Natchez Trace Parkway

The Natchez Trace Parkway covers a slice of the South rich in history and beauty, especially in the spring. You get a pretty good look at things if you ride your bike most of the 450-mile distance from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee, as we did from late March into the first week of April. You pedal the gamut, from the stark images and prose of the Medgar Evers memorial at the Jackson airport to blossoms around the antebellum mansions in Natchez, the blooming redbuds along the parkway, and the tourist-filled honky-tonks on South Broadway in Nashville. A few pictures from the trip: top, the typical road surface and traffic on the parkway; below, an early morning run in French Camp, MS, a stone’s throw from the parkway; a National Park Service employee at Mount Locust, MS, dressing the part of one of the “Kaintucks” who floated down the Mississippi on flatboats and then walked back home on the Natchez Trace in the early 1800s; mist in Pegram, TN.; the breakfast shift at French Camp Academy in Mississippi; and the Silver Threads hit it at Robert’s Western World in Nashville. (That’s a fairly lifelike effigy of the great country singer Marty Robbins beaming down from the rafters in the top left corner.) Click here for a Natchez Trace gallery. Click here for information about the parkway.