A road trip from Louisiana to Mississippi: Crawfish, beignets and beaches

Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calder’s Travel email Get Simon Calder’s Travel email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. open image in gallery Crawfish farms are scattered across southern Louisiana We checked in to the chic Tiger’s Trail RV Resort, an adjunct to the neighbouring L’Auberge Casino and packed with amenities like a swimming pool, lazy river feature, laundry and pickleball courts, plus the friendliest camp hosts we’d yet met. open image in gallery Sunset from the New Orleans RV Resort The classic waterway of Bayou Manchac took us back into the 19th century, and the Southern Swamp Byway took us further still, with a timewarp journey into backroads where gators and turtles were often the only living creatures and crawfish farms were commonplace. open image in gallery City Park is the second largest park in the US after New York’s Central Park We arrived just in time for the Wednesday concert series in Lafayette Square, a free weekly festival of live music and food kiosks that immediately got us up to speed on how to enjoy the city, especially when we came across the urban oasis of City Park, the second largest park in the US after New York’s Central Park. open image in gallery Historic high poverty levels in Louisiana have been exacerbated by a succession of hurricanes The state of Mississippi presented us with dazzling Gulf Coast real estate.