Mississippi Camping

We went on vacation last week. We started out by driving to Nashville the first day. We decided to get a hotel outside of Nashville, which was difficult. We didn’t have reservations anyplace. We ended up staying at a red roof in, which really sucked. It was not very clean, and was pretty loud. The breakfast was the worst hotel breakfast I have had in quite a while. We finished driving to Atlanta the next day. We hit Atlanta about 1300 on Friday. It took about 3 hours to get around Atlanta. Talk about some serious traffic. Hung out in Atlanta for a few days. It was hot and humid. We left for Mississippi Tuesday morning. We drove through Alabama, Meridian, Jackson and got on Highway 61 (blues highway) in Vicksburg. The drive through Alabama and Eastern Mississippi was pretty interesting. I never realized that it was so wooded. There is a lot of national forest there. Very pretty. I wanted to go camping at Great River Road State Park, which is in Rosedale, right on the river. I wanted to check out Rosedale because it is referenced frequently in old blues tunes. Most notably, by Robert Johnson (also Led Zeppelin in a cover) in Traveling Riverside Blues. The drive up 61N to Rosedale was interesting. My grandparents are from Helena Ar, which is not far from Rosedale. I have been down there before, but not since I was a kid. I remembered the poverty in that part of Mississippi, and Arkansas, but I didn’t remember how rural it is. Very rural. One thing that I noticed was that in the cities, there seemed to be a decent middle class population, but outside of the cities, the people seemed to be very poor. Another thing that was a little weird was that there were a lot of businesses that seemed to be closed up, but every so often there would be one that was still operational, but you couldn’t tell from the outside. We spent some time cruising around Greenville and Leland, which are both really cool towns with a lot of history. We visited the Highway 61 blues musuem in Leland, which was really cool. The Highway 61 Blues Festival starts Saturday, but we had to get back home.