Deep South USA Plus Texas

Overview

Take one of America’s classic ‘road trips’ exploring the Deep South, renowned for its gracious hospitality, its charming southern drawl, its unique Creole and Cajun cuisine and, of course, the most popular music genres of the 20th century – jazz, rock n’ roll, the blues and country.

Flying into Atlanta, Georgia, we’ll travel through the rolling rich farmland of Tennessee, past the cotton fields of Mississippi to Louisiana’s moss-covered bayous and the vast South Texas plains. You’ll stay in some of America’s most fascinating cities: Chattanooga, Nashville, Memphis, the amazing New Orleans, as well as Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.

We stay two nights in Nashville, known as Music City USA, the centre of the huge country music industry - where aspiring artists come to start their careers, songwriters try out their new songs and where anyone can walk into one of the myriad of live music venues and hear some of the best music-making in North America.

Not too far down the road lies another of America’s great musical cities - Memphis. Home of the remarkable Sun Studios that launched Elvis’ stratospheric rise to fame and the site of his sprawling home, Graceland; Memphis also played a pivotal and tragic role in the civil rights movement as the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated.

We stay three nights in New Orleans, ‘The Big Easy’ with its motto ‘Lessaiz les bons temps rouler’ – let the good times roll depicts exactly what makes this city such a rewarding place to visit. Its famously progressive spirit and liberal attitudes date back to its French roots, when convicts were freed on condition that they settled there. Then it became an unruly smuggling enclave ensuring its rebellious streak continued to thrive. Always pushing the boundaries it was inevitable the exceptional French, Spanish, American and African cultures fused so harmoniously producing a unique city which has given birth to jazz and its most famous son, the remarkable Louis Armstrong. It was also home to some of the greats of American literature such as Mark Twain and Tennessee Williams, who famously said that ‘America only has three cities, New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. All the rest are Cleveland!’

Our extension into the ‘Lone Star State’ of Texas includes a visit to the very soul of Texas – the Alamo, where in 1836 an estimated 189 men were killed by Mexican troops trying to prevent Texas from gaining its independence. As the second largest US state, Texas is unbelievably almost three times the size of the UK, and has a proud cowboy tradition dating from the 19th century. We discover this almost legendary western heritage during our visit to a working cattle ranch learning how the life and back-breaking work of cowboys evolved into the sport of rodeo, next we see the Fort Worth stockyards, in their heyday the world’s largest.

Who can ever forget the excitement, hope and sheer exhilaration the US gave the world during the 1960s and ‘70s at the height of its space program, the moonshots and those immortal phrases ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ and of course probably the world’s most famous understatement, ‘Houston, we have a problem!’ We’ll tour the Johnson Space Centre and NASA’s ‘Mission Control’ from where the ill-fated Apollo 13 crew was saved from almost certain disaster by the innovative thinking of some of the best scientists and engineers in the world. It does not seem so long ago, but would you believe the return trajectory through the earth’s atmosphere was calculated using a ‘slide rule’ – how the world has changed! The space centre is still used today to train astronauts and develop the new technologies for future manned missions to Mars.

Next it’s Dallas, which during the 1980s was the setting of the world’s most watched TV programme! However probably more famously, in 1963 the ’Big D’ was propelled to world attention when allegedly, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy, for whatever reason we shall ultimately never know and after which it seemed the entire planet went into mourning - especially so when his son poignantly saluted his father’s coffin. We see the ‘grassy knoll’, learn all about the events of that famous day and there is also a conspiracy museum designed around theories and questions to really make you think.

Finally, we visit Atlanta, site of the 1996 Olympic Games, which really put the city on the map. Home to CNN one of the US’s most iconic ‘institutions’. Atlanta has a lovely laid-back southern charm and is the perfect end to a fascinating tour.