Peabody Ducks, Graceland, and Beale St

The Peabody Hotel is famous for its ducks. Every day at 11am they march 5 ducks from their rooftop home down the elevator down a red carpet and into the fountain in the middle of the lobby. They have done this since the 1930's and the ducks have been featured on the Tonight Show (Johnny Carson), Oprah, Sesame Street, etc over the years. Its pretty funny....they make a big (tongue in cheek) production of the duck march and the lobby is packed for both the 11am march down to the fountain and the 5pm march back to the rooftop "palace". After the morning duck "show" we had breakfast at the Bon-Ton Cafe which was good. Then we headed to Graceland. It was Elvis week so we skipped the 2 hour wait to ride the shuttle to the mansion and the 1.5 hour mansion tour. We walked as much of the Graceland area as we could without an official tour including the entrance to the mansion grounds, his airplanes (the Lisa Marie and the Hound Dog), several of the Elvis shops and an Elvis impersonator performance at the Graceland Crossing area. We headed back to the hotel around 3:30. Christy and I got a nap while the kids watched a little TV. We caught the 5pm duck march on our way to a swim in the hotel pool. Headed up to the rooftop for a drink around 6:30 before going to Blues City Café for BBQ dinner. Dinner was not good - the service was terrible and the food was below average. We survived dinner and took a walk down Beale St which is somewhere between Broadway (Nashville) and Bourbon St. Just before heading back to the hotel at 8:30, we had a blackout in downtown Memphis including all of Beale St and our hotel. We went back to the hotel and laid low in the lobby with most of the other guests. We end up meeting a nice couple from Louisiana (Beth and husband) and a couple girls from San Francisco and had a good time talking and gaming with them. We finally climbed up the stairs to our 7th floor room and went to bed around 11:30. The power was finally restored around 2am. I know because the lights in our room popped on and the AC started flowing. The stadium below is the home of the Memphis Redbirds (AAA affiliate of the St Louis Cardinals). Stadium looked like one of the nicest minor league parks I've seen.... unfortunately they were not in town during our visit.