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Dixie Road Trip

A Back-Roads Atlas · Gulf · Delta · Highlands · Lowcountry

Dixie Road Trip — A Back-Roads Atlas

85 hand-curated routes across ~16,199 miles of the American South — Gulf Coast, Deep South, Upper South, Atlantic Coast, Florida, the Ozarks and Texas — with 678 stops, junction towns, 37 ready-made itineraries and a custom trip builder. One rule: no interstates. Every route shadows the interstate it replaces on two-lane US and state highways, through the small towns, juke joints, battlefields and roadside wonders the big road bypassed. This interactive atlas needs JavaScript; here is what lives inside.

Browse without the map: all 85 routes · 37 ready-made itineraries — every route and trip has its own page with the full write-up, stop by stop.

Gulf Coast

Shrimp boats, live oaks, beach kitsch and five flags of empire — the Old Spanish Trail's whole Southern act, St. Augustine's mile zero to the Sabine River. US 90 and US 98 do everything I-10 can't.

US 90: The Creole Coast (US 90, AL 98 Scenic) — the Old Spanish Trail's middle act. New Orleans → Pensacola, ~270 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-10. The central act of the old Old Spanish Trail — the 1920s auto trail that ran St. Augustine to San Diego on what became US 90. Before the interstate, this was how America met the Gulf: shrimp boats, live oaks, a lighthouse in the median and five flags' worth of history. From New Orleans it threads the Mississippi Sound's old resort towns, rounds Mobile Bay through a utopian colony, and lands in Pensacola, where Spain planted a colony in 1559 — before St. Augustine, though the hurricane that wrecked it cost Pensacola the bragging rights. (The Trail's Florida and Louisiana acts are their own routes — chain all three for the full US 90.)
The Forgotten Coast (US 98, CR 30A) — US 98 & Scenic 30A to the Big Bend. Pensacola → St. Marks, ~280 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-10. Florida before Florida happened to it. Past the white-sand resort strip waits the state's quietest shore: rare coastal dune lakes, an oyster town rebuilding itself, a phone-booth police station, a swamp spring where Hollywood filmed its monsters, and a lighthouse where monarch butterflies mass each fall. The Panhandle's nickname for this stretch is official — and accurate.
Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie (US 90, LA 182, LA 31) — Old US 90 and the back levees of Acadiana. New Orleans → Eunice, ~230 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-10 & the Basin bridge. West of New Orleans the interstate flies over the swamp on stilts; this route stays down in it. Sugar towns along Bayou Lafourche, the oak-arched Teche country, Tabasco's salt-dome island — then up onto the Cajun prairie, where the week is built around Saturday: accordion jam at sunrise, beers at Fred's by nine, live radio from the Liberty at six. Laissez les bons temps rouler, slowly.
River Road & the Felicianas (LA 18, LA 44, US 61) — The Mississippi's levee roads to Natchez. New Orleans → Natchez, ~200 miles, 1–2 days, skips I-10. The levee roads between New Orleans and Baton Rouge hold America's hardest history in its grandest architecture — told honestly now at Whitney, from the perspective of the enslaved. The same corridor is petrochemical country today; the contrast is part of the story. North of Baton Rouge the road climbs into the Felicianas — English Louisiana, Audubon's birds, a famously haunted inn — and ends on the bluff at Natchez, where three routes of this atlas tie their knot.
US 90: The Florida Backbone (US 90, US 1) — Old Spanish Trail — Mile Zero to Pensacola. St. Augustine → Pensacola, ~400 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-10. The eastern act of the Old Spanish Trail, the 1920s sea-to-sea auto trail whose Zero Milestone still stands in St. Augustine. US 90 runs the Panhandle's forgotten inland spine: Florida's biggest Civil War battlefield, the actual Suwannee River, canopy roads laid down by 17th-century Spanish missions, a town made rich by Coca-Cola stock, Florida's only tour caves and its tallest waterfall — all the Florida that existed before the beach did.
US 90: Rice & Rails (US 90) — Old Spanish Trail — Lafayette to the Sabine. Lafayette → Orange, TX, ~130 miles, 1 days, skips I-10. The Old Spanish Trail's last Louisiana act: dead-flat rice prairie where the towns line up along the Southern Pacific tracks like beads — each with one improbable superlative. The boudin capital of the world, the frog capital of the world, the rice capital of Louisiana, the state's first oil well, and a sulfur-mining boomtown, ending where the old trail crossed the Sabine into Texas. An easy day with a full stomach.

