The Epic
28 days · ~4300 miles · from 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.
This trip chains: The Blues Highway · Grant's Vicksburg Campaign · River Road & the Felicianas · Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie · US 90: The Creole Coast · The Forgotten Coast · Golden Isles & the First Coast · Kings Highway & the Lowcountry · Outer Banks & the Sound Country · Bull Run to the Bloody Angle · The Valley Pike · The Crooked Road · Blue Ridge Parkway & the Smokies · Highway 64: Shiloh to Lookout Mountain
Starting in Memphis (loop), this 28-day itinerary connects The Blues Highway and Grant's Vicksburg Campaign and River Road & the Felicianas and Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie and US 90: The Creole Coast and The Forgotten Coast and Golden Isles & the First Coast and Kings Highway & the Lowcountry and Outer Banks & the Sound Country and Bull Run to the Bloody Angle and The Valley Pike and The Crooked Road and Blue Ridge Parkway & the Smokies and Highway 64: Shiloh to Lookout Mountain. 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 4300 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 154 miles per day across the whole trip, or roughly 3.4–5.1 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.
Lorraine, Sun, 61 south, juke night.
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
Dockery, B.B., Till sites, Johnson's grave — Greenwood.
Three churchyards claim him; Little Zion's pecan-shaded plot north of town is the best-attested. Whiskey and guitar picks accumulate. The Help was filmed all over Greenwood; Tallahatchie Flats rents shotgun shacks on the river.
The collapsing store where a lie about 14-year-old Emmett Till began (1955). Markers here have been defaced and replaced for decades — the river-site sign is now bulletproof. Unbearable and necessary.
Navigate day 2 in Google Maps ↗
Tamales, Onward, the bluff.
Rev. H.D. Dennis promised Margaret a castle and built one from cinderblock, paint and scripture — 'ALL IS WELCOME, JEWS AND GENTILES.' Viewable from the road while preservationists work.
A 16-mile avenue through 1,400 monuments to the 47-day siege that ended July 4, 1863 — a holiday Vicksburg kept at arm's length for generations. The USS Cairo, first ship ever sunk by an electrically detonated mine, was raised from the Yazoo a century later and sits under canopy with her boilers bare.
The 1858 courthouse where the Stars and Stripes went up on July 4th — now a gloriously eccentric museum of everything Warren County ever saved.
Navigate day 3 in Google Maps ↗
The 1863 day, Champion Hill narrated.
May 16, 1863 — the decisive battle of the campaign, fought over a hill that changed hands three times. Almost unvisited: country roads, markers, wind in the cedars. Download the map first; there's no gate, no fee, no crowd.
Rev. H.D. Dennis promised Margaret a castle and built one from cinderblock, paint and scripture — 'ALL IS WELCOME, JEWS AND GENTILES.' Viewable from the road while preservationists work.
A 16-mile avenue through 1,400 monuments to the 47-day siege that ended July 4, 1863 — a holiday Vicksburg kept at arm's length for generations. The USS Cairo, first ship ever sunk by an electrically detonated mine, was raised from the Yazoo a century later and sits under canopy with her boilers bare.
The 1858 courthouse where the Stars and Stripes went up on July 4th — now a gloriously eccentric museum of everything Warren County ever saved.
Navigate day 4 in Google Maps ↗
Windsor's columns, Longwood, Forks of the Road.
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.
'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.
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 5 in Google Maps ↗ · via Port Gibson, Windsor Ruins
The Felicianas: Port Hudson, the Myrtles.
Promoted as 'one of America's most haunted homes' — the Chloe legend, a mirror that allegedly holds spirits, and a B&B if you're brave. The town around it is the prettiest in Louisiana, ghosts or no.
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 6 in Google Maps ↗ · via Mammy's Cupboard, Rosemont, Angola Museum
Whitney, Oak Alley, the two capitols.
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.
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.
