About a Week
8 days · ~1000 miles · from 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.
This trip chains: US 90: The Florida Backbone · US 90: The Creole Coast · Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie · US 90: Rice & Rails
Starting in St. Augustine, this 8-day itinerary connects US 90: The Florida Backbone and US 90: The Creole Coast and Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie and US 90: Rice & Rails. It suits travellers interested in parks, coast, mountains & water; barbecue, boudin, oysters & tamales; battlefields, the movement & the past. The day-by-day bases let you split roughly 1000 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 125 miles per day across the whole trip, or roughly 2.8–4.2 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.
Photograph the Zero Milestone, take the old road to Jacksonville's Treaty Oak, then west into the pines: Olustee's battlefield late afternoon. Overnight Lake City.
A 250-year-old live oak saved in the 1930s by a journalist who invented a Native treaty protecting it — fake news in the service of a real tree. Its limbs cover half a city block.
February 20, 1864: Florida's largest Civil War battle, fought in open pine flatwoods — Union forces including the 54th Massachusetts retreated to Jacksonville. February's reenactment is one of the Southeast's biggest.
The Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center on the dark-water river he rhymed but never visited; a 97-bell carillon plays his songs. The Florida Folk Festival has run here every Memorial Day weekend since 1953.
Navigate day 1 in Google Maps ↗ · via Treaty Oak, Olustee Battlefield
White Springs and the actual Suwannee (carillon at the top of the hour), Madison's porches, Monticello's haunted opera house — into Tallahassee for a canopy-road golden hour and the capitol deck.
Courthouse square, four-freedoms monument and deep porches — the cotton-belt Florida nobody pictures, two hours from the theme parks and a century away.
The Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center on the dark-water river he rhymed but never visited; a 97-bell carillon plays his songs. The Florida Folk Festival has run here every Memorial Day weekend since 1953.
An 1890 opera house above the storefronts in a town that bills itself the South's most haunted small town — the ghost tours are a cottage industry; the watermelon festival (since 1949) is the older tradition.
Five official canopy roads tunnel under centuries-old live oaks — Old St. Augustine Road is the genuine 1600s Spanish mission trail this whole route is named for. Drive one at golden hour; the capitol's 22nd-floor observation deck is the free overview.
Navigate day 2 in Google Maps ↗ · via Way Down Upon the Suwannee, Madison, Monticello Opera House, The Canopy Roads
Quincy's Coca-Cola mansions, Florida Caverns at Marianna, the Two Egg and Britton Hill detours for collectors, Falling Waters' vanishing waterfall — sleep by DeFuniak's round lake.
In the 1920s the town banker quietly urged tobacco farmers to buy shares in an Atlanta soda company — Quincy became, per the lore, the richest town per capita in America. The Coca-Cola fortunes built the mansions you're driving past.
Florida's only public cave tours — draperies, sodas and calcite rimstone 65 feet down. Marianna also carries the heavy history of the Dozier School for Boys; the town tells both stories now.
Florida's tallest waterfall: 73 feet straight down into a cylindrical sinkhole — and then it simply vanishes underground. Nobody knows exactly where it goes.
Victorian cottages ringing a nearly perfectly round spring-fed lake — the 1885 winter Chautauqua's southern campus, Hall of Brotherhood still standing. The Christmas lights around the lake are a Panhandle institution.
Navigate day 3 in Google Maps ↗ · via Quincy, Florida Caverns, Falling Waters
Morning paddle out of Milton (Canoe Capital, it's official), then into Pensacola: Joe Patti's, Palafox Street, Blue Angels practice if it's a Tuesday or Wednesday.
Milton is the official Canoe Capital of Florida — sand-bottomed, tannin-dark rivers through longleaf pine. Put in for two hours before the last run into Pensacola.
A working seafood market the size of a supermarket, bedlam since 1931. Get royal reds. McGuire's Irish Pub nearby has over a million signed dollar bills on the ceiling.
Free, vast, and the Blue Angels practice overhead most summer Tuesday and Wednesday mornings — locals bring lawn chairs.
Navigate day 4 in Google Maps ↗ · via Blackwater Canoe Country
The Creole Coast westbound: Flora-Bama straddle, Bamahenge in the pines, Point Clear and Fairhope's utopian pier. Overnight on the Eastern Shore.
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.
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.
Free, vast, and the Blue Angels practice overhead most summer Tuesday and Wednesday mornings — locals bring lawn chairs.
