Written by Kim
This morning we left Tupelo pretty early to get started toward Tennessee on the Natchez Trace Parkway which is 444-miles of scenic drive through Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. Today we traveled a little less than half of the parkway starting at mile marker 267 from Tupelo to Nashville.
The current parkway more or less follows the Old Natchez Trace, a busy travel corridor used by American Indians, European settlers and colonists. Native Americans created and used the trail for centuries. Early European and American explorers, traders, and immigrants used it in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. European Americans founded inns, also known as “stands”, along the Trace to serve food and lodging to travelers. Most of these stands closed as travel shifted to steamboats on the Mississippi and other rivers. The heyday of the Trace began in the 1770s and ended in the 1820s, by the 1830s the route was already in disrepair and its time as a major interregional commercial route had come to an end. Today it’s part of the National Park System and filled with wildlife, hiking trails, camping opportunities and wildflowers.
We stopped a few times to take short walks to overlooks and waterfalls. It’s been pretty dry so some of the waterfalls weren’t even flowing.
The drive as very peaceful. We drove on the Natchez Trace for about 3 1/2 hours and saw merely 30-40 cars, about 20 motorcycles and about 25 bikers. It was a nice change from all the traffic were used to. As a bonus, we got enough cell signal for me to join our church conference via Zoom. It’s been a while since I took a meeting in the car.
We crossed into Tennessee which is not a new state for us but increases our count to a total of 29 states on this trip.
We will spend a few days at Alex’s mom’s before making the final leg of our journey back to Myrtle Beach. I will publish a recap post next week with some stats and graphs from our trip. You know I have a spreadsheet with all kinds of data to analyze and share. Until then…
