New Orleans, LA
Inside the restored 1934 art-deco terminal with the runway and Lake Pontchartrain out the windows. Shrimp and grits, chicken and waffles, daily blue plates, and a weekend brunch buffet. Open Tuesday through Sunday, 8:30am to 3:30pm; closed Monday. The terminal itself is worth the walk-through.
The French Quarter — the Vieux Carré, "Old Square" — is the original city the French laid out in 1718 on a bend of the Mississippi, and three centuries of French, Spanish, Creole, African, and Caribbean culture pressure-cooked into something found nowhere else in America. The Spanish rebuilt it in masonry with wrought-iron galleries after fires in the 1790s, which is why a "French" Quarter looks Spanish. It's the birthplace of jazz, the home of Mardi Gras, Creole and Cajun cooking, above-ground "cities of the dead" cemeteries, and a street grid that floods because the whole bowl of the city sits below sea level behind levees. Jackson Square, St. Louis Cathedral, and the river levee anchor it; the streetcars still run up St. Charles.
Fly into KMSY and the National WWII Museum is downtown in the Warehouse District, six acres across three blocks. The reason it's in New Orleans and not Washington is Andrew Higgins, the local boatbuilder whose Higgins Industries built the flat-bottomed LCVP landing craft that put American troops onto the beaches from Normandy to Guadalcanal, more than 20,000 of them. Eisenhower called him the man who really won the war; historian Stephen Ambrose heard that and built the museum around it. The draw for a pilot is the aircraft hung through the pavilions: a B-17E named My Gal Sal, pulled off a Greenland ice cap 53 years after she went down, plus a B-25, an SBD Dauntless, a TBF Avenger, a P-51, an F4U Corsair, and a Bf 109. There's also a Higgins boat, a submarine experience built around the USS Tang's last mission, and the Road to Berlin and Road to Tokyo galleries. The Tom Hanks-produced film is worth the time.
Along the "River Road" that follows the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge stands the most famous of Louisiana's antebellum estates: Oak Alley, named for the breathtaking quarter-mile double row of 28 live oaks — planted in the early 1700s, decades before the 1839 Greek Revival mansion — that frame the path from the river to the house. Riverboat passengers gave it the name, marveling at the tunnel of oaks. Like the other River Road plantations (Whitney, Laura, Evergreen), the modern site now tells the fuller story honestly, including the enslaved people whose labor on the sugar plantation built the wealth the columns represent. The setting on the Mississippi levee, the oaks, and the sugarcane country around it are the draw.
A 33,000-square-foot aviation museum at 429 Pass Road in Gulfport, founded around the legacy of John C. Robinson — a Gulfport native and the first African-American combat pilot, who flew for Emperor Haile Selassie's Ethiopian Air Force in the 1935–36 war against Mussolini's Italian invasion. Robinson was known to the world as the "Brown Condor." Returning to the U.S., he became one of the original instructors who trained the Tuskegee Airmen. The museum's Mississippi Aviation Hall of Fame holds bronze busts of Apollo astronauts Fred Haise (born in Biloxi) and Stu Roosa, Shuttle astronauts Donald Peterson and Richard Truly, the Key Brothers (1935 endurance record holders), Roscoe Turner, and Jesse Brown (first African-American naval aviator, killed at Chosin Reservoir). Galleries on the Tuskegee Airmen, the Air Force's 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Hurricane Hunters (based at Keesler AFB next door), crop dusting, and Mississippi's military bases from 1917 to today.