New Mexico Roadtrip: Hello Memphis

We have kicked off our road trip to New Mexico. Tuesday was day 1, and we drove to Memphis that day, where we are spending 3 nights.

Previous Post: New Mexico Roadtrip: Planning

720.6 miles from Jacksonville to Memphis

Tuesday was spent driving. All day. The total distance turned out to be 720.6 miles.

We started around 7am eastern time, and checked into our AirBNB around 8:45pm central time, which is almost 15 hours door to door, with the time change.

We have taken many long road trips, and we’ve found that 750 miles for the day is about our limit. It’s usually 15 hours on the road, including stops, so if we get a reasonably early start, we are able to reach our destination before it gets too late.

Some of you may be doing the math and thinking that 720 miles can be done faster than 15 hours, and that’s true, but I usually don’t drive too fast, with one eye on my Prius ‘miles per gallon’ number, and I like to take frequent stops to stretch or eat or use the bathroom, stopping approximately every 100 miles.

There are a couple of ways to go, and I opted not to take the route that goes through Atlanta, which would be on interstate highways the entire way. Instead we went west on I-10 to I-75, and then took a several hour detour off the interstate highway, taking mostly US-82, through Albany GA and Eufala AL (where we stopped for lunch), enroute to Montgomery AL, where we picked up I-65 to Birmingham and then I-22 which goes all the way to Memphis.

The drive itself was nice, and uneventful. Weather was great, sunny all day, and we passed the time mostly listening to podcasts as well as some music on Sirius XM.

Walking in Memphis

Our first day in Memphis was beautiful in the upper-70’s. After working all morning, we were able to get out in the afternoon and again in the evening.

In the afternoon we went for a walk in Overton Park, which was just a 10 minute drive from where we are staying. Overton Park is a big park that holds the Memphis Zoo, an art museum, a small golf course, and has lots of outdoor spaces, including an old-growth forest, which is rare to find in such an urban setting. We walked for about an hour, mostly on a nice paved path through the forest area, but just one detour for about 15 minutes into a nice hiking path loop through the woods.

We also came upon the bike gate arch, which is one of the main entrances to the park, and commemorates the spot when a highway was once proposed to be built, which would have destroyed that section of the park and the old-growth forest. It is now a key spot along Memphis’ bike paths and greenways, and the starting point if you want to travel to the other huge park in town, Shelby Farms. The arch is decorated with over 320 colorful old bicycles!

Later in the day, to coincide with sunset, we went for a walk on the Big River Crossing, a pedestrian bridge over the Mississippi River that is over 1 mile in length! In actuality, it is the outer part of a railroad bridge, with that track having been decommissioned and converted to a walking path.

What was nice about this bridge is that the start on the Memphis side is on a bluff, at a higher elevation than the river, so there is no climbing uphill to get to the center of the bridge. On the other side (which is in West Memphis, Arkansas), the bridge does go all the way down to the elevation of the river, but it is a very gentle slope. From the center of the bridge, there were some awesome views of Memphis in the distance – see photo at the top of the page.

After crossing the bridge and back, we also checked out Martyr’s Park, which is along the Mississippi River and has great views of the river and the bridges crossing the river. Martyr’s Park commemorates the site where 1500 people were buried who died of yellow fever in an epidemic in 1878, many of who were healthy people that tried to help others who were already sick.

In total, between both outings, we walked over 2 hours, probably covering a good 5+ miles!

Food update

While not a very high bar, our goal for this trip is to eat more healthy than we typically do on a vacation, which usually means 3 ‘bad’ meals per day! To assist, we are mostly renting AirBNB’s with kitchens, and bringing some of our own items to ensure we can easily cook some meals.

For the days we are on the road, we will do the easy thing and give ourselves permission to not eat well. For this day in the car, especially given where things are with COVID, we went with very small fast food meals, rather than larger gut-busting restaurant meals.

The potentially bigger problem for us is that we have a very soft spot for donuts, and on roads trips we love to discover and try out local donut shops. We have continued with that trend already on this trip, stopping at Gibson’s Donuts Tuesday night when we arrived, given that it is open 24/7 – it did not disappoint! On Wednesday, we tried another local shop, Midtown Donuts, which was also great, and reminded us of the donut shops that that we love, which are typical in California (our favorite is Happy Donuts – there are several in the Bay Area). I don’t want to put any more detail here just yet, because we would like to create a space on this site where we review all of the various donut shops we stop at during our travels. Hopefully that is coming soon.

On Tuesday night, we also stopped at Trader Joe’s to pick up some staples and healthier food that we will eat here in Memphis, or perhaps take with us for the rest of our trip.

While we did eat a few donuts on Wednesday for breakfast, our other meals were OK. Caroline prepared a home cooked meal of quinoa, eggs and sausage, and while it was missing some veggies, it is at least better than eating out. Our other meal of the deal were just simple sandwiches.

Again, while not the healthiest of eating days, it is way better than what we would normally eat on a road trip.

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We have one more day in Memphis, and then it is off to Oklahoma City.