Driving Back Home

We left North Carolina early Thursday morning to start our journey back to Minnesota. We planned a new route home, because we wanted to see a part of Mississippi.

We wanted to stop there because there are only two states I do not recall having been in…Idaho and Mississippi. Since Mississippi seemed a reasonable distance to include on our trip home (Idaho, of course, was not!) we decided it would be fun to stay overnight in Tupelo, Mississippi.

Therefore, on Thursday we drove from North Carolina, through South Carolina, through Georgia and through Alabama to Mississippi. We stopped at the birthplace of Elvis, a must-see attraction in Tupelo, before checking into our hotel…then we went out for dinner. It was a pleasant day.

The next morning we drove on the Natchez Trace Parkway, a 444 mile national scenic byway, that goes through three states.

The road roughly follows the “Old Natchez Trace” a historic travel corridor used by American Indians, European settlers, slave traders, soldiers and a few presidents. It has a lot of history to tell, dating back to the late 1700’s.

We drove on the parkway for thirty miles before getting off to head towards Kentucky. There was another attraction we wanted to see on our way back to Minnesota…the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky.

The quilt museum was interesting. I have more thoughts and photos to share in an upcoming post.

Our third morning was a bit different than the others. We spent the night near St. Louis, Missouri, and woke up to a snowstorm (unusual amounts expected for this part of the country). We got an early start, but it was slow going the first few hours, until we drove out of the storm and the roads cleared up.

As we checked out that morning in St. Louis, the clerk at our hotel gave us a blessing for our safety while traveling through the snow…she was a kind-hearted woman and a delight. It felt right, and special, to start our journey that day with her blessing.

We were thankful we made it back to Minnesota safely.