STL2NOLA 22 – Tunica Resorts, MS to Memphis, TN – I Made It!

I will not leave you hanging. My ride from Tunica Resorts, MS to Memphis, TN completed my bicycle tour of the Mississippi River Trail between St. Louis and New Orleans. I made it! With the completion of this tour of the Mississippi River Trail between S.t Louis and New Orleans, paired with my previous tour of the MRT between St. Peters, MO and Minneapolis, means that I have ridden pretty much the entire length of the Mississippi River. I rode back onto the Big River Crossing for a celebratory photo.

Here is the map of the final day’s ride.

This final day was an easy 40 miles. There was wind but nothing unmanageable. There was sunshine. Sometimes there were clouds. There was plenty of amusement, starting with a sign for Clack Road. Was Clack a person? Maybe the road was named after a noise?

After my encounter with Clack Rd., I cycled up Old Highway 61 and ended up on an arc of road past the abandoned Harrah’s Casino Tunica. I cycled on Harrah’s Casino Parkway seemingly forever before rejoining Old Highway 61. The abandoned casino site is a full mile across.

I passed acres and acres of empty parking lots, with shuttle bus shelters still standing. I saw unkept fields which had once been a golf course. There were a very few buildings, the husks of three grand hotels, still standing. Mostly there was the echo of failed grandness.

Harrah’s Casino Tunica… offered a 140,000 sq ft casino and three hotels with a total of 1,356 rooms. There was also an RV park, the Bellissimo Spa & Salon, a convention center, The Willows sporting clays shotgun club, and a 2,500 seat entertainment venue….

This site seemed to encapsulate Mississippi for me. I had spent a full week riding from Natchez up the western side of the state. Everywhere that I went, I saw abandoned buildings and sites. I am sure that all of them had been built with the highest hopes yet so so many of them failed. I do not know what to do with my sadness from seeing all this. The people who live there, all of them were so nice, clearly doing the best they can each day to have the best day that they can. But there is so little “there” for them to do, to participate in. Imagine putting your grandchild or child in a corner for timeout; there are no toys, nothing to do. And then you never ever come back to get them. Who would want that fate for anybody?

I kept pedaling. There was nothing else to do.

I found a bicycle route sign. Heaven only knows why someone decided to stick it on a post out in the middle of nowhere. I am guessing it was done on a dare.

I rode past almost a mile of fields like this. As far as I can tell, these are rice fields with “furrow irrigation.” The furrows allow the farmer to precisely flood portions of the field, instead of the whole field all at once. Researching rice growing in the US led me down a rathole of fascinating papers on crop yield, water requirements, and even which methods produce rice with the lowest arsenic levels. Jump over to my Perplexity thread rice field irrigation and read through the sources if you care to follow me down that rathole.

I know that you were looking for the canonical bridge photo so here it is. This creek was kind of interesting with the line of dead trees along the waterline and lush, green trees behind the dead ones.

After riding through rural Louisiana and Mississippi for almost ten days, I crossed over US-61 and, quick as flipping a switch, I was out of the poor Mississippi River Delta and into well-heeled suburbia. In the distance, I could see the hills that would take me above the river level for the first time since I left Memphis. The change was so sudden, it was almost disorienting, the sort of feeling you get when you wake up from a dream and have to readjust to reality.

As I rode up into the hills, the road got pretty. It was sure nice to have something other than fields to look at, even if I had to pedal up hills.

I made a lunch stop at a Mexican restaurant and got into a conversation with Carlos, the owner. His huevos racheros were delicious and unlike anything I had had before. The eggs were covered with a spicy deep red, almost brown, sauce. I am used to a bit of hot red salsa on top of eggs on top of corn tortillas. Carlos said that he and his wife just serve them the way their families made them. We also talked about his four kids and their bicycles and how much we all like being outdoors. And he told me about how he likes to take his family on vacation to Mexico. And we took pictures. Had the end of my tour not been calling to me, I could have spent the whole afternoon hanging out with him.

A few more miles of pedaling brought me back to Tennessee, which I had left by train two weeks earlier.

Serendipity struck. Who paints their whole church vibrant purple? There must be a reason.

A few more miles brought me into a semi-industrial part of Memphis. I got confirmation that I was headed home when I crossed the bridge over I-55.

The last bit of pedaling brought me back to the Big River Crossing. I thought that standing on a bridge over the Mississippi River would be a fitting place to wind up my tour. It sure felt great to be there!

Cold winds drove me off the bridge. I was dressed for bicycling, not gawking. So I found a restaurant and settled in to wait for my Amtrak train to carry me north to Carbondale, IL. Candy was set to pick me up the next morning. I splurged on a roomette and got a solid four hours of sleep on the train. Once in Carbondale, I had a short four mile ride to a hotel and more sleep. (Can I include it in this blog post since I did not get to the hotel until almost 3:00am the next day?)

All in all, this was a perfect final day of a three week tour that had been physically and emotionally demanding.

This St. Louis to New Orleans page has a map of the entire route and links to all of the blog posts in this series.