Natchez to Tupelo – April 24

So the local weather forecasts were bang on – a lot of big, fast moving storms slammed through Mississippi this morning including a number of tornadoes.  It seems there may have been up to 10 fatalities.

We stayed put in Natchez until noon, as the radar showed bands of storms to the northwest and northeast moving in a north-easterly direction (i.e. exactly our path of travel).  As we got underway, a couple of systems were just ahead of us but moving away faster than we were travelling.  I have not before seen clouds move as quickly as we saw today.

We rode the Natchez Trace Parkway diagonally across Mississippi, it’s a 444-mile route that commemorates an ancient trail used by animals and people that connected southern portions of the Mississippi River, through Alabama, to salt licks in today's central Tennessee.  

It was a beautiful ride, and we had the road almost entirely to ourselves as the storms seemed to have kept the tourists away.  In fact, outside of French Camp the Trace was closed as a tornado had knocked about 100 trees into the road.  We were turned back about 25km’s for a detour, reconnecting with the Trace north of the closure and continuing on to Tupelo for the night.