Ol’ Man River, Head to Toe

One late afternoon last June, as the undistinguished hamlet of Motley, Minn., lay beneath a sky of steel-wool clouds, a hungry, befuddled pair of strangers rolled up in a turquoise Oldsmobile and parked by the Y-Knot package liquor store. That was my wife and myself, on the threshold of something big.

We wanted to find the headwaters of the Mississippi. Then we wanted to follow the river top to bottom. If we covered the whole 2,300 or so miles in two weeks, we’d touch 10 states. Somehow, tidy, white Minnesota would evolve beneath our wheels into murky, bluesy Louisiana. But since this was a road trip without reservations, there was no way to know what we’d see or where we’d sleep along the way.

We didn’t imagine there’d be quite so much God, so much junk food or so many unsettled Civil War scores along the way. We didn’t guess that when the next two weeks were over, we’d sound like those dreamy wanderers who come back from India talking about how the weather was rotten, the poverty was staggering, the social divisions were bitter and yet somehow they can’t wait to go back.

It was our first day on the road. We’d flown into Minneapolis and picked up the car, and now, with light fading, it was clear we weren’t going to make it to Bemidji, the day’s goal, or even to Brainerd, where we might have been consoled by the oversized statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Instead, we had Motley.

Ah, but once we’d parked and followed a few locals toward the mysterious lights beyond the liquor store, we had the Morrison County Fair, and we needed nothing more.

A volunteer bluegrass band picked and grinned. The worthies of the Motley Lions Club dished out dinners. A carny barked under a neon-lit Ferris wheel. Cautiously, silently, Mary Frances and I circulated in this note-perfect mid-America, marveling.

Hens, hogs and lambs huddled in the livestock pens. Ponies carried children in slow circles near the ostrich burger stand. The top dressmaking prize, a blue ribbon announced, had gone to Katie Jacobs for a sleeveless green linen number, total cost $10.59. And on the midway, a trio of teenage girls whispered and giggled while a tall, handsome boy, about 17, raised a sledgehammer heroically overhead and slammed it down.

Bling! went the bell atop the pole, and we all felt better.

Nobody was being ironic, nobody was being deliberately kitschy, and nobody but us was expecting Garrison Keillor to step from behind a curtain at any moment. After the fair, we found the Sunset Motel a few miles up the road in Staples, claimed a room for $34 and pulled the door closed behind us just as those low, steel-wool clouds let loose.

For most of the night, the thunder boomed and lightning glare flashed through our room. We were still about 50 miles short of the Mississippi’s headwaters, but we had arrived.

*

I.

The Mississippi starts about 125 miles south of the Canadian border, where a narrow trickle leaks north, not south, from Lake Itasca, Minn. There, all summer long, Midwestern families pull up in Winnebagos to lead their children across the steppingstones from shore to shore.

With long legs and sure feet, you can cross that trickling water in nine strides. The water is a foot deep. It’s hard to believe these are the headwaters, and, in fact, there is a bit of fraud involved.

Originally, the first few feet of the Mississippi ebbed through swampy undergrowth. But in the 1930s, a state park superintendent concluded that this presented “a sight that is not becoming to such a great river,” and had the Civilian Conservation Corps move dirt around until the headwaters had been nudged aside by a few dozen yards to a more scenic spot.

The superintendent chose well. Shallow, calm water. Green reeds everywhere. Walking and biking paths wind around the water, a few state-owned cabins are available seasonally, and canoes and rowboats rent for $3 an hour.

“We make a pilgrimage here every year,” said Tom Engelhardt, who had come from St. Charles, Ill., to laze at the water’s edge with his 7-year-old daughter, Annie. “I’ve got pictures of myself doing the same dumb things on the same dumb rocks 40 years ago.”

Then Engelhardt went back to threatening to toss Annie’s Barbie doll into the current, so that some little girl in New Orleans could have her. We dipped our toes, then rolled out. And the long parade of tiny towns, lazy scenery and river industry began.

In Red Wing, Minn., home to one of America’s best-known footwear makers, I bought shoes, which turned out to be made in China. And in Wisconsin, shortly after we’d crossed our first state line, Mary Frances suddenly yelped as if struck by sniper fire.