Deep South

The Delta, the Black Belt, and the Georgia heartland: blues, civil rights, Faulkner, kudzu, tamales and the deepest history per mile in America. The spiritual center of the whole trip.

The Blues Highway (US 61, US 82, MS 1) — US 61 through the Mississippi Delta. Memphis → Natchez, ~320 miles, 2–4 days, skips I-55. The most storied road in American music: flat as a griddle, straight as a guitar string, haunted at every crossroads. Memphis to Natchez through the Delta — 'the most Southern place on Earth' — past juke joints, Robert Johnson's graves (all three), Emmett Till's Mississippi, tamale counters and the ruins of empires both cotton and Corinthian. Bob Dylan named an album after it for a reason.
Natchez Trace Parkway (Natchez Trace Pkwy) — 444 miles, zero billboards, ten thousand years. Natchez → Nashville, ~444 miles, 3–4 days, skips I-55 / I-65 corridor. The model for this whole atlas: a 444-mile National Park road tracing the ancient footpath that Kaintuck boatmen walked home after floating their goods to Natchez. No trucks, no billboards, no stops signs — just mileposts counting up from the Mississippi bluffs through cypress swamp, Chickasaw country and the Tennessee hills to Nashville's door. Drive it in legs; the mileposts below are your spine.
Grant's Vicksburg Campaign (US 61, MS 552, MS 27, US 80) — The 1863 maneuver, county road by county road. Loop from Vicksburg, ~165 miles, 1–2 days, skips I-20. April–July 1863: Grant crosses the Mississippi below Vicksburg, cuts loose from his supply line, wins five battles in eighteen days, and locks the 'Gibraltar of the Confederacy' into the siege that splits the South. You can drive the whole campaign in a weekend on roads that have barely changed — this loop and the Blues Highway braid together on US 61, drawn side by side on the map.
The Civil Rights Trail (MS 16, US 80, US 31) — Jackson to Birmingham through the Black Belt. Jackson → Birmingham, ~430 miles, 3–4 days, skips I-20 / I-85 / I-65. The corridor where the movement was fought and won: Medgar Evers's driveway in Jackson, the Neshoba County back roads of Freedom Summer, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the 54 marching miles of US 80 to Montgomery, and Birmingham's churches and parks. This is the heaviest driving in the atlas and the most important. Take it slow; let it work.
The Hill Country Ramble (MS 178, MS 7, MS 6) — Old 78 and MS 7 through Faulkner country. Memphis → Tupelo, ~130 miles, 1–2 days, skips I-22. North Mississippi's hills sound different from the Delta — a droning, hypnotic blues (R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, fife-and-drum picnics) that never needed Chicago. The same hills grew Faulkner, Ida B. Wells and one very famous Elvis. Memphis to Tupelo the old way: courthouse squares, catfish in a leaning store, and the best bookstore porch in the South.
Hank's Lost Highway (US 31) — US 31 from Montgomery to the Bay. Montgomery → Mobile, ~170 miles, 1 days, skips I-65. US 31 runs in I-65's literal shadow, which means it carries everything the interstate threw away: pecan stands, courthouse towns, and the boyhood geography of Hank Williams, who learned guitar from a Black street musician in Georgiana and died at 29 in the back of a baby-blue Cadillac. Play the records in order as you drive; the road wrote them.
Sherman to the Swamp (US 441, GA 15) — US 441 down the spine of Georgia. Dillard → Folkston, ~330 miles, 3–4 days, skips I-75 / I-16 / I-95. Georgia top to bottom without touching an interstate: waterfall gorges and Foxfire country, Athens's college-rock holy sites, the official Antebellum Trail through towns Sherman spared (or didn't), Flannery O'Connor's peacocks, the swamp Pogo called home — and a platform built for watching freight trains. US 441 runs from the Smokies to the Okefenokee like a core sample of the South.

Upper South

Shenandoah battlefields, mountain fiddles, bourbon warehouses and the Blue Ridge running like a spine. Valleys where the Civil War never quite ended and the music never stopped.

