On the morning after our arrival in Mobile, we moved from the gas dock over to a covered slip at Dog River Marina where Salty would spend the next 10 days out of the weather. It was appreciably darker and gloomier under the covered roof, but we were grateful that Salty would not get any more water rained down into her leaks at least for the time being. We spoke to the service people about getting the periodic checkup and servicing done on the engines that they said they'd take care of while we were on the road.

After packing our bags, we left at noon to get the rental car. Even though it was a mere two weeks since our last land excursion, the cold and the wet of the Tenn-Tom made us thankful to be off to the promise of a dry hotel on land for a while. The trip to Natchez from Mobile required that we take I-98/I-84 halfway across the little 'peg leg' of Alabama and across the width of Mississippi to the Mississippi River, over which Natchez sits on a high bluff.

Natchez sunset on the Mississippi; Tug with 42 Barges in tow; Cliff Avenue walk.

Natchez has a long complex history and remarkably has thousands of original antebellum structures, including dozens of restored mansions and plantation houses - a remarkable architectural and cultural time capsule. We were booked at Monmouth Hall - and took time to walk the grounds before darkness set in. The house, although with origins to 1818, appears as it did in 1840's and was built by a New Yorker who came down south to take advantage of the cotton boom in the decades before the Civil War and apparently did very well for himself - as did hundreds of others who came to Natchez.

Monmouth Hall; Our room at Monmouth Hall; Grounds at Monmouth Hall

We had cocktails and hors d’oeuvres in the Quitman Lounge where the bartender named Roosevelt reigns. Unlike a typical hotel bartender, he actually played host and introduced us to others ("These boys just came in on a boat", etc.) - we met the owner of Monmouth as well as New Orleans realtors who specialize in historical properties, and a delightful Southern lady who'd been coming to the Quitman Lounge for decades. They enthusiastically told us tales of New Orleans and of days past in Natchez. We then had dinner in Monmouth's 1818 Restaurant - where we dined in mid-19th century splendor amongst the ghosts of the glory days. I couldn't see the ghosts, but I knew they were there.

The next morning, with bright sun and blue skies, we started at the Natchez Visitors Center, where there are good exhibits on the history of Natchez - focusing both on the prosperous years of enormous cotton plantations as well as the brutal lives of the slaves who worked them. Natchez was the cultural center for the plantation owners - the oasis of Greek Revival homes, French furniture and fabrics and Limoges porcelain - surrounded by thousands of square miles of cotton. The city was named after the indigenous Natchez Indians, who were slaughtered and sold into West Indian slavery by the French in the 1730s. The city subsequently came under Spanish control in 1763, then British and finally American control after the Revolutionary War. We took the Hop-on-Hop-off bus tour of the town - as the only riders on the bus. In the afternoon, we took a tour of the amazing Longwood House, walked around Natchez-under-the-Hill (the old Mississippi River port) and the Clifton Avenue walkway.

Longwood mansion; and Natchez-under-the-Hill

On Saturday, we toured the very grand Stanton Hall - built by a Northern Irish immigrant, who became a very wealthy cotton broker, walked around the fairly deserted but very decorous downtown that contains many dozens of antebellum houses, visited St. Mary’s Basilica (built as Mississippi's only Cathedral), and the First Presbyterian Church with its historic Natchez photo collection. Then, we followed up with a visit to the William Johnson House Museum, formerly inhabited by a free black man, formerly enslaved, who worked as a barber and who owned slaves himself. We also toured Rosalie Mansion on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.

Stanton House; St Mary's Cathedral; and the First Presbyterian Church

William Johnson House; Rosalie House; and Melrose House.

On Sunday, our last full day here, we toured Dunleith House and Melrose House, but also took the opportunity to drive a bit on the Natchez Trace Parkway to see the Indian mound known as Emerald Mound. The Natchez Trace, now a paved parkway, is built upon the trail that boatmen would follow to hike back to Nashville and beyond after having gone down river to New Orleans - an overland trek that was necessary until the invention of the steamship (no boats at that point could go upstream against the current in those days). The Emerald Mound is a remarkable structure, that apparently was left by the mysterious Plaquemine culture over a thousand years ago, and was still in use as a ceremonial structure until the arrival of the French. It is the second-largest mound structure in the US.

Dunleith House; and Emerald Mound

As an introduction to Mississippi, Natchez was an amazing one. Read Richard Grant's Dispatches from Pluto for another view of the complex charm of Mississippi. Mississippi is certainly a place with a difficult history, but with a charm, beauty - even exoticness - in spots that certainly make it somewhere you'd want to return.