Road Trip to the South

By Don Richert

My wife, Tati, and I decided to take a 26-day road trip to several different cities and historic areas in the Southern United States. We left our home in New York City on Sunday, December 17, 2017 and took three days to drive to Nashville, Tennessee. We visited the Parthenon in Nashville, an art museum inside a full-scale replica of the original Parthenon in Athens. Around the top of the facades of the front and back of the museum are re-creations of the statues that were there in the original Parthenon. Inside the museum, there are casts of the ancient statues, as they exist now, and explanations of how the statues were recreated.

South of Nashville, we got on the Natchez Trace Parkway, which stretches from Nashville to Natchez, Mississippi, and is a part of the National Park System. The Parkway is 444 miles long and follows a route that Native Americans first used. In the late 1700s, white settlers began using the trail also. In the early 1800s, boatmen from Ohio and Pennsylvania floated cash crops, livestock, and other things down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers on wooden flatboats. When they reached Natchez or New Orleans, they sold their cargo, sold their boats for lumber, and then walked or rode on horseback toward home via the Old Trace. Here is a part of the original Old Natchez Trace that we walked along.

   When we were driving on the Natchez Trace Parkway, sometimes an hour would go by before we would see another car. The drive was beautiful, with lots of interesting places to stop along the way. The thing is that the maximum speed limit was 50 miles per hour, and for one long stretch, it was 40 miles per hour. At times, it seemed like we were creeping along, even when we exceeded the speed limit. However, when we got back on an interstate highway near Natchez, with many other cars, we missed the Parkway.

In Natchez, we stayed at a B&B overlooking the Mississippi River.

    One of the most interesting things that we did in Natchez was to do a tour of Longwood, a mansion built for Haller Nutt, a wealthy man who owned several cotton plantations. It is claimed that Longwood is the largest octagonal house in the United States. Construction began before the Civil War and the outside was finished, but construction of the insides was halted when the war began. The rooms of the basement floor were finished so the family could live in it, but the upper floors were never completed. It was very interesting to see the insides of the upper floors, because you can see how the construction was done, much of it with bricks. The Wikipedia entry for Longwood says that Haller Nutt never finished Natchez home; Longwood was the last burst of southern opulence before war brought the cotton barons’ dominance to an end.

Next we drove to New Orleans, Louisiana, arriving on Christmas Eve. We stayed in a private room at a hostel, where, the first night, the owner hosted a Christmas Eve dinner for everyone there. We had many interesting conversations over dinner that night and over breakfasts with the mostly young people who were staying there.

    We spent most of our time in New Orleans in the French Quarter, some of whose buildings were decorated for Christmas.
    We went to the Louisiana State Museum in the French Quarter and saw several exhibits, including an excellent one on Hurricane Katrina. The exhibit does a great job of showing what was happening before, during, and after Katrina. For example, it highlighted the things that the Army Corp of Engineers did and did not do in the years before Katrina, many of which left the city so vulnerable to the hurricane.

We left New Orleans and drove to Montgomery, Alabama. Last year I read March, the “graphic novel” by John Lewis that recounts his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement. We decided to spend a full day in Montgomery, since that was such an important city in Lewis’s account. In Montgomery, we visited the Civil Rights Memorial Center and the Freedom Rides Museum. The Freedom Rides Museum is at the site of the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station, one of the places where the Freedom Riders were savagely beaten. Visiting the Center and the Museum were very moving experiences.

We got to Savannah, Georgia, on December 30 and took the Old Town Trolley Tour of the City, which was very interesting. We also walked around the city a lot. Our first night, we had dinner at the Savannah Sea Food Shack and enjoyed a low-country boil, with shrimp, corn on the cob, sausage, and potatoes boiled in Cajun seasoning. We liked it so much that we bought several packages of Crab and Shrimp Boil Seasoning at a local grocery store, so we could make it ourselves when we got back home.
    On Tuesday, January 2, we drove from Savannah to Charleston, South Carolina, and went to the Charleston Visitors Center to get maps and suggestions for things to do. We walked around the historic part of Charleston, even though it was getting very cold. We went back to the Visitors Center to make a bathroom stop before driving to our motel. That was when we saw a sign on the door of the Visitors Center saying that it would be closed the next day due to inclement weather. Inside, Tati found out that Charleston was expecting a big snowstorm and that the bridges leading out of the city might be closed. I think that was also when we learned that the snowstorm was coming from the south.

We decided to drive north and got as far as Florence, South Carolina, that night. We were planning to stop in and see Morris Dean, the creator of this blog, in the Chapel Hill area. The next morning (Wednesday), Morris texted me an excerpt from the Washington Post:

…First, a monster storm will hammer coastal locations from Georgia to Maine with ice and snow. By Thursday, the exploding storm will, in many ways, resemble a winter hurricane….

I checked the Weather Channel app on my phone and saw that it was predicting that the snow would start in New York City about 4:00 a.m. on Thursday. So we decided to drive from Florence to home that day. We were on the road about 13 hours and drove about 650 miles. And we beat the storm! The next morning, New York City was blanketed with snow.
    So we cut our trip short. But we had many interesting experiences and learned many things. Someday, in the spring, we would like to get to the places we did not get to on this trip: Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown.

Copyright © 2018 by Don Richert Like certain members of the staff of Moristotle & Co., Don Richert was in the Tulare Union High School Class of 1960.