Road Trip Day 7 - New Orleans to Vicksburg

Today was a travel day.  We drove from New Orleans to Vicksburg.  Thankfully, it was one of our shorter drives.....only about 5 hours.  Before we even got out of New Orleans, we saw that a cruise ship had arrived at the docks of the French Quarter.  I've seen pictures of these cruise ships but they just don't do them justice.  This thing was HUGE.  Seriously.  It was taller than the bridge over the Mississippi River!  There was too much traffic for me to get a good picture of it though - boo :(

Anyhoooo, we didn't just take the GPS-designated route from New Orleans to Vicksburg.  We took a more scenic route.  It started with the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.  There's a reason we went this way.  There's a story.  When I was younger, I used to dream about being on a long, long road in the middle of water, water as far as the eye can see.  It was a recurring dream kind of thing.  

Then one day, I saw a picture of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and thought oh my god!  It exists!  I must visit it!   So, this trip, we did!  It was pretty cool.  24 miles of nothing but water.  

Then, In Mississippi we stopped at the Windsor Ruins.  These enormous pillars are all that's left of a pre-civil war mansion that was accidentally burned down soon after the Civil War ended, by cigarette ashes being dropped in an

area that was being renovated.  Stay away from cigarettes, people! They're bad for you and your house!  We also found a crater...no, more like a canyon, totally covered in Kudzu.  It was so covered in Kudzu (an invasive vining plant) that I couldn't tell if there was anything at the bottom of it.  River?  Train track?  Sandpit?  Secret entry to hell?  Who knows?

When we arrived in Vicksburg, we had some time before eating dinner.....all the museums were closed so we visited the city cemetery.  It's a pretty big cemetery.  In addition to over a hundred years of Vicksburg residents, it also contains the graves of 5,000 confederate soldiers.  In my opinion, they should have been buried in the national cemetery inside the civil war park in Vicksburg BUT I'm guessing they were seen as traitors to the country, and so were not allowed to be buried there.

Speaking of the civil war park, it's HUGE and tomorrow we're going on a 2 hour guided tour.  I can't wait!  I love history!