Day 7: Vicksburg - Natchez Trace Parkway - Natchez

Enjoy the Full Southern Breakfast at your inn, and you're off via #61, this time heading due south. After a short drive of 42 km you'll arrive in Port Gibson, a former port curving around Bayou Pierre. Its extravagant mansions and tall cypress and oak trees escaped the Union Army's torch when General Grant called the town "too beautiful to burn".

The Natchez Trace Parkway, angling southwest to northeast across Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, is being developed by the National Park Service to commemorate the Old Natchez Trace. It was centuries old, worn down by deer, buffalo and Indians, when Hernando De Soto, the Spanish explorer, crossed it 400 years ago. Today's parkway crosses and re-crosses the old road; depressions along ridges and across fields mark where it ran.

The most rewarding stretch of this scenic parkway in Mississippi is south of Port Gibson to Natchez. Wayside exhibits, interpretive markers and self-guiding nature trails highlight locations that illustrate the history of the Natchez Trace. Emerald Mound, one of the largest Indian temple mounds in the country, is 17.6 km northeast of Natchez at milepost 10.3 on a country road about 1.6 km off the parkway.

By midday or early afternoon you should arrive in Natchez, a beautiful and fascinating city. It was established in 1716 by French colonizer Jean Baptiste le Mooyne, Sieur de Bienville, as Fort Rosalie. The town's golden era came in the 19th century when cotton became king and Natchez grew to be an important river port. Fortunes were made; vast plantations with magnificent homes reflected the prosperity of the period. Before the Civil War, it was said that half of the millionaires in the U.S. lived between Natchez and New Orleans. Today more than 500 antebellum homes and shops remain in Natchez, where the gentry once lived high above the river - the gamblers, thieves and ladies of the evening lived on the steep slopes below.

Your accommodations are at one of the grand Natchez mansions. If you are familiar with the movie "Gone With The Wind", you will feel right at home at Linden, located near other historic homes and sites of Natchez.