Around us lay Pepin (pop. 867), smelling of fresh-mown grass and looking like the laziest little town ever. As we paralleled the river, Mary Frances had seen a sign. Directing me to the shoulder of the road, she burst forth with tales of Laura, Mary, Carrie, Ma, Pa, Jack the bulldog, and the time Nellie Oleson fell or was pushed into Plum Creek. Nellie came out covered in leeches, which seemed to satisfy everyone pretty well.

Pepin, you see, was the birthplace in 1867 of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of “Little House on the Prairie.” The Oldsmobile’s clock showed 10 minutes after 5, and we sat in front of the closed door of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum.

Mary Frances approached and peered in wistfully. Then the door cracked open, allowing a cashier named Jeanette Marcks to poke out her head and pose a fatal question.

“Are you from far away?”

Inside, we found books (the “Little House” series has been printed in more than three dozen languages), old saws, Indian arrowheads, school desks, a rug-beater, a photo of Laura’s first teacher. Marcks, now resigned to an extra hour’s work, told us the museum had visitors from every state last year, and 33 foreign countries to boot. By the time I fired up the Oldsmobile again, I held a museum gift shop receipt for $40.70. Now we have various Laura Ingalls Wilder souvenirs, including those salt-and-pepper shakers we’d always wanted.

*

II.

For many Americans, the Mississippi is an abstract east-west dividing line, or a half-remembered silvery glint seen once or twice from 30,000 feet up amid those flat fly-over states on airline routes.

But if you start thinking in north-south terms, things look different. The river doesn’t just look bigger, squiggling down the middle of a map, it looks nearly inevitable. It seems to run through everything.

The Mississippi separates Minnesota from Wisconsin, Iowa from Illinois, Missouri from Kentucky, Arkansas from Tennessee, and Mississippi from Louisiana, covering more than 2,300 miles (the exact distance varies as the river constantly reroutes itself) before finally emptying from the swamps into the Gulf of Mexico about 90 miles south of New Orleans.

Even before Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat upon it, Lewis and Clark, Oregon-bound, used it as their starting point. Ulysses S. Grant won a key Civil War victory by floating supplies downriver and taking Vicksburg. The first water-skier balanced on two pine planks behind a boat on Lake Pepin in 1922, and the first Burma Shave signs went up on Highway 61 outside Red Wing a few years later.

The blues were born along the river’s edges in Arkansas and Mississippi, as were the Muppets (creator Jim Henson spent his boyhood in Leland, Miss.), as was the teddy bear, as was jazz, a few miles farther south. The river courses through songs of Johnny Cash, John Fogerty, W.C. Handy, Woody Guthrie, Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern and Randy Newman, to start a list that could go on and on.

Writers Tennessee Williams (St. Louis) and Richard Wright (Natchez) were raised in river towns, as were bluesmen Muddy Waters (born in Rolling Fork, Miss.) and Willie Dixon (born in Natchez). Martin Luther King Jr. slept his last night in the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, about a mile from the river. And you may think first of New York or London or the Hamptons when F. Scott Fitzgerald or T.S. Eliot are mentioned, but the first of those two was raised in the river town of St. Paul, the second in St. Louis.

It was Eliot, in the opening of “The Dry Salvages,” who wrote, “I do not know much about gods;/ but I think that the river/ Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable . . . “

By our third day of driving, we were in La Crosse, Wis., where Grandad Bluff rises 640 feet above the river valley. While we fueled up, a mailman wandered over to chew the fat, and told us fondly of the day 40 years ago when someone dared him to back his ’57 Mercury down the narrow, winding road from Grandad Bluff to town.

“I was drunk,” he explained proudly. “But I backed all the way down, almost.”

Almost? Never mind. The river called, the miles rolled, and on our windshield, the insect death toll escalated. There wasn’t always time to hear a whole, unabridged story, but there was a chance to glance at the breakfast crew in the Garden of Eatin’ (near Trempealeau) or pick up some raspberries and sarsaparilla for the road at the melon market (in Thompson). And there was Dickeyville, Wis., where we found the Midwest’s answer to the Watts Towers.

About 70 years ago, a Catholic priest named Matthias Wernerus set out to build a memorial to local young men killed in World War I. He saw no need for blueprints. Soon the churchyard was encrusted with glass bits, pottery shards, sea shells, quartz, copper, coal, moss, petrified wood, 6,000 bags of cement, stalagmites and stalactites from nearby caves and (according to a pamphlet from the gift shop) a bunch of “those round balls which used to be found on the top of a stick shift in old cars.”

