About a Week
6 days · ~650 miles · from Memphis
The Mississippi's last 700 miles by its levee roads: Delta blues country on MS 1, Vicksburg and Natchez on the bluffs, the Felicianas, the plantation road to the river parishes, and LA 1 to the end of the road at Grand Isle.
This trip chains: The Blues Highway · River Road & the Felicianas · LA 1: End of the Road
Starting in Memphis, this 6-day itinerary connects The Blues Highway and River Road & the Felicianas and LA 1: End of the Road. It suits travellers interested in barbecue, boudin, oysters & tamales; blues, country, jukes & jamborees; battlefields, the movement & the past. The day-by-day bases let you split roughly 650 miles into a sequence of visits rather than trying to cover every linked route end to end. Use the daily highlights to decide which places deserve your longest stops.
Budget an average of about 108 miles per day across the whole trip, or roughly 2.4–3.6 hours behind the wheel at an assumed 30–45 mph back-roads pace. This is a planning estimate, not a measured time for each leg: transfer days can be longer and rest days shorter. Add meal stops, tours, ferries, traffic and hikes separately; use each day's navigation link for current driving estimates.
Use these day-end areas to plan lodging; the map pins are orientation points, not hotel recommendations. The final day can be your departure day.
Choose your dates around the experiences below rather than assuming one season fits the entire trip. These notes come from the linked route guides; check current forecasts and official schedules.
Out of Memphis on 61, then off it as soon as the pilot's-wheel signs allow: Tunica, Moon Lake, and Friars Point, where the river still comes to town and nothing has been in a hurry since the steamboats. Clarksdale by late afternoon for the Delta Blues Museum and whichever juke has a band. Overnight Clarksdale.
A proper primer museum in an 1895 rail depot right on 61 — learn to hear what you're about to drive through.
Where 61 meets 49 — Robert Johnson's alleged bargain. Delta Blues Museum (with Muddy Waters's cabin), Ground Zero, Red's juke joint, the Riverside Hotel where Bessie Smith died (1937), beds at the Shack Up Inn, and Abe's Bar-B-Q since 1924.
Navigate day 1 in Google Maps ↗ · via Gateway to the Blues
MS 1, the official Great River Road, the whole way: Rosedale's White Front Café for hot tamales out of the pot, Greenville's levee and Doe's if you did not get your fill, Mayersville and Unita Blackwell's town, and the long empty miles behind the levee to Vicksburg's bluffs. Overnight Vicksburg.
The restored 1955 courthouse where the murderers were acquitted in 67 minutes, and where the county issued its formal apology in 2007. The center's guided story is the strongest hour in the Delta.
Willie Seaberry's sharecropper-shack juke ran Thursday nights from 1963 until his death in 2016. Closed now, still standing in the fields — road-trippers stop to pay respects. McCarty Pottery in town shapes Delta clay into heirlooms.
'You might say it all started right here' — B.B. King, about the plantation where Charley Patton taught a generation. The Grammy Museum Mississippi in Cleveland is the modern bookend.
World-class museum wrapped around the brick gin where B.B. worked; he's buried on the grounds. Club Ebony, the chitlin'-circuit landmark he later bought, stands nearby.
Tamales and gigantic porterhouses out of a 1941 grocery storefront — enter through the kitchen. Greenville is the hub of the Delta's Hot Tamale Trail (ask about the festival each October).
Navigate day 2 in Google Maps ↗ · via Emmett Till Interpretive Center, Po' Monkey's, Dockery Farms, B.B. King Museum, Doe's Eat Place, Muddy Waters's Rolling Fork, The Onward Store, Margaret's Grocery
The military park early, then old 61 south: Port Gibson, the Windsor Ruins, Grand Gulf's ghost town and its hilltop view of the river. Natchez by midafternoon — the bluff, Under-the-Hill for a drink where the flatboatmen misbehaved, Longwood's unfinished octagon, and the Forks of the Road memorial, which should be read before the mansions, not after. Overnight Natchez.
'Too beautiful to burn,' Grant supposedly said while marching through. The golden hand atop First Presbyterian has pointed heavenward since 1859.