The crenellated Old Capitol — Mark Twain called it a 'little sham castle' and blamed Sir Walter Scott for the South's worst ideas — and Huey Long's 34-story tower, where the Kingfish was shot in 1935 and lies buried out front under his own statue. Free observation deck.
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.
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.
Navigate day 7 in Google Maps ↗ · via Port Hudson, Louisiana's Two Capitols, Donaldsonville, Houmas House, Oak Alley, Evergreen Plantation, Whitney Plantation, Destrehan Plantation
Rest day one. Beignets count as rest.
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 8 in Google Maps ↗
Fred's → Savoy jam → Liberty Theater. The full calendar.
'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.
'Catfish Capital of the Universe' by act of the Louisiana legislature. Spuddy's or a roadside shack — wild-caught, thin-fried.
Family outfits run flat-boats into the Terrebonne wetlands — gators, Spanish moss, and guides whose accents are the real attraction.
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.
Six blocks of oak canopy, iron lampposts and 400-odd historic buildings — the sugar boom frozen mid-stride.
Navigate day 9 in Google Maps ↗ · via Des Allemands catfish, Swamp tour country, Morgan City, Franklin's Main Street, LeJeune's Bakery, Avery Island, Evangeline Oak, Breaux Bridge
Tabasco island, hot bread, swamp light.
'Catfish Capital of the Universe' by act of the Louisiana legislature. Spuddy's or a roadside shack — wild-caught, thin-fried.
Family outfits run flat-boats into the Terrebonne wetlands — gators, Spanish moss, and guides whose accents are the real attraction.
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.
Six blocks of oak canopy, iron lampposts and 400-odd historic buildings — the sugar boom frozen mid-stride.
French bread from the same recipe since 1884. When the red light by the door is lit, hot bread is coming out — pull over immediately.
Navigate day 10 in Google Maps ↗ · via Breaux Bridge, Evangeline Oak, Avery Island, LeJeune's Bakery, Franklin's Main Street, Morgan City, Swamp tour country, Des Allemands catfish
100 Men Hall, median lighthouse, Anderson's room.
A 1922 chitlin'-circuit dance hall — Etta James, Big Joe Turner — still throwing shows in a town that calls itself 'a place apart.'
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.
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.
Navigate day 11 in Google Maps ↗ · via Fort Pike & the Rigolets, 100 Men Hall, Biloxi Lighthouse, Ohr-O'Keefe Museum
Africatown, Fairhope pier, Bamahenge, the line-straddling honky-tonk.
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.
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.
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.
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 12 in Google Maps ↗ · via Pascagoula Abduction Marker, Mobile Carnival Museum, Africatown, Dauphin Island & Fort Gaines, Bon Secour NWR, Orange Beach, Bamahenge, National Naval Aviation Museum
Dune lakes, Truman's streets, oysters.
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.
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.'
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.
Navigate day 13 in Google Maps ↗ · via Gulf Breeze UFO Country, Indian Temple Mound, Coastal Dune Lakes, Seaside, Mexico Beach, Cape San Blas
Phone-booth PD, worm grunting, Wakulla's monsters — rest at St. Marks.
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.
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.
One of the world's largest and deepest freshwater springs, where Tarzan swam in the '30s and the Creature from the Black Lagoon lurked in 1954. The 1937 Spanish-revival lodge serves navy bean soup; manatees idle by the dive tower.
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.
Navigate day 14 in Google Maps ↗ · via St. George Island Light, World's Smallest Police Station, Worm Gruntin' Capital, Wakulla Springs, St. Marks Lighthouse
Across the Big Bend backroads (US 19/441 corridor) to the blackwater: night boat under dark skies.
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 15 in Google Maps ↗
The Funnel's trains, A1A north-enders reversed: oldest city, oldest kitsch.
America's oldest city (1565) and its coquina fortress — the shell-stone walls absorbed cannonballs like a sponge; the fort was besieged repeatedly, never taken. Fort Mose, two miles north, was the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what's now the US (1738).
