Home of the Blues

As I alluded to earlier, I had an idea for an awesome road trip. I’ve been doing some preliminary planning, and it looks like it would be a bit expensive. I’ve decided to start saving for it, and tentatively plan on doing this next year.

But, what is it, you ask?

I call it, “The Home of the Blues”. The idea is to start in Chicago, and drive south, tracing (basically) back along the Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans, stopping along the way in the towns legendary in American music, representing country, jazz and the blues; St. Louis, Nashville, Memphis, before ending up in Crescent City, my favorite city in the whole wide world.

(Being a baseball fan, I’d likely also make a side trip to Louisville…)

There’s so much to love about this trip, at least for me (Tracy, though a big fan of driving, greets this idea with a shrug – for herself, anyway). Except for the Big Easy, it’s all part of the country that I’ve never seen before. The cities I mentioned are (according to Google Maps) all between 3-5 hours driving time apart, so if I took a week to do this, I’d have about a day in each city to do some sightseeing. And since New Orleans is my all-time favorite, and since anticipation is as much, if not more, of the pleasure, I’d have it to look forward to the entire time.

But riddle me this, Batman: why is a one-way ticket from PDX to ORD more expensive than a one-way ticket from MSY to PDX? That seems odd, though it might be a result of the dates and times I was using to plan my trip.

(Random things one finds out with “teh google” – MSY is the airport code for Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans because the airport was situated on the former grounds of the Moisant Stock Yards, named after a regional aviation pioneer, John Moisant, who crashed there.)

Alas, between a car rental and the two one-way flights, this is out of budget for me on a spur of the moment. I will put it off a year and start saving up for it. That will give me some more time to plan out the stops I’d like to make along the way.

I so want to do this, though.