After a good ride through Tennessee, including stops at Memphis, Nashville and Cleveland, we took a tour of the Chickamauga Civil war battlefield site. It is the largest such site in the US and the oldest. Apparently the vets from both sides came back for a reunion and erected monuments where they various units fought.
From there on to Helen, GA dodging thunderstorms on the way.
We realized when having coffee in Birmingham the morning after Barber, that we hadn’t seen an important part of the south. The Mississippi delta is what many of us traditionally think about when we think about the south. Nothing else for it but put it in “R” and reversed our course.
Indianola and the BB King museum, Fat Baby Catfish house for dinner, Po Monkey Jukehouse stop and all the stops along the blues trail. Worth the visit! Getting to sing all those old Mississippi tunes in my helmet all day – priceless!
Good coffee in Nashville. Also heard Crema is good…
We headed into ‘bama and to Birmingham for a visit to the Barber Motorsport museum. It exceeded our expectations in every way. Five floors with over 700 motorcycles on display, many rare and some classics are brand new, never been started.
It turned out the indy car guys heard we were coming to town and put on a race on the track next door, which was nice. Southern hospitality knows no bounds. The sports car race we watched was more demolition derby than road race, but lots of fun!
When in Cleveland, MS here is your coffee stop…
Nice coffee in the funky little place. Downtown Vicksburg.
Good coffee in Vicksburg…
After spending a couple of days in Baton Rouge getting Klaus’ brake line replaced with some fancy new stainless units, we rode up to Vicksburg via the Natchez trace parkway. The parkway road is like a little oasis from normal riding. It is like riding through a park, no houses or commerce along the route and not too much traffic. A 50 mph speed limit was the only non perfect part of the experience, but we were able to work around that….
The Vicksburg National park is worth the stop too, even if you aren’t completely up to date on your civil war history.
We rode out to the end of the highway to a place called Grand Isle. Grand Isle has the most hurricanes of any place in the North America, getting affected every 2-3 years and with a direct hit every 7 years. We asked a young guy why he stayed and his answer was simple, he said “this is home”.
Klaus’ bike sprung a leak in his front brake line while we were at the end of the road, so we did a temporary repair and rode back to Baton Rouge and the nearest BMW motorcycle dealer. Now we have an extra day in Baton Rouge. Bonus!