Beyond the monuments to Jesus, Mary and Christopher Columbus lay a cemetery, and beyond the cemetery lay a Little League field with a game in progress. In fact, there was nothing to stop a deep drive to right field from rolling among the headstones. I rooted for a wallop that might disturb the dead, but no luck.

Farther south, in Galena, Ill., we visited our friend Catherine and heard how the town was first enriched by mining and river commerce, then re-enriched by weekending Chicagoans. The town’s full-time population is only about 4,000, but it’s full of gorgeously restored 19th century houses on huddled hills. More than two dozen homes have been converted into bed-and-breakfasts, and the main drag’s storefronts have specialties such as toy soldiers and art glass, with frequent reverent reference made to the town’s most famous former resident, Ulysses S. Grant. We dined just off Main Street, then tiptoed through the dark into Catherine’s back yard, where she showed us our first fireflies.

Galena, we came to realize, was the optimum size for a destination on a road trip like ours--small enough that the main drag can be walked in an hour or two, large enough that there are plenty of lodgings to choose from. By the time we’d spent a week on the road, we’d developed a reflexive scorn for larger cities, scooting in and out as quickly as we could.

Hannibal, Mo., wasn’t a big city, but in river lore it might be the biggest name of all. It was midday and hot as usual when we slipped into town, past blocks of undistinguished homes and stores, until we drew near the river and the Mark Twain Dinette, Pudd’nheads Gifts & Collectibles, Twainland Cheesecake Co., Becky Thatcher Restaurant, the Huck Finn “home site” and the annual celebration of Tom Sawyer Days.

Twain, born Samuel Clemens in nearby Florida, lived in Hannibal with his parents from 1839 to 1853. He wrote “Life on the Mississippi,” a nonfiction work, and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in the early 1880s. Inside the Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, we saw a photo of him at 12 and a copy of his riverboat pilot certification. Outside, we found Tom and Becky themselves. Ten of them.

This very day, judges would choose among five Toms and five Beckys, each 13 years old. They were the finalists of a competition that began in February, and now they were down to their last half-hour. The chosen 10 stood on the faux-historic street, Toms brandishing fishing poles and corncob pipes, Beckys bright-eyed in their bonnets.

The scoring, as one Tom (a.k.a. Cliff Johnson) told us, was 45% dependent on “how we interact with tourists.” Brooke Chinn, his Becky, nodded sweetly.

Then we noticed the little old ladies eavesdropping and note-taking in the background. Like time travelers in a bad movie, we could change Hannibal’s future with this little chat. Or, like Huck, we could light out immediately for the territory ahead.

*

III.

Sliding from the Midwest into the South, you get a gradual evolution of junk food, but the contents stay pretty much the same. Through Minnesota and Wisconsin, every fair we found featured funnel cake: dough squeezed through a funnel into a pot of frying grease, then powdered with sugar. Waiting for us at the Cafe du Monde in New Orleans, we knew, was the king of junk food: beignets, triangular pastries of fried dough bathed in, yes, powdered sugar. But it wasn’t until Day 5 in St. Louis that we fully grasped the risks involved when summer storms and fried foods mix.

Arriving in mid-afternoon at the big annual festival beneath St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, we squinted up as Air Force jets zoomed and looped beneath clouds of gunmetal gray, then ducked below ground level to wander through the Museum of Westward Expansion beneath the arch. Less than an hour later, we stepped up into chaos.

A 20-minute tempest of shrieking wind, pelting hail and lightning strikes had torn apart tents, scrubbed activities onstage and chased thousands of fairgoers from the grassy riverbanks. St. Louis, in full repose an hour before, was now in full retreat. Then a team of hollering paramedics rushed past carrying a woman on a stretcher, pouring water on her mysteriously wounded midsection. Two other stretchers passed nearby. We retreated ourselves and spent a quiet night about 50 miles south in Ste. Genevieve. But the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave us the full storm story the next morning: The festival’s wounded had been standing near a funnel cake booth when the storm hit. Equipment flew and the boiling grease came showering down. Second-degree burns.

*

IV.

