Saturday, November 17, 2012

St Jude's and Downtown Memphis

Some of you know that we have a 2 year old granddaughter at St. Jude's in Memphis. Next week will be her 4th chemo treatment. Hopefully there will be an operation in December that will cure our girl. She is doing well and we appreciate everyone's prayers.
Our son has 3 older children and we enjoy taking them away from the apartment to enjoy things, when we can. Yesterday was the "trolley day". Memphis is a very nice and clean older city, downtown now. They have worked hard to clean and keep the river front area really nice for visitors. Memphis is a St. Jude friendly city also.

Nic and his big sister Essie getting ready to board the Riverfront Trolley.

Alexis and Grana hopping on board.

One happy girl. Alexis has to walk on cruthches,a birth defect called spinabifia. Memphis and lots of private buisinesses, along with the zoo, give special attention to kids from St. Jude's. The conductor assumed that Alexis was from the hospital. We told him no, her little sister is there. The conductor says "your trolley ride is free". Wow. They only charge a dollar anyway to ride but we appreciated the conductor. He let us ride twice and then parked the trolley close to our car to save Alexis a long walk. Everyone downtown is St Jude friendly. St Jude is one fantastic children's hospital. I will never hesitate donating to this work. We" made over" Alexis saving us 5 bux and treated her to her own pizza for lunch.

Oh boy. This is how a 4 year old grandson sees his grandfather. Now I know why they think I am so old, ha.

Essie and Grana having fun on the ride. We got to ride down around the riverfront then up through downtown. It would be nice to see all big cities take care of the downtown areas like Memphis does. We saw no trash. All empty storefronts were clean and well taken care of. No homeless people hanging around and the police presence was great.

This 4 year old was having the time of his life. We stopped at the welcome center. Nic touched Elvis' shoe and the alarm went off. He never left my side from that point on. Was nervous the police might question him.

Just a shot of one of the cars. This is a great thing that Memphis has. Good transportation and cheap. I am sure the city loses money. The driver that we had was just a super guy. He has a personality that lends itself to the job he does.

A little time in one of the city parks to burn the energy up for a 4 yr old grandson.

We loved going to Mud Island and watching the barges.

One last shot of one of the trolley cars.
Just a few short hours with our grandkids but hopeful the memories will last them a life time. Teri and I are blessed to have 16 grandchildren. Each one makes us feel very special.
Thanks for riding the trolley with us. Have a great Thanksgiving.
Dan

PS
The new car gets great mileage. We had a headwind coming home from Memphis yesterday, so it hurt our overall 300 mile trip average. Was only 49.8 mpg.

posted by Dan & Teri Gregg @ 11:11 AM

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home