400 miles in and we are both still alive, which is truly remarkable when you consider how many times today we have listened to Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places (The Long Version).” This is what happens when you let the newly-minted Garth fan control the iPod.

After a quick stop in Nashville for lunch with an old friend, I introduced Earl to the Roadside America app. I navigated the quick rainstorm between Bucksnort, TN, and the Duck River while she explored. So, it figures that our first detour didn’t come from the app, right? We saw a sign for the Tennessee Fresh Water Pearl Museum, and Earl jumped at it. I hopped off the interstate and headed down the little 2-lane.

Looking at the website now, I kinda wish we’d actually stopped. As it stood, we couldn’t find anything about it on Roadside America, and the signs appeared to lead us straight into a trailer park. Now, I have no problem with people who live in trailer parks, but it was wooded and I sewanee there was banjo music, so I pulled a u-ey with Earl saying, “Can you drive faster?”

I proposed a stop in Jackson, TN, at the Casey Jones Village—a place I frequented in the summers of my younger years when I was dragged by my mother and her friends to the annual Miss Tennessee Pageant (Miss America system, not Miss USA, thankyouverymuch). They used to have a pretty cool little ice cream shop and general store. Earl agreed with a bit of a grumble and went back to the app.

“Ooh, Mama! I found somewhere I really want to go!”

Referring to Agreement #2, it was settled: We were detouring from our scheduled detour.

To the International Rockabilly Hall of Fame Museum in Jackson, TN.

That’s Lee Gaugh, our phenomenal tour guide. I’ll admit, our arrival was a little inauspicious. The door was locked despite the “Open” sign, and there was a sign saying to ring the buzzer for a tour. It seemed a bit sketch, but before we could back out, an older gentleman walked up the sidewalk and unlocked the door. There was a group in a room off to the side, and Earl and I kind of stood just inside the door and looked around for a moment. I was plotting our departure when Lee popped out and introduced himself.

It’s not your typical museum. Lee was quick to explain there aren’t any fancy exhibits, but there are lots of stories. And, boy, was he right. He grew up knowing Carl Perkins (who claims Jackson as home), and his tales were a wonderful mixture of legend, personal moments, and sheer history.

Earl was won over the moment Lee said, “Now, when you go to Graceland, one thing they won’t do is open up a display case and let you hold an actual artifact.”

She had no frame of reference for the significance of the blue suede shoes he placed in her hands, but she was duly impressed and obviously petrified she might drop them.

Did you know “Blue Suede Shoes” was written after Carl Perkins was performing in a club and heard a kid warn the girl he was dancing with not to step on his shoes? True story.

We heard tales of the history of rockabilly music, of Elvis and Sun Records, of Jerry Lee Lewis and the Million Dollar Quartet. Then we were led into the Dance Hall where, up on the stage, was a set of drums. They were given to the museum by Elvis’s drummer D.J. Fontana. Lee urged Earl up on stage and handed her a pair of drumsticks donated by Johnny Cash’s drummer W.S. Holland. Then this happened:

We’d only planned to stop for 30 minutes or so, but we were at Rockabilly for an hour and a half. I was certain Earl had been bored by the stories and all the talking, but as we walked out the door, she grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. “That was so awesome.”

Hopping back in the car, I agreed with her declaration. “Yeah, that was pretty cool, wasn’t it?”

“It was!” she chirped. “And it was all my idea!”

Yes, my child, it was. What a great idea it was!

Tonight, we’re bedded down in Memphis in a quiet hotel undergoing extensive renovation that seems to indeed be outside of the murder district (knock wood). Tomorrow: Graceland. Then westward we go. Earl’s excited. Once we leave Tennessee, we’ll be in all new-to-her states.

I’m just hoping I get to control the iPod for a bit tomorrow. Clearly, I need to properly introduce her to Rockabilly.

I have always loved road trips. Just get in the car and go. Of course, I also used to sleep on road trips—hooray for naps!—and for a long time I was too young to drive, but I loved them despite my likely whines to the contrary.