Twenty-three Corinthian columns alone in the woods — all that's left of Mississippi's grandest mansion, which survived the war only to burn from a party guest's cigarette in 1890.
More antebellum mansions than anywhere (the millionaires sat out the war); Longwood's unfinished octagon — workers dropped tools in 1861 and never came back. Hold both: the Forks of the Road slave-market memorial, and a beer at Under-the-Hill where the river men drank.
A 1940 roadside restaurant built as a 28-foot hoop-skirted woman; you eat lunch inside the skirt. A complicated icon — repainted, reconsidered, still serving legendary banana caramel pie.
Navigate day 3 in Google Maps ↗ · via Port Gibson, Windsor Ruins
River Road & the Felicianas driven north to south, the reverse of the atlas: St. Francisville's Grace Church and Oakley House, where Audubon tutored and painted, Rosedown's gardens, Port Hudson's long siege. Baton Rouge's Old State Capitol — the castle Mark Twain hated — and the new one Huey built to be taller than everybody's. Overnight Baton Rouge.
More antebellum mansions than anywhere (the millionaires sat out the war); Longwood's unfinished octagon — workers dropped tools in 1861 and never came back. Hold both: the Forks of the Road slave-market memorial, and a beer at Under-the-Hill where the river men drank.
English Louisiana: Grace Church's mossy churchyard, Rosedown's gardens, and Oakley House, where the young Audubon painted dozens of his birds as a live-in tutor.
The longest true siege in American history (48 days, 1863) — and among the first major assaults by Black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, whose valor here helped change the Union army.
A 1940 roadside restaurant built as a 28-foot hoop-skirted woman; you eat lunch inside the skirt. A complicated icon — repainted, reconsidered, still serving legendary banana caramel pie.
Jefferson Davis's boyhood home, kept small and plain — a footnote that explains a lot of what follows upriver.
Navigate day 4 in Google Maps ↗ · via Mammy's Cupboard, Rosemont, Angola Museum, The Myrtles, St. Francisville, Port Hudson
Donaldsonville's River Road African American Museum, then down Bayou Lafourche with the water for a median: Thibodaux's Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center and the 1887 massacre marker, Golden Meadow's shrimp boats, and the long elevated bridge on LA 1 over Leeville, where the road has to fly because the land has gone. Grand Isle State Park for the beach and the end of the road. Overnight Grand Isle.
In 1868 Pierre Caliste Landry became mayor here — the first Black mayor of any American town. The River Road African American Museum carries the story forward.
The state's only inhabited barrier island: birding fallouts in April, the Tarpon Rodeo in July, houses on ever-taller stilts.
The river parishes' Black history told at the bayou's head: free towns, root doctors, and the country's first Black mayor elected here in 1868.
The 'Sugar Palace' and its gardens — Bette Davis filmed Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte here. Stay for dinner in the old kitchen if the budget allows.
The quarter-mile allée of 28 live oaks, planted a century before the 1839 house. The postcard of the Old South — read its slavery exhibit so you see the whole picture.
Navigate day 5 in Google Maps ↗ · via Donaldsonville, Houmas House, Oak Alley, Evergreen Plantation, Whitney Plantation, Destrehan Plantation
Back up the bayou and across to Houma, then the Barataria Preserve in Marrero for a boardwalk hour in the swamp that explains the whole trip's geography. Across the river into New Orleans by the old highway, where the Mississippi you have been following finally gets a city worth the trouble.
This day is a transfer or a local exploration day without nearby stops in the linked route catalogue. Follow the day plan above; do not add distant route highlights just to fill the schedule.
Navigate day 6 in Google Maps ↗
The Great River Road, Southern Act is a 6-day trip of about 650 miles.
It starts in Memphis.
It chains The Blues Highway, River Road & the Felicianas and LA 1: End of the Road.
Day 1: Clarksdale; Day 2: Vicksburg; Day 3: Natchez; Day 4: Baton Rouge; Day 5: Grand Isle; Day 6: Grand Isle → New Orleans.