A Hop, Skip, & a Jump

We’re great ones for brainstorming here at the Flyer, and we recently focused our superpowers on cooking up a few fun things to do during “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer,” now already upon us, without driving too far. Luckily, we spell Memphis Flyer “F-U-N” around here, and within a few minutes, or maybe days, but certainly well before the heat melted our brains, we had this intriguing grab-bag of quick excursions ready for you. Tack it on your wall! They’re all surefire — and nearby  — cures for the summertime blues.

Big Cypress Lodge

If you’ve ever wanted to get a proper look inside the entirety of the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid, Big Cypress Lodge is the place for you. I’d visited the ground floor before to explore the shops, marvel at the live alligator, and gaze at the enormity of the tall building, but the hotel experience gives you access to so much more.

In your room, chips, popcorn, and candy await you, as do two queen beds and a balcony just outside. You can also relax in their third-floor lounge, called The Den, complete with rotating activities to do with fellow lodgers.

Yet the biggest attraction has to be the view from the top floor. Both a restaurant, The Lookout at the Pyramid, and a balcony are suspended 300 feet in the air, accessible only by elevator. And that ride, the car going ever-slower the nearer it gets to the top while an audio recording of the building’s history by Bill Dance plays on, is a comical experience, to say the least. 

Once you reach the top, it’s like a breath of fresh air. The décor, newly renovated in April, mimics the beauty of the ocean. The whole room is surrounded with glass and allows for a full view of Downtown and the Mississippi River.

My mom and I were eager to explore the balcony after ordering our food. The view was beautiful, of course, but we were absolutely dying of laughter over the windy day. Our hair blew in every direction, making it almost impossible to get a photo of the two of us.

Then our food arrived. The braised short ribs with mashed potatoes were divine. The rich sauce, full of red wine and aromatics, made every bite well-balanced, the beef so tender you didn’t need a knife, the potatoes chock-full of butter, all complemented by roasted Brussels sprouts with toasted almonds. The big finish was the warm vanilla butter cake and ice cream.

After a couple of hours of exploring, we made our way to the Mississippi Terrace, a full bar with two fire pits, oversize furniture, high-top tables, a stage for live music, and, best of all, a balcony with an unobstructed view of the bridge and the river. Whether you’re playing cards with friends or toasting s’mores with your family, this relaxed space is the perfect way to decompress after a busy day. We settled in near one of the fire pits and ordered the charcuterie board. Fresh fruit, two kinds of cheese, smoked sausage, salami, spicy mustard, and toasted bread made for the perfect snack. They also serve wings, flatbread, salad, and more — which made the experience all the more comfortable and cozy as we were immersed in the radiance of nighttime Memphis. Big Cypress Lodge in the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid is hands-down the best place to see it in all its glory. — Gracie Driver 

Go Dark

Summer’s so bright, it’s a great time to get dark. For a break from the season’s gleam and glare, why not walk on the city’s dark side? 

Dark tourism is a thing, and it’s on the rise. Dark tourists simply want the dark stuff — ghosts, cryptids like Bigfoot, alien sites, or true crime. More broadly, dark tourism can also include visits to any site of human tragedy, human suffering, or natural disaster. Think Ground Zero in New York or Alcatraz in San Francisco. The Memphis equivalent of this would be the yellow fever tours at Elmwood Cemetery.    

“I think that folks are looking for sort of the underbelly of the city,” said Stephen Guenther, co-owner of Historical Haunts Memphis and The Broom Closet, South Main’s spiritual supply shop. “Every city — large or small — has these curious stories, whether it’s murders, kidnappings, ghost stories, whatever it might be. But I think there are people who are looking for the unusual, the dark.” 

If your Memphis staycation needs a break from sun-drenched days of fruity cocktails and splashing around the pool, don’t be afraid to take a walk on the dark side. Memphis has plenty of it. 

Here are a few good ways to be a dark tourist here this summer:

• Take a ghost tour

There are a host of these in Memphis. Local ones (the ones we’d recommend) include Backbeat Tours and Historical Haunts of Memphis.  

Backbeat’s tour will take you by The Orpheum Theatre to visit Mary, Memphis’ most famous ghost, and to the John Alexander Austin House, a Victorian-era mansion haunted by star-crossed lovers.