While Earl has taken a few smaller road trips up to Newport, RI, for the Newport Folk Festival, I’m hoping with this trip to instill that same love in her—to give her the same kinds of memories that I have.

I took my first road trip when I was 5. My parents, both grandmothers, my big brother, and I piled into a van to trek westward. I was enamored by the van. It was a beauty of a conversion van borrowed from one of my father’s friends, huge and plush and the back bench folded down into a bed and there was a table for playing cards. I remember peering over the back seat and wondering how on earth my father was going to pack all of the stuff six people needed for two weeks on the road, plus the requisite two sets of golf clubs, into that tiny little space.

Needless to say, my father is a car packing fiend. I have blossomed into one as well. Back away from my back end, bellboys—only I, the Prodigal Packer, can get all of that stuff back in the way it came out!

We took a video camera on the trip, and somewhere there are VHS-C tapes of my blonde hair blowing every which way in Dodge City. Dust was everywhere, and that was the first time my mom allowed me to scale the ladder on the back of the van to see how high I could go.

There was an ski excursion in Colorado where I got so angry with the ski people because they would not give me poles. You had to be six to get poles, but I was less than a week away and they would not give me poles. Righteous indignation doesn’t begin to describe the feeling, especially when you consider that I, a mere 5 year old without poles, aced the bunny slope on the first try. My brother, 21 and therefore trusted with the sacred poles, couldn’t even navigate the slight bump in the snow he encountered on the way to his ski lesson.

The anger was quickly assuaged by the doorman at our hotel in Colorado Springs with whom I had a brief but intense love affair. He did magic, pulling coins from behind my ears, and treating me like the queen as he gallantly gestured me through the doors into the lobby. For dinner, he recommended the corner chowder, and I made myself sick in the hotel bar eating corn chowder with my Nana, but I would not stop eating it because it was just so good.

We ventured up to Pikes Peak, befriending a fellow traveler along the way and giving her a ride to somewhere, back when it was safe to befriend fellow travelers and offer them a lift. The snow on the mountain was almost up to my father’s shoulders, even in May, and I wanted to dig tunnels and never come out.

Somewhere there’s a picture of me and Granny, Dad’s mom, standing on the Four Corners of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. She was tickled by that. But when it came to the Grand Canyon, Dad dropped us all off at the rim and went to park. Granny met him halfway back to the van, ready to go. “Mama, it’s the Grand Canyon!” “It’s a hole in the ground. I’ve seen it.” She was equally impressed a few days later with South Fork.

Life changed in San Antonio. In a motel, Granny fussed that she didn’t like chocolate while eating just as much of my chocolate ballerina birthday cake as any of the rest of us. I got a baby doll who sucked her paci, my first camera (a Kodak disk camera that I loved for years and years), and the true surprise of the day, the pronouncement that the family was growing. My sister had gotten married the year before and was expecting her first child. I was going to be an AUNT! Wasn’t I excited??

No! I come from an old family; my dad was 40 when I was born, practically dead with old age, and he was the second youngest. All my aunt and uncles were ancient. In an instant, I saw my freshly six-year-old self morph into my Aunt G. I flung myself on the bed and kicked and screamed, “I’m too young to be a dumb old aunt!”

It’s worth noting, at the time, Aunt G would have been right around 40. In other words, my age now. Aunt G, I apologize for ever thinking you were ancient. For what it’s worth, I no longer do. Age brings perspective and the older I get, the younger you are.

Decades have passed since that first road trip, but the memories are still just as vivid as ever. I remember feeling so loved on that trip, riding in the van, listening to stories, hearing my grandmas quibble and conspire, my parents navigate, and my brother practice his life-long patient tolerance for his baby sister.

Like me on that trip, Earl will come home a year older and broken in to adventure. Our car won’t be nearly so full of folks, but I hope it’s just as full of love and tolerance.