Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 22nd of May.

One of the joys of the travel desk is that my excellent colleagues are always coming back from

somewhere exciting and just back from the US state of Mississippi is global travel editor, Annabel Grossman.

Welcome, Annabelle.

Thanks, Simon.

Yes, I'm just back from a trip to the States where I was in Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi.

And I think Mississippi was certainly the most surprising of the places I visited.

Well, let's home in on that state. It's a bit of a weird shape. It's down very much in the south of the US.

Got a tiny short stretch of coastline squeezed between Louisiana and Alabama. The western border is entirely made up

by the Mississippi River, and then just to the north, it shares a frontier with Tennessee.

Yes, exactly. And that does give Mississippi the benefit of it being fairly easy to access.

There are direct flights to Nashville,

which is just to the north, and a lot of tourists will visit Memphis, also to the north,

and New Orleans to the south. A lot of tourists will come to the south, especially to go on

the music trail and visit places like Memphis, Nashville,

and New Orleans. And I would argue that they should now include Mississippi in there.

There are a number of places worth visiting Mississippi, but I would argue if you only have a

certain amount of time, go to the Delta. Right. And tell us about the Delta. This is where the Mississippi River kind of just

spreads into all kinds of different directions.

Absolutely. It's rather flat, swampy marshland, and the landscape isn't particularly

interesting. But what the region does have and what is turning it into a bit of an unlikely

success story is Blues. And I would say starting Clarksdale, which is a rather gritty,

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