Vicksburg, Mississippi

When planning our road trip, Cherie wanted to spend a night in Jackson, Mississippi.

So we did a little research and quickly found out that it wasn't the safest place to visit. I think one of the reviews for what was supposed to be a safe hotel had a story from a woman whose son had been shot in the head twice while in the lobby. So we didn't book a hotel for that night and left it as a "mystery night", in case we decided to stay somewhere else.

Add to that, we had locals in San Francisco, Chicago and Nashville all tell us how bad Jackson is, so the night before our mystery night, we started searching for other places to stay that were on the way-ish to New Orleans

We came up with Vicksburg and Oxford. We decided on Vicksburg.

And after our trip to Graceland in Memphis, we took off for an easy 3-4 hour drive.

On the way to Vicksburg, we followed some signs to Clarksdale, MS, to see of we could visit the Delta Blues Museum, but we drove around and found nothing. The signage just seemed to stop. Every store was closed and the locals looked fairly dodgy. So we skipped the museum and kept on to Vicksburg.

That day was very simple. We did some shopping at the outlet mall and had dinner at our hotel.

The next day we visited Vicksburg National Military Park for some civil war education, and, of course, stand in front of massive cannons to make our junk look cartoon-like.

All jokes aside, it was a pretty interesting experience. It's funny when you realise you don't actually know a lot about what was a very significant piece of history for a country like the US.

In the park are a lot of statues, dedicated to various soldiers and officers from various states. Among the statues are many cannons and the occasional building, which may have been used as a command post during the war.

There is also a museum dedicated to the USS Cairo, a very primitive, by today's standards, ship which was sunk during the war. The remains of the ship are also on display just outside of the museum.

And that was our quick, mystery stop in Mississippi.

After the military park we took off, once again, southbound down the interstate towards Louisiana for four nights in New Orleans!