same thing) we arrived at the Mud Island Marina. Mud Island, a large park operated by the City of Memphis, is located on an island offshore of the actual city itself.

Immediately, Wade sought out the a-okay from the manager to use the showers. Jenny cleaned up inside the cabin of the boat and I washed the mud covered deck. Dirty work out of the way, we were given the key to the showers and an hour later we felt like human beings again! Amusingly enough, everything happens to Jenny and the hot water in her shower didn't work, there were dead cockroaches in there, and she wisely decided to wait to use my shower. The next few hours were dedicated to laundry, waiting to see if our friend Drewbear would be able to join us, and chatting with random folks who were curious about where we were from/where we were going now that we were showered and no longer looked like mud creatures from the Mississippi lagoons. While the laundry did its thing, we walked just up the hill to the park which we were told we couldn't miss seeing. There we saw the riverwalk - a scale model of the channels and islands of the Mississippi River. It was HUGE! We followed the river from its beginnings in Itasca, MN five city blocks down to the Gulf of Mexico!

Wade hitched a ride to a hardware/grocerys store as Jenny and I finished up the laundry and dried off from our walk through the park. By this time, we had discovered that Drewbear could not join us afterall but we had no desire to motor through the pouring rain so we elected to stay in Memphis for the day. When Wade came back we walked across a walkway that crossed over the river into the city of Memphis and found food right away at the Napoleon Cafe. Nothing beats a good burger when your starving. We've gotten into this nasty habit of only eating one meal a day and it puts us all in moods, but its such a hassle to pull out the galley and make food that no one wants to do it - so we were starving. It was sort of a questionable looking place so maybe the food wasn't that good, really, and we were just too hungry to care but right then it hit the spot.

Then we basically walked around the city of Memphis. We went by Beale Street, we saw the 3rd tallest Pyramid in the world (that is actually a sports and entertainment complex), and we picked up Elvis souveniers and postcards. We ran through the park fountains on Main Street, got Starbucks frappichino coffee for Jenny, and then Jenny gave it away to a homeless man we saw sleeping in a corner. We started to walk to a hardware store but after 5 or 6 blocks we turned around because Wade called them and they were closed. We wished we could have gotten to go to Graceland, but we decided it would cost too much to get there - next trip, maybe.

When finally we were ready to go back to the marina, we couldn't get back across the river! The crosswalk was locked down and the other bridges leading across didn't have pedestrian walkways (from what we could see from a distance anyway). We walked from the walkway/out of commission monorail to the freeway crossing the river and didn't find a walkway and walked to the next bridge and couldn't see a walkway there either. We ended up having to call a cab just to get back to the right side of the river (the taxi fee is a lot steeper in Memphis than any of our other taxi excursions). At the marina, we gased up, grabbed the blankets and then hunkered down in the laundry room to watch a movie (Sahara!) where it was warmer and drier before returning to the boat for bed! It's a good thing we decided to stay in Memphis too - it rained the whole day and that night was one of the stormiest yet!