The Valley Pike (US 11) — US 11 down the Shenandoah. Winchester → Roanoke, ~200 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-81. I-81 is the East's worst truck gauntlet; US 11 runs beside it through everything the trucks miss. The old Valley Pike was Stonewall Jackson's highway in 1862 and Patsy Cline's hometown main street — limestone churches, battlefield orchards, the world's largest musical instrument (it's a cave), and a fiberglass army of dinosaurs fighting Union soldiers. The Shenandoah, at conversation speed.
Bull Run to the Bloody Angle (US 29, US 50, US 15, VA 3, US 1) — The Northern Virginia Civil War loop. Loop from Alexandria, ~240 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-95 / I-66. More Civil War per square mile than anywhere on Earth: both Bull Runs, Mosby's partisan country along the John Mosby Highway, the biggest cavalry battle ever fought in North America, and the terrible quadrilateral — Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, Spotsylvania — where 100,000 men fell within fifteen miles. Driveable from DC, unforgettable in any direction.
The Crooked Road (US 58, US 11, VA 8) — Virginia's mountain music trail. Bristol → Floyd, ~210 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-81. In 1927 a talent scout with a portable recorder set up over a Bristol hat shop, and the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers walked in — 'the big bang of country music.' The Crooked Road strings the living remnants: the Carter Fold's Saturday nights, Galax's Friday radio show, the Floyd Country Store's jamboree, wild ponies on the balds in between. Plan the whole week backward from the music calendar.
Blue Ridge Parkway & the Smokies (Blue Ridge Pkwy, US 441, US 129) — America's longest slow road, southern half. Roanoke → Cherokee (+ Smokies spurs), ~400 miles, 3–5 days, skips I-81 / I-40 / I-26. The Natchez Trace's mountain cousin: 45 mph, no trucks, no billboards, mileposts counting Roanoke (120) to Cherokee (469). Highest peaks in the East, an abandoned Wizard of Oz theme park, gem-mine kitsch, Asheville's gilded mansion — then over the Smokies on Newfound Gap Road, with a spur to the most famous 11 miles of curves in America. The parkway is the destination; the towns are the intermissions.
Highway 64: Shiloh to Lookout Mountain (US 64, TN 55) — Southern Tennessee the long way. Memphis → Chattanooga, ~340 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-40 / I-24. The southern tier of Tennessee, where I-40 never goes: Shiloh's terrible quiet, slugburgers across the Mississippi line, the whiskey hollow that made Jack Daniel (and the enslaved man who taught him), a Victorian Chautauqua on the mountain — and the grand finale, Lookout Mountain's holy trinity of American roadside attractions. See Rock City. You've read the barns; now obey them.
Bourbon, Bluegrass & Shakers (US 68, US 150, KY 52) — US 68 and the old Kentucky pikes. Lexington → Mammoth Cave, ~180 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-64 / I-65. Kentucky compressed: stone-fenced horse farms, the ghost-quiet perfection of Shaker Village, the state's bloodiest battlefield, bourbon's hometown (Jesse James bullet holes included), Thomas Merton's silent monastery, Lincoln's symbolic log cabin in a marble temple — and the longest cave on Earth, with a concrete teepee motel to sleep it off. The Upper South's northern edge, at barrel-aging speed.
The Constitution Route & 231 (VA 20, VA 231) — Jefferson and Madison's neighborhood, then Virginia's prettiest road. Charlottesville → Sperryville, ~75 miles, 1–2 days, skips US 29. Two presidents lived eight miles apart out here, and the road between their houses is signed the Constitution Route. Past Monticello and Montpelier it becomes VA 231 — a US-top-ten scenic byway: stone fences, horse farms and the Blue Ridge wall rising over every pasture, Old Rag's granite dome dead ahead. Wine country the whole way (the Monticello AVA's 40-odd wineries surround the start), ending at Sperryville under Skyline Drive.
The Overhill Country (US 64, TN 68, US 411, US 321) — Ocoee whitewater to the peaceful side of the Smokies. Chattanooga → Gatlinburg, ~175 miles, 2 days, skips I-75. The mountains between Chattanooga and the Smokies that I-75 skips entirely — named for the Overhill Cherokee towns whose drowned capitals gave Tennessee its name. Olympic whitewater in the Ocoee Gorge, a man-made copper-mining desert, America's largest underground lake, the bacon shrine at Benton's, and Sequoyah's birthplace — landing on the Smokies' quiet side before Pigeon Forge turns the volume up. Lookout Mountain's Civil War heights launch the whole run.
Gold, Clay & Longleaf (US 64 Alt, NC 705, NC 24/27, US 521) — the Carolina Piedmont crescent. Raleigh → Columbia, ~250 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-85 / I-77. The cities everyone flies over — Raleigh, Charlotte, Columbia — strung together the back way: America's oldest pottery community at Seagrove, the ancient worn-down Uwharries, the farm where a 17-pound rock used as a doorstop turned out to be the nation's first documented gold, Andrew Jackson's disputed birthplace, and Revolutionary Camden. The Piedmont keeps its treasures at two-lane speed.