Historical Haunts has a haunted pub crawl on South Main that ends at the notoriously haunted Earnestine and Hazel’s. Its Dark Memphis Walking Tour features hauntings, murders, and dark history. 

• Visit Elmwood Cemetery

Cemeteries don’t have to be dark places. Elmwood Cemetery says it is simply “Memphis at rest” and a place full of history. Elmwood also realizes the draw of such an old cemetery with an array of amazing people from across the city’s past. For this, they offer tours. A lot of them. 

For starters, tour maps and booklets for $5 facilitate self-guided exploration around the grounds. Or, with a $10 digital audio tour, you get a CD or digital download and a map to explore from your car. Elmwood also offers a free scavenger hunt download that you can print and discover as you walk or ride. 

• Explore Memphis’ Hoodoo history 

Memphis’ Hoodoo history might not be well known yet but the Beale Street Hoodoo History and Folklife Museum hopes to change that. It opened last year and is located right above A. Schwab. It celebrates “the vibrant traditions of Hoodoo, root work, and the lives of the people who carried and preserved these traditions in the African American community.” Expect to see authentic herbal remedies, amulets, and photographs of legendary Memphis spiritual workers.

Hoodoo — at its core — is an African American folk spiritual tradition that blends folk magic with deeply held religious beliefs. While Hoodoo itself isn’t “dark” in the sinister sense, its mystical traditions and spiritual practices often intersect with the same curiosity that draws people to dark tourism and the supernatural.

Free, self-guided tours are available Sunday through Friday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Just alert the person working the front desk at A. Schwab before you head upstairs to the museum. — Toby Sells

Birding By Ear 

Call it Stockholm Syndrome, but at a certain point every summer, realizing we Memphians are utterly captive to the heat, I just want to revel in the sheer convection oven-ness of it all. Enough with this infernal AC! Knowing I can return to my refrigerated life any time, of course, I head out to touch grass. I don’t seek the full-on sun of, say, a boating adventure but the forest’s many dappled shades of green, just a hop, skip, and a jump away at Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park. 

On my most recent visit, I was reminded as soon as I arrived that it’s always a few degrees cooler than the city, way out there in the woods. And so, shaking off my summer doldrums with that cool hint of hope, I resolved to become a bird watcher right then and there. Maybe I would even start a “life list” of species I identified.

The ranger at the visitor’s center made it easy for me. “You should check out the Memphis chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society,” she chimed in helpfully. “They have meetings every third Wednesday of the month. They’re a really nice group of people. Every year, around the middle of December, they do a bird count, which they’ve been doing since the 1800s.” And, as it turned out, the park had just hosted a wild butterfly count last Saturday.

I, on the other hand, had resolved to become an audio-ornithologist, by way of an app called Merlin, which identifies birds by their calls as well as their photographic images. Indeed, it can cut out the visual dimension completely, which made sense amid the dense weave of sunlit greenery and shadowed deadfall surrounding me that day, where all birds were reduced to mere fleeting blurs.

As soon as I’d parked at the head of the Woodland Trail, a three-mile loop over undulating forest terrain (with some challenging uphill sections for your cardio), Merlin was identifying birdsongs, opening up an invisible world to me. I always appreciate the general clamor of avian cacophony on a hike, but this time was different. Suddenly, each chirp and chatter had a specific performer. “Ah, so that’s a cardinal’s song,” I thought for each species identified, as unseen feathered divas, from red-bellied woodpeckers to Carolina chickadees to white-breasted nuthatches, broadcast their oratorios. 

It should be noted that some birders find Merlin to be less than infallible, and consider adding a species to your life list simply because it was identified by the app to be bad form. Still, in all my naïve ignorance, I was happy to be learning a thing or two while I decompressed from city life, and comparing the recorded sounds with archived birdsongs in the app seemed to verify what it was telling me.

Meanwhile, I could take in more miniature views of the forest, including toads, flowers, and those ever-present “leaves of three.” They were an important reminder that, while indulging in a staycation, it’s not just about the life lists we complete by day’s end, but the poison ivy we avoid along the way. — Alex Greene  

Mid-South Ice House

Memphis is well into the dog days of summer, when you either sweat through “feels like” 109-degree weather, or admire the squiggly lines in the air during your drive down Poplar while tumbleweeds roll by and an eagle screeches overhead. In times like these, the best getaway is the coldest place you can find. And for Memphians, there’s no place colder than the Mid-South Ice House.

