A Short Leisurely Drive

After sweating my ass all over Vicksburg for a couple of days, it was good to have a nice little drive up the Natchez Trace Parkway. The Natchez Trace Parkway runs from Natchez, MS up to Nashville, TN. For those who don't know, the Natchez Trace was an old dirt trail that Indians wandered along until the white man came and decided they wanted to wander around on it. Kentucky had a prominent role in the early days of commerce on the Natchez Trace as farmers from Kentucky (and other Ohio Valley fellows) would load up flatboats with crops (or more likely whisky made from their crops) and travel down to Natchez or New Orleans. Since they couldn't take a flatboat upstream, they walked home on the Natchez Trace. Obviously Kentuckians were the most important (or possibly obnoxious) of them because these travellers were known as Kaintucks. Then some other white men realized that they could make money by robbing and killing other white men who walked along that trail. So in spite of that (or possibly because of that), the federal government decided that this dirt trail was an important part of American history and should be preserved. By blacktopping it so cars could drive on it.


It seems a little strange to have the National Park Service maintaining a highway. And they were. Park Service people were mowing the grass. Removing dead trees. Sleeping in the beds of their trucks. Real government labor. We only drove a section of the Trace between Jackson and Tupelo but I came to one conclusion - that section doesn't have much. Granted, after all the walking the past couple of days, I didn't feel like taking a nature hike. Plus, the hiking trails all seemed to lead to a cypress swamp. Swamp equals mosquitoes which means subtract Marc. Then there were the historical sites. Basically, it was a small, pull-through parking lot with a sign to let me know that Hernando De Soto camped there one night. Not all of them were bad. We stopped at one site where there were a couple of Indian burial mounds. Not sure why, but I really did like that exhibit. Something about the proportionality or the gentle sloping of them. There's something there. Just something attracted me to that spot.


One of the selling points for the Natchez Trace is that it's a scenic parkway which means under federal law there aren't any billboards or anything along the way. And there aren't. Which was fine for viewing. However, when you get hungry, you don't know where to stop and eat. Then you end up taking a side road and stopping at a pseudo touristy place that has a "cafe" next to a gift shop and a bunch of old buildings that were moved to that spot and have no real historical connection to it. And maybe in addition to moving someone's house to the spot, they move their 19th century gravestones while leaving the actual bodies at the cemetery. Yes, there was a place just like that. And the cafe charged $6 for a sandwich. Not a sub or hoagie, but a two-pieces-of-white-bread-with-ham on it sandwich. Which meant we went off another side road to a gas station with a deli. Speaking of food, there is one good thing to come out of staying in a pop-up camper with very few amenities. It's a good excuse to get some Jiffy Pop.