We began with no reservations. But we did have Auto Club directions, the “Ulysses” of TripTiks, split into two volumes. It came in a box the size of a toaster, but heavier, and bulged with fold-out maps.

The maps were printed in headache-inducing red and black and made the whole enterprise seem as adventuresome as a shipping invoice. We named our anonymous route-plotter Gertie, and we knew she wanted our damn trip over quickly. Wherever possible, her orange felt pen pointed us toward the widest, fastest freeway or highway in the area. She calculated a total driving time of 38 hours, 49 minutes, total mileage 1,855.1.

In your dreams, Gertie.

We needn’t have bothered with the Auto Club at all. Since 1938, a network of local, state and federal roads has been marked off as the Great River Road, bearing green-and-white signs showing the outlines of a riverboat steering wheel. Beginning a little south of St. Paul and continuing down to Baton Rouge, in fact, there’s a chosen road on each side of the river, and crossings are frequent, often by bridge, occasionally by ferry. (Consider the implications of this: You could drive the river twice, making bridge and ferry crossings in an opposite rhythm, and each time see a new river, another America.) The farther south you go, the fewer River Road signs you find, and the more vital local maps become. But, after all, exploration is the point.

We discovered there’s a great dividend to braving the humidity and mosquitoes of summer: Just about every town along the river stages a festival in the days around July 4. For days we were swaddled in bunting, serenaded by brass bands, fed with hot dogs and cheese curds and gumbo.

Not that this was one big Hallmark moment. On the way into Cairo, Ill., where the Ohio joins the Mississippi, I glanced back over Charles Dickens’ wicked dismissal of the place in 1842. Dickens called it “a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave unchecked by any gleam of promise, a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.” Cairo is also where Jim and Huck’s escape plans fell apart. Instead of stopping there and heading up the Ohio to emancipation for Jim, the two floated past Cairo in a thick fog, slipping deeper into slave country.

And when I looked up from my reading in the passenger seat, there was downtown Cairo all around us--a silent, boarded-up, graffiti-marred main commercial street lined with shiny plastic American flags that some lonely civic booster must have planted the day before. We saw just two signs of life in urban Cairo. The first was a man on the sidewalk calling a woman a stupid bitch in front of children and other adults.

The second came as we neared the bridge into Kentucky: It was a pair of law-enforcement officers pummeling a civilian on the hood of their patrol car. All three were white men. Whether the blows were provoked, we couldn’t tell.

Once across the bridge, Mary Frances insisted we pull over at a pay phone so she could report what she saw. The police dispatcher, she said, seemed profoundly incurious.

*

V.

I had a splurge in mind for the Fourth of July in Memphis, and with a little heavy acceleration, we reached the Peabody Hotel just before 5 p.m.

Up to now, we’d been spending $60 to $90 nightly on hotels--here a motel, there a Holiday Inn, over there a bed-and-breakfast. The Peabody, a grand old belle that many Southerners view as the center of Mississippi Delta civilization, was a departure from all that.

First, amid theme music and the rat-a-tat-tat flash of several dozen cameras, came the 5 p.m. march of the Peabody’s lobby ducks from fountain to elevator to rooftop penthouse, a strange ritual that apparently derives from the actions of a drunken hunter in the 1930s. Then came fireworks over the river.

We watched amid thousands of merry Memphians along the Mississippi’s banks. Then a few thousand of us walked a few blocks east to Beale Street, set to raise hell. Before long, the street was livelier than I’ve ever seen Bourbon Street in New Orleans. One cop guessed 10,000 to 20,000 people were out and about on Beale’s prime stretch of redeveloped restaurants and bars, carrying beer in plastic cups and dancing to blues bands.

The next day we visited the National Civil Rights Museum (a powerful series of exhibits in the former Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot) and prowled Mud Island, where Memphians have built a model of the river’s lower 954 miles. Even scaled down to 30 inches per mile, with little boys leaping from bank to bank like Gulliver in Lilliput, the river runs for about 2,400 feet and drains into Tennessee’s largest public swimming pool, which stands in for the Gulf of Mexico.

From Memphis, it’s just a few miles to the Mississippi state line. They’re disheartening, stark miles--southern Memphis, largely black, is one of the poorest parts of town--and the rural Mississippi countryside that follows has long been among the nation’s poorest territories. But now its scarred and scattered mobile homes, done in by humidity and runaway vegetation and neglect, share the roadside with great, gleaming hotel-casinos.