Atlantic Coast

Barrier islands, Gullah Geechee country, pirate lore and 400 years of port-town history from the Outer Banks to St. Augustine. US 17 — the old Kings Highway — is the thread.

Kings Highway & the Lowcountry (US 17, US 21) — US 17, the coast road since 1735. Wilmington → Savannah, ~290 miles, 3–4 days, skips I-95. US 17 follows the colonial Kings Highway through the marsh kingdom: Calabash fried seafood, the Grand Strand's neon, rice-empire ruins, sweetgrass basket stands in unbroken West African lineage, Charleston's complicated grandeur and Savannah's haunted squares. The whole route runs inside the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor — the living culture is the main attraction.
Golden Isles & the First Coast (US 17, GA 99, FL A1A) — US 17 and A1A to the oldest city. Savannah → St. Augustine, ~210 miles, 2–3 days, skips I-95. Georgia's hundred-mile marsh (Sidney Lanier wrote it an ode) hides Gilded Age ruins, wild horses, a church that seats twelve and the ferry-dependent remnants of Gullah Geechee island life. Cross into Florida for eight flags' worth of Fernandina, a boneyard beach, the last river ferry on A1A — and St. Augustine, where America's oldest city wears its 1565 pedigree under a thick coat of glorious kitsch.
Outer Banks & the Sound Country (US 17, US 64, NC 12) — NC 12, two ferries and the Albemarle backwaters. Dismal Swamp → New Bern, ~300 miles, 3–4 days, skips I-95 (by 200 miles). The slowest road is a boat: this route includes two state ferries, a swamp canal George Washington surveyed, the dune where powered flight began, the lighthouse they moved a half mile inland, and the inlet where Blackbeard lost his head. Sound-side Carolina keeps its own time — 'hoi toider' accents, decoy carvers, shrimp burgers — and hands you to US 17 at the birthplace of Pepsi.