Venerable Florida kitsch: the Ponce-themed park has poured sulfurous 'youth' since the early 1900s (peacocks included); the 1893 Alligator Farm keeps every living crocodilian species. Finish with Minorcan clam chowder — datil-pepper heat found nowhere else.
Navigate day 16 in Google Maps ↗
Mayport ferry, boneyard beaches, the millionaires' ghost club.
Salt-bleached oak and cedar skeletons toppled along the bluff — the Atlantic slowly eating the maritime forest, beautifully.
The little St. Johns River ferry keeps A1A unbroken (cars, gulls, five minutes of brine); Singleton's Seafood Shack at the landing fries what the boats brought.
Florida's oldest continuously operating bar (1903), mahogany and murals intact, in the eight-flags town where the modern shrimping industry was born. Pirate's punch; reasonable people order two.
Ferry from St. Marys to wild horses grazing the ruins of Carnegie's Dungeness; JFK Jr. married in the one-room First African Baptist chapel at the island's north end (1996). Book the ferry weeks ahead; bring everything, buy nothing — there's nothing to buy.
The Gilded Age's most exclusive club — Morgans and Rockefellers wintering together; the Federal Reserve was secretly drafted here in 1910. Driftwood Beach's oak boneyard at dawn, the Sea Turtle Center after breakfast, and the Wanderer memorial on the south end remembering one of America's last slave ships (1858).
Navigate day 17 in Google Maps ↗ · via Mayport Ferry & Singleton's, Boneyard Beach, Palace Saloon, Cumberland Island (spur)
Smallest church, Sapelo if booked, Bonaventure at close.
Brunswick stew's contested birthplace (Virginia objects; the 1898 'original pot' is displayed here regardless) and a working shrimp port. Lover's Oak downtown has hosted courtships for a claimed 900 years.
Faces carved into the live oaks (find them; locals will hint), Fort Frederica's 1736 ruins, and the lighthouse whose keeper's ghost still climbs the stairs, by reliable report.
Shrimp boats beside the brick chimney of a rice empire — Fanny Kemble's 1838–39 journal from this plantation helped turn British opinion against slavery. Black Union troops burned the town in 1863, the raid that troubled Glory's Col. Shaw.
Reservation-only ferry to Hogg Hummock — one of the last intact Gullah Geechee communities, holding on against tax pressure and time. Tours by community members; book well ahead, tread gently.
Memory Park Chapel (1949): about a dozen seats, stained glass, door never locked. Rebuilt by donations after a 2015 fire — the congregation is whoever pulls over.
Navigate day 18 in Google Maps ↗ · via Brunswick, St. Simons Tree Spirits (spur), Darien & Butler Island, Sapelo Island (spur), Smallest Church in America, Midway Church
Penn Center, Sheldon ruins, Angel Oak, Bowens Island at five.
Rainbow Row to the Battery, Philip Simmons's wrought-iron gates, Fort Sumter offshore where it all began (April 12, 1861). Eat the whole story: Bowens Island's oyster shack on the creek, Bertha's Kitchen's okra soup — both James Beard classics.
Pat Conroy's town and Hollywood's favorite porch: The Big Chill house, Forrest Gump's locations, The Prince of Tides everywhere. Horse carriages under the oaks of The Point; the Conroy Literary Center holds the words.
One of the first schools for freed slaves (1862), later the only Southern retreat where Dr. King's interracial team could safely meet — his cottage remains. The beating heart of Gullah Geechee culture; the Saturday fish fry is church.
Brick columns open to the sky — burned by the British in 1779, wrecked again after the Civil War. Spanish moss, birdsong, and the South's whole arc in one ruined nave.
A live oak perhaps 400–500 years old, shading 17,000 square feet — limbs like whales sounding through the earth. Free, and quieter than any cathedral.
Navigate day 19 in Google Maps ↗ · via Beaufort (spur), Penn Center (spur), Old Sheldon Church Ruins, Angel Oak (spur)
Sweetgrass stands, Georgetown, Calabash, one ironic mini-golf round.
