I had great visions for yesterday – visions of lovely Natchez, of stately Civil War-era homes and of cotton-growing. But they weren’t to be, thanks to what I later discovered to be TD5.

It rained heavily pretty much from the moment we set out from Vicksburg on Route 61 on our way to Natchez. And that rain, as I learned on the local Louisiana news that night, was courtesy of Tropical Depression 5 – or TD5 for short – a weather system that luckily didn’t grow into a hurricane. Now that would’ve been a travel adventure (and a few blog posts) to remember!

Natchez is a lovely city of about 20,000 located on the Mississippi River about 60 miles south of Vicksburg. It apparently has the largest number of pre-Civil War (also called Antebellum)-era homes anywhere in the United States.

Cotton made the town rich in the decades leading up to the start of the war in 1861, so much so that it had more millionaires per capita before the outbreak of the war than even New York City. And despite having a large proportion of its population serve in the Confederate Army, the town was also friendly to the Union, which help it escape the large-scale destruction suffered by neighbour-to-the-north Vicksburg.

I was all set to take a horse-drawn carriage ride through the old town to ooh and aah over the many lovely houses. But that plan quickly came off the rails due to the rain, so we opted for the bus tour instead. There were so few tourists – we were the only two in fact – that in place of a bus, we got driver/guide Eric in a grey limousine who took us on a personalized hour long tour through the city.

Unfortunately, the opportunities for photo-taking were nil. The windows kept fogging up on the inside and it rained so hard it wasn’t really practical to open the window. But we did learn some interesting things from Eric both about Natchez and about Mississippi as a whole:

• Summer is already over for school kids – they went back a week ago – which is why the steady stream of tourists had pretty much dried up. Tourism is the number one industry in the Natchez area, and overall, visitors are way down due to the recession.
• Pre-Civil War homes can go for upwards of $1 million but a gorgeous (ok, except for the pepto-pink board and batten exterior) 10,000 sq. ft. Victorian mansion in A-1 condition and manicured grounds recently sold for only $250,000.
• Cotton was king for a long time – now it shares its throne equally with corn and soybeans as principal agricultural crops.
• There’s a public school system in the state, Eric said, but it’s used almost exclusively by African American children and the majority of white children go to private schools.

Once we finished touring with Eric, our next stop was supposed to be a cotton plantation. It was unique – it offered both a historic tour and the chance to see modern cotton production up close. Unfortunately it was still raining hard…and to top it all off, when we got there it turned out to be closed.

So we continued our journey south into Louisiana, where we finally were able to leave good old TD5 behind us. Not quite the day I had imagined – but sometimes there’s nothing you can do about that when Mother Nature has other ideas! Oh, and as a side note, even after it rained, it was still really hot and really humid.