Tom's Travel Blog

The purpose of the whole trip was to visit our daughter at her home in Oxford MS (Mississippi), where she lives with her husband. She moved there in 2019, and  we had planned to visit her in April 2020, but the pandemic stopped that. But now three years later we were able to make the trip.

We flew from Chicago Midway, Chicago’s second airport, to Memphis TN – the closest airport to Oxford. Midway airport is busy – about 20 million passengers annually before the pandemic. The biggest airline there by far is Southwest Airlines with over 70 destinations, almost all within the US. It has an L connection from the Loop on the Orange line, so we used that to get there. But it was early! Our flight was at 08:35 and we wanted to be at the airport by 6:30 at the latest. This meant getting up at 4:30, leaving the hotel at 5:30, and being on a train at about 5:45. The flight was uneventful, we landed on schedule at Memphis, and met our daughter and her husband who then drove us the hour or so over the state line into Mississippi and on to Oxford.

Dating from 1837, Oxford is an old-established town. It was always intended to be the seat of a university (hence the name) and in 1841 Mississippi duly selected Oxford as the home of the University of Mississippi, colloquially known as ‘Ole Miss’. Today the town has just over 20,000 inhabitants, and there are about the same number of students at the University. It’s a very traditional southern town – there’s a town square, with wooden buildings round it – today most of these are shops, bars or restaurants. There’s housing beyond that, then the typical strip-mall developments on the outer edge of town. The University is adjacent to town. Perhaps Oxford’s most well-known building is Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner the Nobel-winning author who lived there for decades. Today Rowan Oak is preserved and open to the public.

We spent three nights in Oxford, staying with a member of our daughter’s husband’s family. So we had two full days plus most of the day we arrived and the morning of the day we left. And we were kept busy, what with exploring the town and the wider environment.

On our first full day we were taken down into the Mississippi Delta. This is not in fact the actual delta at the mouth of the Mississippi river – that’s know as the ‘River Delta’. The Mississippi Delta is an area of flat, fertile agricultural land in the NW of Mississippi, lying alongside the river. This was where cotton was King; this was where the Blues were first sung; and this was where racial oppression was possibly at it worst, from the later 19th century to the mid-20th. It has a unique racial, cultural and economic history. Here’s a link to a Wikipedia article about it.

We spent the day driving through it, and we saw some of the contrasts. We visited Clarksdale, where early bluesman Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil; then Merivale where we visited a pottery and ate a very good lunch at a very good restaurant; the Mississippi Grammy Museum at Cleveland (more Grammy nominees have come from Mississippi than from any other state); and finally we had a light meal in the bar at the Alluvian Hotel in Greenwood. In the space of just one day you can only scratch the surface of the area, but you can perhaps recognise its contrasts: the coffee shop at Clarksdale was so different from the restaurant at Merivale, for instance. It was certainly fascinating.

We spent the following day in Oxford and its environs. There was an open day on campus, with all the University departments promoting themselves; then we walked round to Rowan Oak and relaxed in the grounds for a while.

And of course throughout the visit we ate and drank! I lost count of the places where we ate good meals, but I remember drinks at City Grocery (it’s a bar, despite the name – it’s possible that it was a grocery store once upon a time); coffee at Clarksdale and the lunch at Galleria in Merivale; and most of all, the excellent meal at Lenora’s bar & restaurant in Oxford. A great evening.

Read Full Post »