After leaving NOLA yesterday, I still had my passport in hand searching for more national parks on our route when I discovered the Natchez Trace Parkway. The Natchez Trace Parkway extends 444 miles through three states, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, and is one of the most scenic drives in the country. We are all about scenic drives so we decided to skip Baton Rouge, which was our next planned stop, and explore the parkway instead.
We didn’t know it, but the NTP was about a half mile from the Walmart that we stayed at last night. We began the day by visiting the Natchez National Historical Park, also pretty close, then backtracked and jumped on the parkway. After just a few minutes of driving, we were happy we changed our plans!
The two-lane parkway is maintained by the National Parks Service and offers spectacular views with several historical sites along the way. We drove most of the Natchez to Jackson leg, stopping at Mount Locust, Sunken Trace and Rocky Springs. The parkway is motorhome friendly with a few exceptions and the speed limit is 55, so you can actually enjoy the scenery.
Vicksburg National Historical Park was our next and final stop for the day. We arrived at the park later in the afternoon so we didn’t drive the 16 miles around the battlefield but we did explore several other monuments. We then drove about four hours to Texarkana, Arkansas to crash at yet another Walmart. At this point, we should be calling this trip the Walmart Tour 2015 🙂
Stay tuned tomorrow to see if we can continue our road trip permanently after finding a few diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park!
Pretty scenery! Had to laugh at your "your of Walmart" lol
It was very pretty. We may have to go back and drive the whole thing someday!