Selecting our Route South

Deciding which route to take actually took a lot of forethought. We knew we wanted to get south, where it would hopefully to be warmer. In fact, we got out of Ohio just in time; the next day it was snowing. Did we want to hug the east coast? Or go directly to New Orleans? We had become kind of attached to the idea of going to New Orleans, but now that we were looking at the Covid and weather maps more closely, it didn’t make sense to head west to Arizona and New Mexico as we’d originally planned. Florida seemed the place to be.

We were talking to a friend about our debates on which way to go, and he mentioned the Natchez Trace Parkway as a possibility. Neither of us had heard of it before, but since one of our goals was to go to National Parks, Seashores, and Historic Sites, this US National Parkway seemed to be a great idea. When we looked at the 444 mile drive from Nashville, TN to Natchez, MS, we ended up extending the drive by a day or so in order to make sure we could stop along the way and explore the area.

Our original plan included only one hotel on the route south: Nashville. Then we’d be in New Orleans the next day. Taking the Natchez Trace Parkway would mean that we’d stop once before Nashville (Bowling Green, KY as it turns out), then Nashville, then at least one more night before New Orleans. The cover photo for this post is from the Ohio/Kentucky border as we crossed the bridge at the Ohio River.

We decided in the end to spend our third night in Jackson, MS, though in hindsight Tupelo would have been better because we hadn’t accounted for the darkness. Once things got dark, we couldn’t see or do anything along the Parkway. Because we pushed ourselves, we ran out of time and missed a big chunk of the Parkway.

From there, we decided to take a short drive east to Davis Bayou in Mississippi, one of the campgrounds that is part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, then go to New Orleans, then backtrack to Pensacola, FL and Fort Pickens, the other Gulf Islands National Seashore campground. Then we’d go down the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Everglades and the Keys, then up the east coast of Florida through Charlotte, NC and Knoxville, TN,  and then back to Ohio.