About a Week
6 days · ~480 miles · from New Orleans
New Orleans to the Big Bend at porch speed — the whole northern Gulf without one mile of I-10.
This trip chains: US 90: The Creole Coast · The Forgotten Coast
Starting in New Orleans, this 6-day itinerary connects US 90: The Creole Coast and The Forgotten Coast. It suits travellers interested in parks, coast, mountains & water; barbecue, boudin, oysters & tamales. The day-by-day bases let you split roughly 480 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 80 miles per day across the whole trip, or roughly 1.8–2.7 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 the Chef Menteur past Fort Pike, 100 Men Hall in Bay St. Louis, the median lighthouse and Mad Potter in Biloxi — overnight in Ocean Springs' art-town calm; Walter Anderson museum before it closes.
A 1922 chitlin'-circuit dance hall — Etta James, Big Joe Turner — still throwing shows in a town that calls itself 'a place apart.'
The hermit genius who rowed twelve miles to Horn Island to paint pelicans through hurricanes. His secret painted room, discovered after his death, is here intact.
An 1820s brick fort guarding the back door to Lake Pontchartrain — the moody, marshy way out of New Orleans that I-10 drivers never see.
Cast iron, 1848, and standing in the median of US 90 — it rode out Camille and Katrina and became the coast's comeback symbol. Long tended by women keepers, a 19th-century rarity.
Frank Gehry pavilions under the oaks for George Ohr, the self-declared 'Mad Potter of Biloxi,' whose wild pots America only appreciated fifty years too late.
Navigate day 1 in Google Maps ↗ · via Fort Pike & the Rigolets, 100 Men Hall, Biloxi Lighthouse, Ohr-O'Keefe Museum
Pascagoula's singing-river UFO marker, Africatown's Heritage House (allow real time), Mardi Gras museum downtown, Dew Drop dog — then around the bay to Fairhope's pier sunset.
Founded by survivors of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship (1860, fifty years after the trade was banned). The wreck was finally found in 2019; the Heritage House museum tells the community's story.
Founded 1894 as a single-tax utopian colony — the experiment technically still runs. Bookshops, flowers on every corner, and the pier at sunset over Mobile Bay.
In 1973, two fishermen reported being floated aboard a craft by clawed beings — one of the most documented UFO cases ever. The city put up a historical marker in 2019. The river already had legends; it sings, after all.
Mobile's oldest restaurant (1924), home of the upside-down hot dog. Jimmy Buffett name-checked it; locals never needed the endorsement.
Mardi Gras started here in 1703 — fifteen years before New Orleans existed, as Mobilians will gladly remind you. Trains, crowns and Joe Cain's whole story.
Navigate day 2 in Google Maps ↗ · via Pascagoula Abduction Marker, The Dew Drop Inn, Mobile Carnival Museum, Africatown
Eastern Shore morning, Bamahenge and the dinosaurs in the Elberta pines, a Bushwacker at the Flora-Bama straddling the line — Pensacola by evening; Blue Angels practice if it's a Tuesday or Wednesday.
Founded 1894 as a single-tax utopian colony — the experiment technically still runs. Bookshops, flowers on every corner, and the pier at sunset over Mobile Bay.
A full-scale fiberglass Stonehenge hidden in the pines of Barber Marina, with life-size dinosaurs lurking down the road — all by Virginia roadside auteur Mark Cline. Free, weird, perfect.
The star-shaped 1834 fort guarding the bay's throat — the other half of the 'Damn the torpedoes' duel. The little car ferry to Dauphin Island (40 minutes, dolphins frequent) turns the two spurs into the best loop on the coast.
Four miles of undeveloped dune and maritime forest between the condo walls — 'safe harbor' in French, and it is: nesting sea turtles, the Pine Beach trail, and the beach as it looked before 1950.
Alabama's sugar-sand main beach: the Hangout's family sprawl, Gulf State Park's pier and 28 miles of trails — and the hot-pink Pink Pony Pub (1956), the dive that every hurricane has spared.
Navigate day 3 in Google Maps ↗ · via Fort Morgan & the Mobile Bay Ferry, Bon Secour NWR, Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Bamahenge, Flora-Bama Lounge, National Naval Aviation Museum
Naval Aviation Museum first (it's free and enormous), then the slow beach road: dune lakes, Grayton's Red Bar, Seaside's film-set streets. Overnight on 30A.
The 1981 New Urbanist prototype town that played Truman Burbank's too-perfect world in The Truman Show. Eat at the Airstream row and decide if you could escape.
Site of the late-1980s 'Gulf Breeze sightings,' one of the most famous UFO flaps in American history — likely a hoax involving a model and double exposures, but the town never quite let it go.
A thousand-year-old Mississippian platform mound sitting incongruously downtown, with one of the country's first municipally built museums (1962) beside it.
Rare lakes that swap water with the Gulf — found in only a handful of places on Earth. Paddle Western Lake, then join the locals at the Red Bar. Town motto: 'Nice Dogs, Strange People.'
Navigate day 4 in Google Maps ↗ · via Gulf Breeze UFO Country, Indian Temple Mound
Mexico Beach's rebuilt main drag, Port St. Joe, Cape San Blas toes-in-sand hour — Apalachicola for the Gibson Inn porch and the day's oysters.
Hurricane Michael's 2018 bullseye, stubbornly rebuilt low-rise and local — the small-Florida holdout the road is named for.
St. Joseph Peninsula's wild, dune-backed strand — repeatedly rated among America's best beaches with none of the crowds. Port St. Joe keeps the museum of Florida's 1838 constitution.
The town that once shipped a tenth of America's oysters. The wild fishery closed in 2020 to recover and a limited harvest returned in 2026 — ask what's local before you order, then sit at the Gibson Inn's porch bar like a sea captain.
Collapsed into the sea in 2005, rebuilt from its own salvaged bricks by volunteers. Climb it; the strand below stays gloriously empty.
Navigate day 5 in Google Maps ↗ · via Mexico Beach, Cape San Blas
St. George Island light, the world's smallest police station, Sopchoppy worm country, Wakulla's monster-movie spring — finish at the St. Marks lighthouse, monarchs willing.
The town that once shipped a tenth of America's oysters. The wild fishery closed in 2020 to recover and a limited harvest returned in 2026 — ask what's local before you order, then sit at the Gibson Inn's porch bar like a sea captain.
Collapsed into the sea in 2005, rebuilt from its own salvaged bricks by volunteers. Climb it; the strand below stays gloriously empty.
A phone booth on US 98, in service since 1963 — installed partly to stop tourists from making long-distance calls on the police phone.
An 1842 light at the end of everything, in a refuge where monarch butterflies stage each October before crossing the Gulf. Finish with oysters where the rivers meet.
Drive a stake, rub it with iron, and earthworms erupt from the ground (the vibration mimics moles — Darwin himself pondered it). Festival every April, with a Worm Queen.
Navigate day 6 in Google Maps ↗ · via St. George Island Light, World's Smallest Police Station, Worm Gruntin' Capital, Wakulla Springs, St. Marks Lighthouse
The Gulf Crawl is a 6-day trip of about 480 miles.
It starts in New Orleans.
It chains US 90: The Creole Coast and The Forgotten Coast.
Day 1: in Ocean Springs' art-town calm; Day 2: near Fairhope, AL; Day 3: near Gulf Breeze, FL; Day 4: on 30A; Day 5: near Apalachicola, FL; Day 6: near St. Marks, FL.