Saturday, May 25, 2019

Vacation 2019 Day I - Mississippi

It's time for a vacation road trip on the first long weekend of the year. The Memorial Day weekend this Monday, 27th is a holiday here in US. Just one day Holiday, but we call it a long weekend. It is never long, passes too fast.

Go West Man - following the motto in the 19th century pioneers we wanted to go on a long drive "Westward Ho" to discover the Wild Wild West. It's not very pleasant to drive Westward looking at the bright and sparkling early summer sun blinding your eyes. 

We drove through up and down cascade of roads among the scenic undulating landscapes, looking at the vast greenery of agricultural lands, pastures where cows and horses grazed under an afternoon son, barbed fences separating them from the highway. Looking through it grass is greener on the other side of fence now made a whole lot of sense to me. Tall pines, Oaks, Mapples, Sweet Gum trees adored both sides of the road like Canopy.

Soon we passed through Highway 80 which connects Montgomery to Selma in Alabama where Dr. Martin Luther King once led a historic walk of Civil Rights movement. Alabama is a pretty big, wide state - traveling East to West took its sweet time in "Sweet Home Alabama". From Highway 80 we jumped into the Interstate 20 which tooks us right into the state of Mississippi where the Visitor Welcome Center proudly greeted us with the banner - "Welcome to Mississippi, Birthplace of America's Music". The blues music grew up in the Mississippi Delta just upriver from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz.

We did a night halt at another historic town of Vicksburg on the eastern side of the vast Mississippi, arguably the longest river in the world. It was the site of a key Civil War battle fought between the Union soldiers led by their supreme commander Abraham Lincoln and the Southern Confederacy. The place has a museum where the Civil war artifacts are zealously stored. Americans are good at preserving history, every city big or small has museums showcasing the exhibits commemorating various historical events. More later...

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