Blue Ridge Blues and BBQ - New Orleans to Nashville (Guided)

The first half of the Blues and BBQ route, guided. Eight days from New Orleans to Nashville, seven nights and only around 940 miles, which makes this one of the shortest guided tours in the range and leaves a great deal of time in the towns themselves.

The Mississippi Delta is really the whole point of it. Baton Rouge and Natchez come first on easy 85 and 120-mile rides, then Clarksdale, the crossroads town at the centre of blues mythology and home to the Delta Blues Museum. Memphis follows, with Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis all recorded, along with Graceland and the bars of Beale Street.

The last stretch of the route heads up into Tennessee. Florence sits on the Alabama line close to Muscle Shoals, another recording town with a reputation out of all proportion to its size, and then the route reaches Lynchburg and the Jack Daniel’s distillery before the 240-mile run into Nashville and a farewell dinner.

EAGLERIDER provides the motorcycle, the tour leader, all seven nights and the group dinners. Fuel, most meals and insurance are arranged separately. The roads here are easy and the daily distances modest, which is deliberate: this is a route where the evenings matter as much as the riding. For anyone who wants the American South’s music heritage properly rather than as a detour on the way somewhere else, led by someone who knows which bars are worth the walk, this is comfortably the trip to book.