Commercial Auto Dealers

I’ve been writing a lot about my road trip the last couple weeks. That’s because I’m still excited about it even though we’re at our destination. The new HHR that we got from our local GMC dealer has been a dream and we had great weather the entire way. But since it’s just my wife and I, we had to get creative in passing the time. Here are some things we came up with.

Audio Books
I don’t mean the traditional types of audio books that you put into the CD player. We would discuss movies that one of us has seen but the other one did not. We went into details as if we were telling the entire story from beginning to end. We would also ask each other questions during the story to get more detail. This passed about two hours going through Texas.

Call People
Since my wife doesn’t have a driver’s license, she was the only one that used the cell phone. But she put it on speakerphone and we called some old friends and family that we haven’t talked to in a long time. We got caught up and had a good time reliving memories. That passed a couple hours in New Mexico.

Make New Lyrics to Popular Songs
My wife is notorious for this. She likes to take a song that she knows I like and change the words so that’s the only thing I think about the next time I hear it. One of them is Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Hold My Hand.” She likes to sing “fold my ham” instead. It makes me so mad, but it makes me crack up, too.

Come back on Wednesday and read some more ways we passed the time.

The day was August 18, 1977. Mourners left a private ceremony inside Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee to say goodbye to “The King” Elvis Presley. His body was gently placed in a sparkling white 1977 Miller-Meteor Landau Traditional Cadillac, one of the most recognizable hearse limousines at the time. A silver Cadillac limousine was at the front of the long procession that went from Graceland to the nearby Memphis Cemetery.

What happened to that hearse that carried the body of “The King,” though?

One man – Chuck Houston – says he was the last person to drive the hearse in 1984. He got the hearse when the Memphis Funeral Home updated their fleet and got rid of the older cars. Houston’s father was the official owner of the hearse and it was one of his most prized possessions. He agreed to loan it to a funeral director in Florida, but he did this very reluctantly. According to Houston, this was the only funeral hearse that his father really wanted to keep in his 50 years of doing business.

Houston and a friend were driving the hearse to Florida to deliver it to the director there. But on the way there, they ran out of gas. After getting a couple gallons of gas in the car, they were on their way again. But a few miles later, the engine shut off completely and fire shot out from under the hood. This fire eventually engulfed the hearse…the hearse in which Elvis took his last ride.

And that’s what happened to the Elvis’s hearse.