Invited by state governments thirsty for tax revenue and economic development, the gambling industry has colonized the riverside from top to bottom. Jamie Jensen, author of the guidebook “Road Trip U.S.A.,” notes that “you’ll never be more than 100 miles from a slot machine, from one end of the Mississippi to the other.” And the gaming trade shows up most dramatically in Tunica County, which brags of the largest concentration of casinos in the United States outside Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

We gave them the same attention we gave Graceland in Memphis--none--and pressed on.

In Clarksdale, birthplace of the blues, 92 degrees cool at 6:30 in the evening, we slowed but did not stop. (The blues museum was closed, and the rest of downtown was as about as gritty and menacing as any Southern small town you can imagine.) Through Tutwiler and Mound Bayou we drove on, and Shaw and Leland and Greenville, until in Vicksburg we braked for the Civil War.

Vicksburg, its 200-foot bluffs overlooking the meandering river, is where U.S. Grant’s Union troops imposed a siege that became one of the most crucial confrontations in the war. The siege lasted 47 days and ended with a Southern surrender, effectively giving Union troops control of the Mississippi, on July 4, 1863. Key battle sites are preserved on the grassy hills and grave markers of 1,800-acre Vicksburg National Military Park.

I must have learned some details of the siege in a history class once. What I’m sure no teacher mentioned, however, is that because of the siege surrender date, resentful Vicksburg largely ignored Independence Day until the end of World War II. And even now, early July seems a strange time in town, with no fireworks and no civic celebrations. Checking out storefronts on July 6, we found more decorations going up for that week’s Miss Mississippi contest than old decorations coming down from Independence Day. The local newspaper’s holiday coverage focused on somber ceremonies commemorating 19th century surrender. A little farther downriver we came across a souvenir shop peddling Confederate flags and T-shirts, including one that said: “If at first you don’t secede . . . “

But in Vicksburg we also found Margaret’s Grocery. Tipped off by the folk-art experts at the Attic Gallery, we doubled back and headed three miles north of town on old Highway 61, the route taken by millions of northbound African American families looking for a better life in the early 20th century. There stood Margaret’s, unmistakable, on the west side of the road.

Margaret’s Grocery hasn’t actually sold groceries since February 1995, when the proprietress, Margaret, turned 80. The center of attention now is the work of Margaret’s husband, the Rev. Hermon Dennis, 82, who married Margaret 14 years ago and promised to build her a palace.

Dennis, a preacher who looks eerily like Michael Jordan as an octogenarian, has covered the grocery inside and out with Christian slogans and bright colors and converted a disabled school bus into a chapel. “You welcome Jews and Gentiles,” says one sign.

“Sometimes nobody comes. But on a busy day, “ Margaret told us, “we get five, six people.”

Once a visitor arrives, the reverend starts preaching, and he won’t stop. We were there a good 90 minutes, and the preacher showed us around, sat us down in the chapel, quoted several Bible verses, and pronounced sternly that wives must obey their husbands. (Here I caught Margaret and Mary Frances exchanging we-know-better glances.) He was denouncing racism and drugs, still apparently in the early stages of a larger peroration, when we realized we had to get moving again.

We sidled toward the car and bowed and waved and waved and bowed, then finally climbed in and rolled off. The preacher stood in his yard of many colors, waving and sermonizing. Margaret grinned and waved us off, whispering, “He won’t stop.”

We weren’t in Minnesota anymore.

A day later, we were rolling through little Woodville, Miss., just about to cross into Louisiana, when a sign suggested we visit the Wilkinson County Museum, in downtown Woodville, where a fascinating exhibit had been staged on Jews in the Old South. In we went.

The museum building, a former bank on Courthouse Square, included a walk-in safe that held a small but well-stocked bookshop. Paging through a volume of Eudora Welty’s photographs, Mary Frances blanched, then soberly approached the kindly, white-haired docent at the desk. The book, mostly devoted to images of African Americans, was full of racist pencil scratchings. Gently, she warned the docent that he should look at it.

“This is unfortunate,” said the docent slowly and quietly in a thick drawl, the book spread open before him. “It’s all through the book. It’s ruined.”

He was a white man, about 65. He sighed and looked embarrassed.

