Retired on Friday and DH and I plan on heading out in our fifth wheel the first week of April for our first big trip:
KM, my wife and I are currently winding up an extensive trip across the southeast US in a fifth wheel and have visited many of the places you are contemplating. We, like you, are not into shopping type stuff, we enjoy nature and museum / general interest type attractions. Some ideas about the places you have listed:
Vicksburg - The battlefield is good but only takes about a day to see. There wasn't much else in the area that appealed to us. By far the only decent place to stay is the Ameristar Casino RV Park in Vicksburg. We don't gamble so the casino aspect held no appeal to us but all of the other RV parks in the area were not very nice. Ameristar is a parking lot with hookups but decent, safe, and reasonably priced.
Memphis - We stayed at Tom Sawyer RV Park in West Memphis. Our site fronted the Mississippi, we could watch the barges from our back window. We enjoyed the River Walk Park in Memphis which has a small replica (well, small being a couple of blocks long) of the Mississippi River and information about the history of towns and river itself. A short drive from River Walk Park is Gus' World Famous Fried Chicken on Front Street in Memphis. We ate there right before going to River Walk Park and it was the best fried chicken I have ever had, and very reasonably priced.
I use rvparkreviews.com pretty exclusively for deciding where to stay. You can find my reviews here:
RV Park Reviews :: Viewing other reviews of campgrounds and rv parks submitted by a user.
They may be appropriate since we also travelled in a fifth wheel and ease of access to parks was a primary concern for us (I still don't back up very well).
Also, when we travel we use this website for finding neat and fun places to eat:
FoodiePie.com - For Foodies Only! Restaurants and Foods Featured on The Food Network & The Travel Channel
We stop at restaurants that have been featured on the "Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives" show and have found them all to be good, reasonably priced, and a general fun experience. We avoid the "Man vs. Food" glutonous (spelling? as in massive quantity and little to no quality) restaurants and have tried only one "Best I Ever Ate" restaurant where we had a very poor experience as described below....
MR. D's Restaurant in Lorman a short distance from the Trace is worth a stop.
We ate here a couple of months ago and I was VERY disappointed. My wife said the fried chicken was the best she ever ate but neither of us would
ever return here. Everything else on the buffet was terrible, the fried chicken was brought out very slowly so it was hard to get any, and the whole place was
disgustingly filthy. Mr. D seems like a nice man but I don't know how he stays open unless he is paying off the health department. When we ate there the table had scraps left from the previous customers which the waitress scraped off the tablecloth with the menu (sort of onto a towel, sort of onto the floor) just before handing said menus to us. The buffet area was downright gross as were the bathrooms. I can only imagine the kitchen.
KM, let me know if you want any advice or information on any other places in the SE you may be passing through or visiting. We are currently in Seneca SC, an undiscovered gem we were lucky to stumble across. Within a 20 minutes drive from our campground is at least a dozen waterfall hikes (from super easy 100 foot walks to difficult hikes of a couple miles) and we have also visited the BMW factory and Toccoa GA "Band of Brothers" military museum (very small but nicely done). It has been a truly pleasant surprise.
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