Tennessee Discovery Road Trip

Seven nights from Nashville to Tupelo, self-guided, through the music heritage of Tennessee and Mississippi, with the flights included.

Seven nights and three stops makes this the shortest and cheapest American road trip in the operator’s range, and it concentrates on one subject rather than covering ground.

Nashville takes four of the nights, which is generous and right: the Country Music Hall of Fame, a backstage tour at the Grand Ole Opry, the honky-tonks along Broadway, the Johnny Cash Museum and Centennial Park. Memphis follows for two, with Beale Street, Sun Studio, where Presley, Cash and Lewis all recorded, Graceland, and the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was killed in 1968. Tupelo closes it with a night at the two-room house where Elvis Presley was born in 1935 and the museum beside it, which is a modest place and all the more affecting for it.

Direct flights to Nashville, a checked bag each way, seven days of fully inclusive car hire in a Volkswagen Jetta or similar and seven nights in three-star hotels at all three stops are included; fuel, most meals and the attraction admissions are not. The price shown is per person sharing. Spring and autumn are the seasons. Four nights in one city at the start also means the trip begins without a drive, which is worth something after a transatlantic flight. Eight days is enough to do the three cities properly and nothing else, which is the right ambition for a first trip to this part of the South.