The town that named a cooking style: lightly battered, flash-fried, served in heaps where the fleet ties up. Jimmy Durante's sign-off — 'Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash' — may or may not be about a local café owner; the town has chosen to believe.
Gullah 'basket ladies' sell coiled sweetgrass from roadside stands along 17 — a craft in unbroken lineage from West Africa, now in the Smithsonian. Buy from the maker; the price honors generations.
A shrimping village under cathedral oaks — T.W. Graham's fries the day's catch; Hurricane Hugo's 1989 surge line is still pointed out on porch posts.
Under the 1842 clock tower: how the Lowcountry's rice empire was built on the engineering knowledge of enslaved West Africans from the Rice Coast — the wealth, and its true authors, in one room.
'Arrogantly shabby' since the 1700s: weathered cottages, rope hammocks (invented here by a riverboat captain), and the Gray Man — the ghost whose appearance before hurricanes is considered actionable local forecasting.
Navigate day 20 in Google Maps ↗ · via The Sweetgrass Highway, McClellanville, Georgetown Rice Museum, Pawleys Island, Brookgreen Gardens, Myrtle Beach, Unrepentant, Calabash
New Bern's Pepsi counter, Harkers decoys, the rum-barrel grave.
Caleb Bradham's corner pharmacy still pours 'Brad's Drink' — invented 1893, renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898 — at the original counter. Tryon Palace's gardens and the 1710 Swiss-founded streets round out the oldest-feeling town in the state.
Shrimp burgers and hushpuppies on the same working dock since 1938 — the name was a Depression-era hygiene boast, now a badge.
Blackbeard's flagship, found in the inlet in 1996, surfaces cannon by cannon at the Maritime Museum. The Old Burying Ground keeps the girl buried in a rum barrel (her father's promise to bring her home — kept, after a fashion).
Decoy carvers and Down East boatbuilding culture, community-built and proud. Passenger ferries run to Cape Lookout's diamond light and Shackleford's wild horses.
Navigate day 21 in Google Maps ↗ · via Birthplace of Pepsi, Sanitary Fish Market
2¼ hours across the sound to Blackbeard's island. Rest day-ish.
Free ferry in; pirate history everywhere. Blackbeard fought his last at Teach's Hole (November 22, 1718 — head to a bowsprit). Islanders still carry the 'hoi toider' brogue; the British Cemetery holds four sailors from the 1942 U-boat war, forever England.
Decoy carvers and Down East boatbuilding culture, community-built and proud. Passenger ferries run to Cape Lookout's diamond light and Shackleford's wild horses.
Two and a quarter hours across open sound — gulls drafting the stern, cars dozing, the best cheap boat ride in America. Reserve ahead; the schedule is the itinerary.
Navigate day 22 in Google Maps ↗ · via Core Sound Museum (spur), The Cedar Island Ferry
Hatteras's moved light, Chicamacomico, Jockey's Ridge, Lost Colony.
The East Coast's tallest natural dune system — hang gliders by day, soundside sunsets that empty the beach by evening. The dune ate a mini-golf course in the '70s; it occasionally returns pieces.
America's tallest brick lighthouse (198 ft), famously moved 2,900 feet inland in 1999 ahead of the eating sea. Offshore: Diamond Shoals, the 'Graveyard of the Atlantic' — 600-plus wrecks and counting.
The 1874 station of the surfmen who rowed into burning seas — the 1918 Mirlo rescue is the service's great epic. Summer beach-apparatus drills still fire the breeches buoy.
December 17, 1903: twelve seconds, 120 feet. The four flight markers pace out the distances in the sand — shorter than a 747's wingspan, which is the whole point.
Roanoke, 1587: Virginia Dare's birthplace, then 115 people gone, one carved word — CROATOAN. The waterside drama has run since 1937 (Andy Griffith spent five seasons in tights here). The 400-year-old Mother Vine scuppernong still fruits nearby.
Navigate day 23 in Google Maps ↗ · via Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station, Jockey's Ridge, Wright Brothers Memorial (spur)
Edenton, the Dismal Swamp canal, US 17 to the war's crossroads town.
