The long road to Nawlins

I can't really say too much about the rest of Alabama, or Mississippi for that matter. There just isn't much there, and most of the nothing isn't even beautiful. Jackson is hardly worth pointing out, aside from the fact that we stayed overnight outside the capital. Road Food pointed us to a good place for breakfast, but we didn't linger, enjoying instead the slow drive down the Natchez Trace Parkway - pronounced to rhyme with matches - which runs from Nashville TN to Natchez MS. The surrounding state forest was quite beautiful, and though we could have and probably should have camped, we didn't, staying instead in one of the sketchiest motels yet.

Natchez has many old town houses (antebellum homes I think Sarah keeps calling them), though most aren't any nicer than the old houses we'd already seen in Nashville and Huntsville, with the exception of a few amazing houses - Longwood (an unfinished octagonal mansion) and Melrose (owned and maintained now by the national park service) - which were set upon much more land than your average town house, more like a plantation home. We also watched a spoof play on the "Pilgrimage", the time in the year when people come to Natchez to learn about and celebrate southern culture, which made me feel almost as uncomfortable, as a Yankee, as I did watching "Bowling for Columbine", as an American, in Paris.

We left Natchez to catch a swamp tour outside of New Orleans, which was really awesome. The swamp, in its unbridled wild nature, has a real beauty and elegance to it. And we finally saw our first live wild animals (after the hawks in WV): a large female gator, a small baby gator, a great white egret, and many smaller bright green tree lizards. Our guide was a real storyteller, bitter and yet content with his lot in life as a Cajun-American.

We drove along backroads (US-90) from the swamp tour in Slidell to New Orleans, past what was presumably a heavily damaged area (now replete with new construction), past the lake over which Katrina built up speed before wrecking downtown New Orleans, and parked ourselves at a nice hotel in the center of the French Quarter, just off Bourbon Street. A little pampering after our long southerly journey!