“Lord,” he said. “It just doesn’t get any easier, does it?”

That night we stumbled upon a gem of an inn on Royal Street, the crescent-shaped rich man’s row of historic houses in St. Francisville, La. (pop. 1,700). The last house on the left was a series of woodsy buildings atop a great sloping lawn. Shadetree, a sign said, and though nobody answered the door, there was a phone number.

Soon we were being shown around by K.W. Kennon, sometime lawyer, sometime carpenter and sometime innkeeper of the property’s three elegantly rustic bed-and-breakfast units. Speaking in a honeyed drawl and looking the way Peter O’Toole might if he took better care of himself, Kennon shambled from the backyard swing to the upstairs loft where we would sleep, offhandedly spinning the tale of how he bought the three-acre property 25 years ago, opened an antiques shop, transformed the place bit by bit, struck up an alliance with an interior designer (who runs a gift shop downstairs but who also has clients in New York), and started taking guests in about 1994.

Settling into our room, I peeked out the window and saw Kennon strolling the back lawn and puffing on a cigar while transacting a little business on his cell phone. Later he told us how each Easter, preschoolers gather in the church cemetery to hunt colored eggs among the headstones. It all sounded very Southern.

Then I thought of thoroughly Midwestern Dickeyville, the shrine, the cemetery and the Little League field, all those miles behind us. We were nearly done now, and we weren’t ready to be nearly done.

For another two or three days we kicked up our heels. Took the dollar ferry from St. Francisville to New Roads. Prowled the French Quarter in New Orleans. Toured a few plantations.

When departure day came, we headed across the Sunshine Bridge toward the New Orleans airport and howled a chorus of “Old Man River” as we crossed the water. Then we bade goodbye to the Oldsmobile and climbed on a plane. In no time at all, the river was the same distant glint we’d known before.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Guidebook: Mississippi Meandering

Getting there: Northwest Airlines flies nonstop between Los Angeles and Minneapolis/St. Paul, and United flies nonstop between Los Angeles and New Orleans.

Along the river: Long-distance car rentals can be the priciest part of a river drive. For a 14-day rental in July, picking up in Minneapolis and dropping off in New Orleans, the best rate an Avis reservationist could find this spring was $847.44 (taxes included) for a compact car. At Hertz, which wouldn’t rent a compact for that drive, the figure for a mid-size was an off-putting $1,124.62.

A river cruise is another option. The two leading companies are the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., (800) 458-6789, fax (504) 585-0685, Internet https://www.deltaqueen.com; and RiverBarge Excursions, (888) GOBARGE; Internet https://www.riverbarge.com, which runs a new 99-cabin barge on the Mississippi between New Orleans and St. Louis.

*

Where to stay: When you take potluck, not every lodging is a winner. But here are four spots, listed from north to south, that did the job for us nicely. In Ste. Genevieve, Mo., the Inn St. Gemme Beauvais, 78 N. Main St., (800) 818-5744 or (573) 883-5744, fax (573) 883-3899. Mildly quirky bed-and-breakfast in a charming French-inflected town. Rates: $89 to $179. In Memphis, the Peabody Hotel, 149 Union Ave., (800) PEABODY or (901) 529-4000, fax 901-529-3646. Grand old hotel with fancy lobby, restaurants, short walk from river. Rate: from $220. In St. Francisville, La., Shadetree, Royal and Ferdinand streets, (225) 635-6116, fax (225) 635-0072. Rustic luxury on a blufftop historic block. Rates: $145 to $195. In New Orleans, Le Richelieu Motor Hotel, 1234 Rue Chartres, (800) 535-9653 or (504) 529-2492, fax (504) 524-8179. This affordable, well-located hotel hotel has free parking, a rarity in the French Quarter. Rates: from $95.

For more information: The Mississippi River Parkway Commission (P.O. Box 59159, Minneapolis, Minn. 55459-8207; https://www.mississippi-river.com/mrpc), a nonprofit group, offers maps tracing the Great River Road from top to bottom. A new map is scheduled for publication in late May. One-dollar donations requested. The guidebook “Road Trip U.S.A.,” by Jamie Jensen (Moon Travel Handbooks; $22.50), includes a helpful 57-page chapter on the Great River Road, although it overlooks Arkansas. Many state tourism offices also publish more detailed maps covering their own stretches of the river.