The honky-tonk that straddles the state line — home of the Interstate Mullet Toss, where thousands hurl dead fish from Florida into Alabama each April. Songwriters' nights are shockingly good.
Home of the Gulf's largest charter fishing fleet, The Wharf's 112-foot Ferris wheel, and back-bay dives reachable by boat — including Pirate's Cove across Arnica Bay, where the floor is sand and the dogs swim.
Navigate day 5 in Google Maps ↗ · via National Naval Aviation Museum, Flora-Bama Lounge, Bamahenge, Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Bon Secour NWR, Fort Morgan & the Mobile Bay Ferry
Africatown's Heritage House (unhurried), the Carnival Museum, then the Mississippi Sound: Pascagoula's singing river, Biloxi's median lighthouse, 100 Men Hall — across the Rigolets into New Orleans.
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.
A 1922 chitlin'-circuit dance hall — Etta James, Big Joe Turner — still throwing shows in a town that calls itself 'a place apart.'
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.
Mobile's oldest restaurant (1924), home of the upside-down hot dog. Jimmy Buffett name-checked it; locals never needed the endorsement.
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.
Navigate day 6 in Google Maps ↗ · via Africatown, Mobile Carnival Museum, The Dew Drop Inn, Pascagoula Abduction Marker, Ohr-O'Keefe Museum, Biloxi Lighthouse, 100 Men Hall, Fort Pike & the Rigolets
US 90 west: Des Allemands catfish, Houma's swamps, Morgan City's Tarzan claim, the Teche's oak tunnel through Franklin and Jeanerette (hot-bread light!), Avery Island's Tabasco salt dome.
'Catfish Capital of the Universe' by act of the Louisiana legislature. Spuddy's or a roadside shack — wild-caught, thin-fried.
The first Tarzan film (1917) was shot in these swamps. Tour 'Mr. Charlie,' the first transportable offshore rig, then note the festival name: Shrimp & Petroleum, since 1936. Only here.
Tabasco has aged on this salt dome since 1868. Jungle Gardens shelters a snowy-egret city and a centuries-old Buddha in a glass pagoda — the McIlhennys were eccentric in the best way.
Family outfits run flat-boats into the Terrebonne wetlands — gators, Spanish moss, and guides whose accents are the real attraction.
The largest surviving 19th-century sugar plantation complex in the country — rows of weathered cypress quarters along the cane. Thibodaux also carries the memory of the 1887 massacre of striking Black cane workers; the general store museum is the keeper of all of it.
Navigate day 7 in Google Maps ↗ · via Des Allemands catfish, Swamp tour country, Laurel Valley Village, Morgan City, Franklin's Main Street, LeJeune's Bakery
Boudin breakfast in Scott, Rayne's frogs, Crowley's hidden opera house, Jennings's first-oil derrick, Lake Charles's carpenter Victorians — end at Niblett's Bluff, where the Trail forded into Texas. Toast its remaining 1,500 ghost miles.
Where the Old Spanish Trail crossed the Sabine on a ferry — Civil War earthworks still ridge the bluff above the river park. Texas is the far bank; the trail kept going 1,500 miles.
Where Longfellow's exiled Acadian lovers were said to part. The Acadian Memorial next door names the real deportees of the Grand Dérangement — the sadness under all the romance.
A living Acadian-Creole village with Sunday jams, the Blue Moon Saloon's porch dancehall — and Borden's (1940), the last old-line Borden's ice cream parlor anywhere.
'Rendez-vous des Cajuns' — the Cajun Grand Ole Opry — broadcasts live most Saturday nights from this 1924 movie palace. Two-stepping in the aisles encouraged.
Officially 'Boudin Capital of the World' by legislative resolution (2012). Best Stop and Billy's sit 500 yards apart — eat both, vote with a second helping. Boudin is breakfast here.
Navigate day 8 in Google Maps ↗ · via Evangeline Oak, Vermilionville & Borden's, The Boudin Capital, Grand Opera House of the South, Liberty Theater, Louisiana's First Oil Well, Charpentier District, Niblett's Bluff
The Old Spanish Trail: Full US 90 is a 8-day trip of about 1000 miles.
It starts in St. Augustine.
It chains US 90: The Florida Backbone, US 90: The Creole Coast, Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie and US 90: Rice & Rails.
Day 1: Lake City; Day 2: near Tallahassee, FL; Day 3: near DeFuniak Springs, FL; Day 4: near Gulf Breeze, FL; Day 5: on the Eastern Shore; Day 6: Mobile → New Orleans; Day 7: near New Iberia, LA; Day 8: near Orange, TX.