On Saturday December 17th we left Tennessee behind and made our move to Jackson, Mississippi. The trip was fairly uneventful and we pulled into LeFleur’s Bluff State Park right around 4pm. I am the “Activities Director” for our little family but John is the “Lodging and Logistics Coordinator” so he books all of our accommodations and I never know before hand what each campground will be like. This one definitely knocked my socks off and remains one of my favorite parks to this day.
The park was located right off of a main road off of on exit from Highway 55 but once you were in the park you had no idea you were just minutes from downtown Jackson. We checked in at the gatehouse and were given access codes for the pinpad so that we could come and go as we pleased in the gated park. We followed a long, winding drive through trees and around a large pond to the camping area. I was so happy when I saw that our site was one of the lakeside spots. John got us backed in while Harley and I sat at a picnic table right along the water. I was so excited that this would be our home for the next 11 days and where we would spend our first Christmas on the road. During our stay there we would spend a ton of time watching the birds and turtles on the water and John even got to see an otter (or so he claims)!
Our first excursion after arriving was dinner at nearby Cultivation Food Hall. They had a ton of great options to choose from and everything that we had there was absolutely delicious. We had Fried Chicken Tenders and fries and Fried Green Tomatoes from Uncle Rays’s and Pork Gyoza, a Shrimp Tempura Roll, and a Fried Hurricane Roll (crawfish, crab, cream cheese, sweet soy and spicy mayo) from Ohashi Sushi. And maybe also three macarons (Strawberries and Cream, Cake Batter, and Wedding Cake) from La Brioche (which may have all been eaten by the time we got back home). As it turns out, Jackson would be one of the best food experiences we have visited so far.
Other places that we would eat during this leg of the trip were A’ha Donuts and More (amazing donuts and fried rice!), The Crawdad Hole (a shack across the street from the campground entrance serving up the best shrimp and crab boil I have ever had), and Mama Hamil’s (an all-you-can-eat buffet with ribs, fried catfish, fried chicken, smoked chicken, chicken livers, and chicken and dumplings, creamed corn, corn salad, coleslaw, fruit salad, broccoli salad, potato salad, mashed potatoes, butter beans, black eyed peas, fried okra, cabbage greens, a full salad bar, dinner rolls, cornbread, hoecakes, peach cobbler, banana pudding, bread pudding, cinnamon rolls and more).
We took one of our first days in town to drive into the downtown area and go siteseeing. We took Harley with us and drove around Jackson stopping anywhere that caught our eye. We visited their gorgeous capitol building, a Welcome to Jackson mural, and the Jackson Greyhound Bus Station where the Freedom Riders arrived on May 28, 1961 as part of a protest to end segregation on public transportation. The bus station was such a big part of history and was especially touching after visiting the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis the week before.
We were also excited to find that there were several museums within a mile of our campsite! We made visits to the Mississippi Natural Science Museum and the Museum of Agriculture and Forestry.
The Natural Science museum had some incredible fossils, dinosaur statues, live fish and reptile exhibits, and the most incredible sand table that taught about topography and weather conditions. We also got to meet a very handsome Pine Snake appropriately named Chris Pine. The volunteer even let me hold Chris! John politely but firmly declined. We spent a very fun afternoon at this museum for a whopping $8 per person admission fee.
We also visited the Museum of Agriculture and Forestry. They had two sections- one inside and one outside. The outside portion was not fully open due to being off season but it consists of a small historical town with a general store, doctors office, school, church, barn, cotton gin, print shop, blacksmith shop and more. There was also a traditional farmstead. We got to go in several buildings and even bought some sodas in the General Store. And of course we made friends with the animals.
The inside portion of the Agriculture and Forestry Museum provided exhibits on the evolution of agricultural practices in Mississippi. It also included the Agricultural Aviation Museum so we got to see a few examples of planes that had been converted for crop dusting. They also had a HUGE display of model trains.
Unfortunately for us, a terrible cold spell settled in so we spent our first Christmas Eve in the tiny house snuggled under blankets together watching movies- Glass Onion and of course our traditional Christmas Eve flicks The Night Before and The Grinch. John made a delicious dinner of Cornish hens and rice pilaf and we snacked on fresh baked chocolate chip cookies before bed. Sadly, we ate all of the cookies and did not save any for Santa.
We would always see people in movies and on television going out for Chinese on Christmas and we had always wanted to do that so, for our first Christmas on the road, we did just that. We found a Chinese Buffet just a few miles down the road in the suburb of Flowood and headed there for lunch. The buffet had so many amazing options- including shrimp, oysters, crawfish and sushi. We were thankful that we didn’t have any plans for the rest of the day because I don’t think we could have moved if we wanted to so we spent the rest of the day lounging around the house making Zoom calls to family members, snacking on junk food, and building a tiny gingerbread house.
During the cold front we had been experiencing temperatures dropped down to single digits-something we were not prepared for this far south. Thankfully John had booked our site across from the shower house as we weren’t able to run water in the house for fear of bursting our pipes. We also had a few issues with our toilet draining and had to use the public restroom while we waited for the drainage pipe to thaw but it was a small inconvenience -especially when we thought about our friends and family at home who were dealing with temps around negative 30 degrees. Things started warming up for us and we spent our last few days in Jackson enjoying the beautiful scenery at our park and sitting around a roaring fire in the evenings.
Other than the unusually cold temperatures, it was a beautiful way to spend the Christmas holiday. We decided not to exchange gifts with each other (we just buy what we want as we go along plus where would we hide things from each other?) and we hadn’t been in one spot long enough to get any gifts by mail from back home but, as corny as it sounds, this amazing life was the best gift of all.