Missing the feel of an ice rink after watching Alysa Liu and the U.S. men’s and women’s hockey teams dominate at the Olympics earlier this year? A trip down to Olive Branch will take you back to that vibe. 

As you enter, you pay admission and rent skates (unless you’re a pro bringing your own). After lacing them up, you enter a rink decorated with the flags of various hockey teams and different states. The middle of the rink is reserved for figure skaters practicing jumps and spins. For the less impressive among us, stands are available to help with balance issues. 

As the only NHL regulation-sized rink in the area, the Mid-South Ice House is home to several child, youth, and adult hockey teams as well as some camps and clinics. It also houses the Figure Skating Club of Memphis and the Mid-South Curling Club. Those looking for lessons can find private options or participate in Learn-to-Skate USA, group skating lessons taught by professional instructors. 

Whether you’re hobbling like a baby deer on stilts as you make a slow lap around the rink or swerving around small children like a speed demon, the Mid-South Ice House presents a fun opportunity to practice your balance and motor skills, solo or with friends. Public skating hours are held on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., and weekend skating is Friday and Saturday nights from 7:15 p.m. to 10 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday afternoons from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. 

The Mid-South Ice House also hosts “Cosmic Skate” on Friday and Saturday nights (which involves disco lights and loud music), Saturday Fun and Games on Saturday afternoons, and Friends and Family Skate on Sunday afternoons. And if you’d rather watch your friends skate than risk it yourself, there are rows of benches surrounding the rink, not to mention a concession stand. Either way, in dog days like these, how can you resist hanging out in a room full of ice? — Allie Maury 

Hotel Pontotoc

You’ve got vacation time coming up. You want to go somewhere, but you don’t want to spend a ton of gas money traveling hundreds of miles away. Yet it would be nice to experience somewhere different and learn something new. The simplest solution: Go Downtown and check into the Hotel Pontotoc at 69 Pontotoc Avenue. You’re getting history, but also luxury and proximity to places you may never have been.

Kyla Kennin, the hotel’s reservation and events manager, explained why someone should spend their staycation at Hotel Pontotoc. “One, because we’re locally owned,” she says. “Our owners are very much invested in our day-to-day operations.” And, Kennin says, “It’s been around since 1906. We’re on our 120th anniversary this year, so it’s rich with history.” Originally opened as a European-style hotel, it came to have a basement club sporting glitter-ceilinged red booths, and was allegedly where Elvis lost his virginity. “It’s definitely a really cool property with lots of cool history that you wouldn’t normally find out about unless you stayed with us.”

The impressive hotel in the heart of Downtown looks like it belongs on a “Wish you were here!” postcard, and the current owners enhanced that look with just the right touches after buying the property. The Jacobean-colored, sapele mahogany woodwork from the back bar all the way up the stairs was shipped over in a container from Ireland. An Irish woodworker gave them a good deal on the woodwork because he was intrigued with the stories about the Pontotoc.

The rooms were designed by Ann Parker of Parker Design Studio. “Every room is named after a significant year from the hotel’s history,” Kennin says, “and every room has a little bit of that year or the theme of the room in the inspiration of the design. So, no one room looks quite like the other.”

Take Room 1953, the Elvis room. “I believe Ms. Parker was going for the Jungle Room at Graceland with this Elvis suite and its jungle wallpaper all around the dark green headboard,” says Kennin. Of course, there’s a king-sized (or “King,” if you prefer) mattress on the bed.

Hotel Pontotoc’s bar and lounge, The Dame, has “small-plate appetizers and desserts,” Kennin says, “but we mainly specialize in Prohibition-style cocktails. So, it’s kind of a speakeasy bar and lounge.” Meanwhile, The Lobbyist, Catherine & Mary’s, Amelia Gene’s, Tonica, and other restaurants are within walking distance.

And if you want to do some sightseeing, Hotel Pontotoc is close to Beale Street and The Orpheum Theatre. Old Dominick Distillery, which includes a bar, is a great place to visit, Kennin says. The National Civil Rights Museum, AutoZone Park, and FedExForum aren’t far away.

“We’re conveniently located between South Main and South Front, which are both loaded with tons of Memphis’ best restaurants and bars. So there’s plenty to do that’s walkable.” — Michael Donahue