Northbound — the historic direction, finishing in Nashville feels like arriving somewhere
The Anti-Interstate
Four hundred and forty-four miles, fifty miles an hour, and not a single billboard, gas station, or semi the whole way. The Natchez Trace is the anti-interstate.
The Natchez Trace Parkway runs from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee, tracing the Old Trace — the footpath the Native nations walked, the "Kaintuck" boatmen trudged home on after floating their goods down to Natchez, the post riders and settlers and soldiers wore into the ground. The National Park Service has kept it exactly as a parkway should be: two gentle lanes, fifty miles an hour, no commercial development, no billboards, no trucks. The catch is also the charm — there's no gas or food on the parkway, so you fuel and eat in the towns just off it. Take two unhurried days, drive it in spring for the dogwoods or fall for the color, and let the history accumulate mile marker by mile marker.
Day one — Natchez to Tupelo. Start with the best coffee in Natchez at Steampunk Roasters (Papi y Papi), in an old brick blacksmith shop, then top off and roll onto the parkway. Climb Emerald Mound, the second-largest Native American ceremonial mound in the country — eight acres of earth raised eight centuries ago. A few miles on, walk the Sunken Trace, where two hundred years of feet and hooves and wagon wheels cut the original road fifteen feet down into the soft loess soil — the most haunting "you're standing in history" stop on the route. Detour into Jackson for an upscale lunch at Walker's Drive-In (a James Beard–recognized kitchen in an old diner), then back to the parkway for French Camp, an 1812 frontier village with a working sorghum mill, and on to Tupelo and the two-room shotgun house where Elvis Presley was born in 1935. Dinner is plate-lunch comfort and crawfish-cream "Romie sauce" at Romie's Grocery, and a night at the Holiday Inn Express in Tupelo.
Day two — Tupelo to Nashville. Coffee at Strange Brew, the town's favorite, then back on the Trace as it crosses a corner of Alabama into Tennessee. Lunch is small-town barbecue at Q Barbecue Co., and a bit farther stands the Meriwether Lewis Monument — a broken stone column at the spot where the great explorer died, under disputed circumstances, in 1809, just three years after returning from the Pacific. Roll off the north end into Nashville for the meal the whole drive has been pointing toward: Hattie B's hot chicken (order the Medium unless you've got something to prove), and a downtown night at the Courtyard, a couple of blocks off Broadway.
And hold the plan loosely — the Trace is built for it. The plan's a backbone, not a cage: the unmarked pull-off where the old road disappears into the trees, the cypress-swamp boardwalk, the mound nobody else stops at, the overlook over the Tennessee River. The whole point of this parkway is that there's nowhere you have to be by any particular time — that's the luxury an interstate can't sell you. Watch for deer at the low speed limit, fuel up whenever you leave the road, and let a quiet marker pull you over. The best stop is the one that wasn't on the list. Go find it.