Ready-made trips

Delta 101 — 3 days, ~420 miles, starting Memphis. The essential first taste: down the Blues Highway to the Crossroads and the Delta's shrines, back through Faulkner's Oxford. Music every night if you time the jukes right.
Grant's Campaign Weekend — 2 days, ~180 miles, starting Vicksburg. The 1863 campaign in two days, exactly as the user manual (Grant's memoirs) describes it — five battles, one siege, county roads the whole way.
Mosby to the Bloody Angle — 3 days, ~240 miles, starting Alexandria / DC. The Northern Virginia war loop, run counterclockwise so the history happens in order — First Manassas to Jackson's deathbed.
Lowcountry Long Weekend — 3 days, ~210 miles, starting Charleston. Charleston to Savannah the slow way — oyster sheds, ruined churches, Gullah history and two of America's most beautiful (and complicated) cities.
Forgotten Coast Oyster Run — 3 days, ~250 miles, starting Pensacola. Dune lakes, Truman Show streets, a phone-booth police station and the springs where Hollywood kept its monsters — Old Florida in one weekend.
Presidents & Pinot — 3 days, ~160 miles, starting Charlottesville. Monticello and Montpelier with the Monticello AVA poured between them, then Virginia's prettiest road north — grafting onto the Civil War loop at Orange for a battlefield chaser.
Crooked Road Ramble — 3 days, ~220 miles, starting Bristol (start Thursday). Mountain music's living calendar: Floyd on Friday, the Carter Fold on Saturday — drive the prettiest gaps in Virginia between shows.
The Gear Jammer: NASCAR Cathedral Run — 7 days, ~1,300 miles, starting Daytona Beach. All thirteen 🏁 cathedrals in one tow: Daytona's founding bar to Bristol's colosseum, through moonshine country, a ghost track and the Madhouse. Track tours run year-round; time any leg to the race weekends in the calendar (Speedweeks, 'Dega, the 600, the Southern 500, Bristol's night race) and the trip levels up accordingly.
The Red Dirt Roadhouse Run — 6 days, ~900 miles, starting Nashville. Six nights, zero pretense: the South's living roadhouse circuit — honky-tonks, jukes and sand-floor bars, run north to gulf. (Red Dirt's mother churches — Cain's Ballroom, the Stillwater scene — sit just west of this atlas's frame; this is the red-clay answer, and Mobile's own Red Clay Strays prove the dirt still grows them.)
The Trace & the Delta Loop — 7 days, ~1,000 miles, starting Nashville. The atlas's flagship week: the full 444-mile Parkway south, then the Blues Highway north — two centuries of American sound and trouble in one ellipse.
The Gulf Crawl — 6 days, ~480 miles, starting New Orleans. New Orleans to the Big Bend at porch speed — the whole northern Gulf without one mile of I-10.
The Civil Rights Pilgrimage — 7 days, ~900 miles, starting Memphis. Memphis to Birmingham through the movement's ground truth. The most important week in this atlas — built with rest stops, because it asks a lot.
High Country & Mountain Music — 7 days, ~620 miles, starting Roanoke (start Thursday). The Parkway's southern half braided with the Crooked Road's music calendar — schedule the week so Friday lands in Floyd and Saturday at the Fold.
The Old Spanish Trail: Full US 90 — 8 days, ~1,000 miles, starting St. Augustine. The 1920s sea-to-sea auto trail's entire Southern act, end to end: from the Zero Milestone in America's oldest city to the Sabine River crossing into Texas — every mile on or beside old US 90, with zero feet of I-10.
Sounds & Banks — 7 days, ~560 miles, starting Norfolk. Two ferries, four lighthouses, one lost colony and the slow handoff from sound country to the Lowcountry's front porch.
The Deep South Grand Circle — 14 days, ~1,700 miles, starting Memphis. The whole lower South in one loop: Delta blues, Grant's campaign, River Road reckonings, Cajun Saturdays, the Gulf at porch speed, Hank's highway and the movement's capitals. Leave Memphis on a Friday and day 9 lands on Fred's Saturday all by itself. The trip of a lifetime, no interstate required.
The Eastern Crescent — 15 days, ~1,800 miles, starting Washington, DC. Mountains down, coast back: the Civil War quadrilateral, the Valley Pike, Virginia's music road, the Parkway's whole southern half, Georgia's 441 spine — returning up the Lowcountry's oyster route.
The Hot Tamale Trail — 2 days, ~160 miles, starting Greenville, MS. The Delta's strangest, greatest food story: hot tamales — wet, spicy, paper-wrapped, by the dozen — rooted in migrant field labor a century ago and beloved ever since. Eat the corridor the Southern Foodways Alliance documented.
Whole Hog: the Carolina Barbecue Trail — 3 days, ~260 miles, starting Lexington, NC. The great schism in one drive: Piedmont pork shoulder with red slaw versus Eastern whole-hog with vinegar and crackling skin. Pits, not politics — though here they're the same thing.
