Part of my ongoing quest to visit a National Park Service property in every state. This time - Mississippi!!

When I visited Mississippi, I was at the beginning of a solo road trip that was going to take me to 12 states. I had landed in Birmingham Alabama and rented a car. After visiting the William Bankhead National Forest in Alabama, I traveled down the road to Mississippi, where I visited two sites in Tupelo. First, I went to the Visitor Center for the Natches Trace Parkway. There was a lot of information at the Visitors Center, and it was rather busy with a lot of people stopping in. The park is actually 444 miles long, and 800 feet wide. This is the PERFECT National Park for a Civil Engineer! What could POSSIBLY be a better thing to celebrate than a ROAD!! :)

The Visitor Center, like most of the Visitor Centers that I have been at, has a nice theater with a great film talking about the location. My advice to you - ALWAYS watch the film!! It has so much information packed into a short time, and there is no way to learn that much on your own - especially if you are like me, and you are only spending an hour or two at each site. As usual, the theater was empty - although another group came in while I was watching.

The center itself had a lot of great exhibits explaining the history of the Natches Trace Trail, and how it became a Parkway. I find it fascinating that these trails that had been used for thousands of years were so well marked that we still use them today.

In addition to the Visitors Center, there are stops along the Parkway with historic information. I stopped at a few of them, and took a hike along a path used by Native Americans for centuries. The official NPS website for the Natchez Trace Parkway is here: https://www.nps.gov/natr/index.htm

#Mississippi