Deep South Holidays
The Deep South of the US? For a holiday? Are you sure? Oh yes, we’re 100 per cent certain. From Gone with the Wind to Graceland, and from the home of Country music to the spiritual home of Jazz, the Deep South of the USA offers far more than just dueling banjos and hills with eyes (don’t ask!) from romantic and evocative plantation houses to a working alligator ranch, there’s loads to explore here and you can expect lots of warm welcomes, huge plates of food, and a measure of courtesy you will find hard to beat elsewhere in the world, let alone in other parts of the USA.
Just in case you can’t spot it on the map, the Deep South has the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the great Mississippi river to the west. The Gulf of Mexico is south, and there’s another river at the North end. We’re talking the US of course, America. That’s the bit in-between Canada and Mexico of course. The ‘Deep South’ is a term used as a cultural descriptor more than a geographical one because Florida is obviously the southernmost part of the USA (did you get that map sorted out?) but is not generally classed as part of ‘the Deep South’ because lots of people gravitate there from the rest of the USA
Deep South Holidays – Overview
There can’t not be something for you somewhere in the states that make up the Deep South. Got that? Good. How about starting with Graceland? The long term home of Elvis is now a 14 acre estate that houses everything Elvis you could wish for. Unless you’re a massive Elvis fan (have an Elvis haircut for instance, and maybe work part-time as an Elvis lookey-likey) in which case you’ll never have enough, but here at Graceland is as close as you’ll get to the man on this earth.
Depending on which ticket you buy, whilst on your Deep South holiday, you can see the Elvis house, cars, aircraft, and even Elvis ‘after dark’ (we’re not quite sure what this means). Note it’s Graceland, not Gracelands (with an ‘s’), which is a Chinese restaurant on the Old Kent Road in London. Graceland is an essential stop on any Memphis holidays, or any trips to Tennessee for that matter. It’s coincidentally on Elvis Presley Boulevard, which if you ask us is why he bought it in the first place. Ah, we just checked and the street was named in 1971, some 14 years after the purchase of Graceland by Presley.
If you want a good starting point for a US fly-drive holiday you’ll find this part of America is made for fly-drive. Start in Atlanta, where there are tons of flights to, and take in Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans – you can even cheat and fit in Orlando holidays for some theme park mayhem as well.
There’s plenty of opportunity to get out in the very open air on your Deep South holidays. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, also in Tennessee, is where endless forest straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. There’re the remnants of Southern Appalachian mountain culture here as well, in what’s America's most visited national park and real Grizzly Adams country, with wonderful foliage, waterfalls, possibly the oldest mountains in the world, that haven’t been messed with by marauding icebergs or ocean torrents for at least a million years, so have a huge amount of fauna and flora diversity.
In Charleston, Savannah holidays, and Jekyll Island holidays discover the magic of the USA’s Deep South. Jekyll Island is a romantic island retreat where beaches and bird watching are the order of the day. Wander round Savannah's picaresque squares or take a carriage ride through Charleston's cobbled streets and the unique and disappearing culture of the Gullah.
Wilmington, North Carolina is somewhere more familiar to you than you might think. It’s been used as a location in hundreds of feature films, and made many TV appearances, most recently Dawson’s Creek. The coast line is disturbingly known as Cape Fear Coast, but there’s nothing to fear at all here, just the expansive and un-crowded beaches, that make the Cape Fear Coast an ideal holiday destination.
Atlanta holidays are a great starring point for an awesome USA Flydrive. Start at the Georgia Aquarium. This isn’t just big, it’s the biggest in the world. Have you ever seen one fish tank with 100,000 creatures in it? No? Come here and you can walk through one, with only a jolly old thick bit of plexi-glass between you and as wide a variety of sea life as has ever been in one tank. Some residents of which would happily have you for lunch if not for the acrylic substance between you and them, and we don’t mean they’d be making you a bacon butty.
On your deep south holiday, take a tour of the CNN studios and see where the news that’s received by over one billion people round the world hails from. Atlanta has a zoo. Now it might seem like we’re over keen on sending you to zoos round the word at Beat the Brochure, but we’d only do that if it was special and something you can’t do here. We haven’t been able to see a giant panda in the UK for a while – the big fellow and his missus that lived in London zoo went back to China in 1993 – Atlanta zoo has two! Go and say hello, show them a few postcards of London and try and persuade them to take a trip sometime.
New Orleans is on the road to recovery after the devastation brought by Katrina. It’s now quite safe to travel there, but there are still completely devastated residential areas not to travel to, and there are variable curfews in place, but this is something that’s subject to change. What will never change though is the indomitable and vibrant spirit of this remarkable melting pot of culture. Will you still see a musician on practically every street corner? Yes. Will you be able to walk up Bourbon Street, under the moonlight? Yes (weather permitting).
The vast majority of the tourist parts of the city, including the French Quarter, Arts District, Magazine Street, and St Charles Avenue are open for business as much as they always have been. The New Orleans experience is alive and well and there for the sampling!
From those smoky mountains to the nightlife, music, cuisine and culture of New Orleans, with the serenity of Savannah and the home of the king thrown in, America’s Deep South is as enchanting and seductive a place to travel to and discover as you’ll find anywhere in the world.