Since Nashville we’ve been travelling down an historical trail known as the Natchez Trace Parkway. Since we did it in sections I have waited till we completed our trip to write this post. (https://www.nps.gov/natr/planyourvisit/index.htm) NTP has been used by long extinct mammals like the wooly mammoth through ancient Indian Tribes to todays RV traveller. It is now administered by the National Parks Service.
The NTP stretches for 450 miles through 3 states (Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi) from Natchez to Nashville and has a fascinating range of interesting points to visit and pretty much all of them have signage and pull over bays.. The road is well constructed and is as smooth as a baby’s bottom. It has a ban on it to disallow commercial vehicle use and the speed limit is around 50MPH so traffic is minimal making the trip easy, calm and relaxing.
I could go through every photo in the gallery but many have signs to explain them. Some that I will mention are those from the Carter House. There are 3 pics of buildings on the grounds that you can see bullet holes in from the Civil War. There are tens of Civil War memorials along the NTP and gravesites are many. There are also lots of sites of Indian Mounds. This is something I previously knew nothing about. You can read the signage of what these were made for. Then there are more recent features from the explorers Lewis and Clark (These explorers are as important in the USA as Burke and Wills are in Australia) to post Civil War times. The gallery ends at our RV Camp on the Natchez banks of the Mississippi.
The second gallery comes from a part of the Mississippi Blues Trail once we left the Natchez Trace at Jackson, Mississippi. This Jackson (there must be a dozen places in the USA named Jackson) is somewhere to avoid at all costs. Thankfully we have our own loo and shower in our caravan so we didn’t have to use these facilities. Anyway being in the ‘Bible Belt’ there are huge churches everywhere and Shane snapped this one as we left Jackson and started passing through cotton plantations to our next stop, Leland. Leland is a ‘down on it’s luck’ town which happens to play an important place in the history of the roots of Blues music. But before I venture into that area Leland is also the town where every baby boomer’s hero was born, Jim Henson creator of the Muppets. The town has erected several monuments to him. Not far from Leland in the town of Greenville is the first “Does Eat Place”.
“Does” has been operating since 1941 and frankly the original café as seen in pic 1, certainly looks that way (There are 13 franchises about). You enter the café straight into the 1st kitchen (pic 2) and the to your left the steaks for which they are famous are cooking away (pic3). You are escorted through the door on the far right of pic 2 straight into the second kitchen (pic 4). As you look across the second kitchen in pics 5 you’ll notice customers sitting at tables against the far left wall and in 6 there is a window on the back wall through which you can see more customers in another room of the house. We were led to another room on the right (pic 7) where we ordered and received the most humongous steak I have ever had (pic 8). Shane had the Fried Shrimp. My steak was so thick that I only managed to eat that triangle of meat against the bone. The rest we put in a doggie bag and we shared it the next night for tea. At $48 for a steak I wasn’t leaving it behind. “Does” really is a southern experience but I still think they need to update the place a tad if only for health reasons.
The remainder of the photos are of historic places on the Blues trail with the exception of the last photo. In all the depression of Leland Shane shot this picture of a grand house that seemed well out of place in this poor region of Mississippi.
Well that’s another one down. I hope you are finding our stories interesting. Even better if they are inspiring you to travel more especially off the beaten track.
Cheers for now.
Garry & Shane.