The 1767 courthouse green running down to the sound — and the 1774 Edenton Tea Party, 51 women in organized political resistance, among America's first. Harriet Jacobs hid seven years in an attic here before her escape; her memoir told the world.
The oldest continually operating man-made canal in America (opened 1805), surveyed by George Washington. The swamp's deeper history: maroon communities of escaped slaves who built free lives in its fastness.
Roanoke, 1587: Virginia Dare's birthplace, then 115 people gone, one carved word — CROATOAN. The waterside drama has run since 1937 (Andy Griffith spent five seasons in tights here). The 400-year-old Mother Vine scuppernong still fruits nearby.
Colonial Spanish mustangs — shipwreck descendants — roaming the 4x4 beaches past the pavement's end. Fifty feet minimum; they enforce it better than the ordinance does.
US 50 is signed the John Mosby Highway: the Gray Ghost's rangers melted in and out of these gaps and hamlets all war. The 1807 twin-wheel mill still grinds on weekends.
Navigate day 24 in Google Maps ↗ · via Fort Raleigh & The Lost Colony, Corolla's Wild Horses (spur), Dismal Swamp Canal, Aldie Mill & the Mosby Highway, Middleburg & Upperville, Brandy Station: Fleetwood Hill, Cedar Mountain, Chancellorsville
Sunken Road, Chancellorsville, Manassas, US 50 west into the gaps.
Lee's masterpiece, May 1863 — outnumbered two to one, he split his army and sent Jackson crashing through the flank. That night Jackson was shot by his own men in the dark woods; the visitor center stands near the spot.
June 9, 1863: 20,000 horsemen in the largest cavalry battle ever fought in North America. The Graffiti House's plaster still carries soldiers' charcoal signatures from both armies — they billeted in shifts.
August 9, 1862: Jackson — famously indifferent to gunfire — drew his sword (rusted into its scabbard, the story goes) to rally a breaking line. Preserved fields, walking trail, profound quiet.
May 1864: Grant and Lee's first collision, fought in burning scrub. In Ellwood's little family cemetery stands the war's strangest marker — the grave of Stonewall Jackson's amputated arm, buried a year before the rest of him.
The Gray Ghost practiced law and is buried here; the Old Jail museum keeps his revolver and the county's stories.
Navigate day 25 in Google Maps ↗ · via Chancellorsville, Wilderness: Ellwood, Cedar Mountain, Brandy Station: Fleetwood Hill
Winchester to Lexington: Patsy, cadets, the cave organ, Lee & Jackson.
Lee's chapel and office at Washington & Lee (Traveller's grave outside collects apples); Jackson's house and grave; VMI's museum displays Little Sorrel, his war horse, taxidermied and unbothered. Hull's Drive-In (1950) survives as a community-owned movie field.
June 9, 1863: 20,000 horsemen in the largest cavalry battle ever fought in North America. The Graffiti House's plaster still carries soldiers' charcoal signatures from both armies — they billeted in shifts.
May 1864: Grant and Lee's first collision, fought in burning scrub. In Ellwood's little family cemetery stands the war's strangest marker — the grave of Stonewall Jackson's amputated arm, buried a year before the rest of him.
December 1862: fourteen assaults up Marye's Heights against the stone wall; none got within fifty yards. Chatham Manor across the river hosted Lincoln in better days — then Walt Whitman and Clara Barton beside the surgeons' tables.
The plantation office at Guinea Station where Jackson died of his wounds, May 10, 1863 — 'Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.' The clock on the mantel still runs.
Navigate day 26 in Google Maps ↗ · via Brandy Station: Fleetwood Hill, Wilderness: Ellwood, Fredericksburg's Sunken Road, Stonewall Jackson Death Site, Patsy Cline's Winchester, Route 11 Potato Chips, New Market Battlefield, McCormick Farm
Parkway to Floyd and Galax — honest math: with day 9 pinned to Fred's Saturday, tonight lands midweek, so trade the Friday Jamboree for the Crooked Road's markers and Bristol's rooms, or bank an extra Valley day to buy the Friday. 58 west to Bristol.