White Sauce & Dry Rub: the Barbecue Belt — 3 days, ~320 miles, starting Memphis. Three barbecue nations in one diagonal: Memphis dry-rub ribs, North Alabama's mayonnaise heresy (it works), and Birmingham's modern pit renaissance — with America's oldest ballpark for dessert.
Boudin, Cracklins & Plate Lunches — 2 days, ~140 miles, starting Lafayette, LA. Acadiana's gas-station gastronomy, done as a discipline: boudin links eaten off the casing in parking lots, cracklins by the wax-paper bag, and the sacred meat-and-gravy plate lunch. Saturday timing doubles the music.
The Whole Hog — 28 days, ~4,300 miles, starting Memphis (loop). The full perimeter: Delta → River Road → Cajun country → the whole Gulf → up the Atlantic from St. Augustine's kitsch to Blackbeard's inlet → the Civil War quadrilateral → the Valley → the music mountains → home over Lookout Mountain and Shiloh. Leave Memphis on a Friday so day 9 is Fred's Saturday — the other music nights are noted where the weekday math gets honest. Four weeks, fourteen routes, zero interstates. The greatest Southern road trip.
The Long Way to the Opry — 21 days, ~3,000 miles, starting Nashville (loop). The musical genome of America in three weeks: honky-tonks, Delta jukes, zydeco Saturdays, Muscle Shoals, Hank's highway, Elvis's two houses, bourbon ballads and the Bristol big bang — looping home to Nashville. Leave on a Friday so day 9 is Fred's Saturday; day 21 tells you the truth about the Fold.
The Overseas Highway — 3 days, ~210 miles, starting Miami. US 1 to the end of the road: forty-two bridges over turquoise water to Key West, with a hurricane monument, a rescued movie boat, tiny key deer and the last mile marker in America.
Florida's Mystic Coast — 3 days, ~280 miles, starting St. Augustine. The nation's oldest city, the beach where speed was born, and inland to a genuine 1890s Spiritualist camp — a weekend of Old Florida faith, art and roadside wonder.
Cracker Trail & the Big Water — 2 days, ~260 miles, starting Bradenton. The old cattle-drive route across Florida's forgotten middle, then a loop of the vast lake at its heart — muck-city football towns, a hand-built castle, and the 1928 hurricane memorials.
The Scenic Seven & the Pig Trail — 3 days, ~340 miles, starting Hot Springs, AR. Arkansas's two great mountain drives back to back: bathhouse steam and gangster lore, then the Buffalo River highlands and the Pig Trail's curves up to Eureka Springs' hillside chapels.
Crowley's Ridge & the Arkansas Delta — 3 days, ~420 miles, starting Piggott, AR. Down the strange loess spine of Crowley's Ridge — Hemingway's writing barn, Johnny Cash's boyhood home — then into the flat Delta's hard history and the blues at Helena.
Sherman's March to the Sea — 2 days, ~210 miles, starting Milledgeville, GA. Georgia's antebellum capital to the sea by the route the Union army burned across in 1864 — old statehouses, market squares, a prison camp and the creek where the march turned tragic.
Bourbon, Bluegrass & Shakers — 3 days, ~300 miles, starting Lexington, KY. Horse country to cave country the reverent way: a preserved Shaker village, a Trappist abbey, Lincoln's birthplace and the bourbon trail's holiest distilleries.
Golden Isles Getaway — 3 days, ~260 miles, starting Savannah. Georgia's marsh coast at low speed: the smallest church in America, wild horses and driftwood beaches, a millionaires' island club and the tabby ruins of the rice kingdom.
Old Florida: Springs, Swamps & the Nature Coast — 7 days, ~780 miles, starting Gainesville. The Florida the postcards forgot: crystal springs and manatees, a sponge-diving Greek town, a Cracker author's homestead, the great lake's muck towns and the Tamiami Trail to Calle Ocho.
Beyond the Sabine: El Camino to the Alamo — 7 days, ~1,050 miles, starting Lafayette, LA. Where the atlas crosses into Texas: boudin and rice prairies to the Sabine, old US 90 to the Alamo, and the King's Highway back through the piney woods and Caddo mounds.
The Ozark & Ouachita Highlands — 6 days, ~780 miles, starting Hot Springs, AR. Arkansas's high country in one loop: the Ouachitas' crest drive, the Scenic Seven over the Buffalo River, the Pig Trail to Eureka Springs, and a run down Crowley's Ridge with the blues at the end.
Coal, Bluegrass & the Country Music Highway — 6 days, ~620 miles, starting Ashland, KY. The mountains that gave America its music and its labor wars: US 23 past a dozen country stars' homeplaces, the coalfield battlegrounds of Matewan, and Virginia's Crooked Road to the Carter Fold.
The Sacred South: Gospel & Sanctuary — 6 days, ~700 miles, starting Tuscaloosa. Alabama's Black Belt as holy ground: the quilting congregation of Gee's Bend, the churches that anchored the movement, and the old Federal Road's frontier missions.
Cradle & Surrender: Jamestown to Appomattox — 3 days, ~260 miles, starting Williamsburg. The bookends of American history in one Virginia weekend: the first English colony and the Yorktown victory, then the plantation road to the courthouse where the Civil War ended.