Mark Cline's fiberglass fever dream: a walk-through tale of Union soldiers attempting to weaponize dinosaurs, going badly. His Foamhenge stood here too before relocating north. National treasure, no notes.
A 215-foot limestone arch tall enough to swallow the Capitol — surveyed by young George Washington (initials allegedly his), bought by Jefferson from George III's crown patent in 1774. US 11 literally crosses on top of it.
The Friday Night Jamboree: gospel at 6:30, then old-time and bluegrass with the whole town flatfooting on hardwood. No alcohol, all ages, candy counter open. One of the last fully intact Saturday-night... on a Friday.
The most photographed spot on the entire Blue Ridge Parkway — gristmill, pond, and Sunday-afternoon old-time jams in season. Shared with the Parkway route; the atlas draws them side by side here.
Friday nights the Rex broadcasts 'Blue Ridge Backroads' live on WBRF 98.1 — walk in, sit down, it's free. Every August since 1935: the Old Fiddlers' Convention, the world's oldest and largest. Barr's Fiddle Shop is the clubhouse.
Navigate day 27 in Google Maps ↗ · via Dinosaur Kingdom II, Natural Bridge, Floyd Country Store, Mabry Mill, Galax: Rex Theater & Barr's Fiddles, Grayson Highlands Ponies, Barter Theatre, Carter Family Fold (spur)
Smokies over Newfound Gap, US 64 west: Ocoee Gorge, Chattanooga's Rock City, Lynchburg whiskey, Shiloh at dusk — Memphis. Done. Tell everyone.
A converted gas station serving the chopped-pork sandwich (slaw on, hot sauce yes) by which all others are judged.
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.
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.
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.
The Friday Night Jamboree: gospel at 6:30, then old-time and bluegrass with the whole town flatfooting on hardwood. No alcohol, all ages, candy counter open. One of the last fully intact Saturday-night... on a Friday.
Navigate day 28 in Google Maps ↗ · via Carter Family Fold (spur), Damascus, Galax: Rex Theater & Barr's Fiddles, Floyd Country Store, B.B. King Museum, Po' Monkey's, The Crossroads & Clarksdale, Payne's Bar-B-Q
The Whole Hog is a 28-day trip of about 4300 miles.
It starts in Memphis (loop).
It chains The Blues Highway, Grant's Vicksburg Campaign, River Road & the Felicianas, Bayou Teche & the Cajun Prairie, US 90: The Creole Coast, The Forgotten Coast, Golden Isles & the First Coast, Kings Highway & the Lowcountry, Outer Banks & the Sound Country, Bull Run to the Bloody Angle, The Valley Pike, The Crooked Road, Blue Ridge Parkway & the Smokies and Highway 64: Shiloh to Lookout Mountain.
Day 1: near Clarksdale, MS; Day 2: near Greenwood, MS; Day 3: → Vicksburg; Day 4: Grant's Campaign loop; Day 5: → Natchez; Day 6: near St. Francisville, LA; Day 7: River Road → New Orleans; Day 8: New Orleans rest; Day 9: near Scott, LA; Day 10: Teche → New Orleans; Day 11: near Ocean Springs, MS; Day 12: near Gulf Breeze, FL; Day 13: near Apalachicola, FL; Day 14: near St. Marks, FL; Day 15: Connector: → Okefenokee; Day 16: near St. Augustine Beach, FL; Day 17: near Jekyll Island, GA; Day 18: Golden Isles → Savannah; Day 19: near Charleston, SC; Day 20: Rice coast → Wilmington; Day 21: near Beaufort, NC; Day 22: near Ocracoke, NC; Day 23: near Manteo, NC; Day 24: Albemarle → Fredericksburg; Day 25: near Warrenton, VA; Day 26: near Lexington, VA; Day 27: Roanoke → the Music Mountains; Day 28: The Long Run Home.