Day Trips from Biloxi

Cross the Biloxi Bay Bridge and the character changes immediately. Ocean Springs has no casinos, an old downtown of low buildings under live oaks, and a concentration of independent shops, galleries and kitchens that no other town on this coast comes close to. You park once and walk, which after a few days on the beach road feels like a holiday in itself.

The anchor is the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, dedicated in May 1991, which holds the Little Room: the small space Anderson covered in murals and kept locked, discovered only after he died in 1965. The adjoining community centre carries about three thousand square feet of murals he painted for a fee that has become part of local legend. Shearwater Pottery, founded by his brother Peter in 1928, still operates in the family compound nearby.

South of town, Davis Bayou is the mainland district of Gulf Islands National Seashore: short trails through pine and marsh, a boat launch, a campground and a visitor centre, and the only piece of that national park unit you can reach without a boat.

The town's own calendar is worth checking. An arts festival fills the streets here in early November most years and turns a ten-minute drive into an hour of parking. That is either the reason to come or the day to stay in Biloxi.

Gulfport is twenty minutes west and is the coast's other city, with a working commercial port, a harbour at Jones Park and a downtown that has rebuilt itself around them.

The Mississippi Aquarium is the headline. It opened on 29 August 2020, deliberately on the fifteenth anniversary of Katrina, across nearly six acres with more than a million gallons of water and over two hundred species, including a bottlenose dolphin habitat and an acrylic tunnel. It is a genuinely good rainy-afternoon answer and it absorbs three hours with children without difficulty.

A few minutes away, the Lynn Meadows Discovery Center is a hands-on children's museum in an old school building, aimed squarely at under-tens and useful in exactly the weather that defeats a beach plan.

The third reason to come is logistical rather than recreational: the Ship Island ferry sails from Gulfport Harbour, not from Biloxi. If you intend to make the island crossing later in the week, drive over beforehand and look at the dock, the car park and the walk. Knowing exactly where to stand at eight in the morning is worth more than any amount of reading about it.

Combine the aquarium with the harbour and lunch and you have a comfortable half day without touching the interstate twice.

Keep going west on US 90 and the coast gets quieter with every mile. Pass Christian, about thirty-five minutes out, is a small town with a working harbour, an old oyster reputation and a run of live oaks along its residential streets that survived the 2005 surge when most of what stood between them did not. The beach here is emptier than Biloxi's and the town is not trying to sell you anything, which is the appeal.

Bay St Louis, another ten or fifteen minutes on and over the bridge into Hancock County, is the prettiest town on the Mississippi coast and knows it. Old Town is a compact grid of galleries, antique shops, bars and small restaurants that runs down to a beachfront and a marina, and the Depot district inland adds a museum or two. There is a casino at the edge of town if that is your evening. The town runs an art walk on a Saturday evening each month, which fills the streets and is worth timing a visit around if the date lines up.

For a full day, do both: an hour in Pass Christian, lunch in Bay St Louis, and the slow way home along the beach road with the Sound on your left the entire way. Total driving is under two hours and the road is flat, straight and rarely busy west of Long Beach.

Twenty-five minutes east of Biloxi, at Exit 61 off Interstate 10, the Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge protects something that exists nowhere else: a non-migratory subspecies of sandhill crane that stays in this corner of Mississippi year round and came within a few dozen birds of vanishing. The refuge was established in 1975 and now covers more than nineteen thousand acres in four units, most of it wet pine savanna, one of the rarest habitats in North America and maintained with deliberate fire.

Two trails are open to the public from sunrise to sunset, the C.L. Dees at about three-quarters of a mile and the Fontainebleau at a mile, and both give you the savanna itself: knee-high grasses, pitcher plants in the wet ground, widely spaced pines, and a horizon that looks nothing like the rest of the coast.

Seeing the cranes is a different matter and it is seasonal. The refuge has run guided tours in the late autumn and winter months, staffing permitting, and those are far and away the best chance. The visitor centre keeps very limited hours, so check with the refuge before you drive out expecting a desk to be staffed.

Go even without a tour. An hour of savanna in the early morning is the strangest and quietest thing within half an hour of a casino floor, and it costs nothing.

Mobile is eighty minutes east on Interstate 10 and is the underrated direction from Biloxi. It is a proper old port city with a nineteenth-century downtown, live oaks, museums and a Carnival tradition it claims as the oldest in the country, which is a claim New Orleans contests with vigour. Battleship Memorial Park on the bay holds the USS Alabama and a submarine and absorbs half a day on its own with anyone interested in the war.

Two stops sit between. Pascagoula has the shipyard that built much of the modern US Navy and the La Pointe-Krebs House, a small colonial building often described as the oldest standing structure in the Mississippi Valley. And Gautier, on the same stretch, is where you turn off for the crane refuge.

Further west, on the far side of the coast towards the Louisiana line, NASA's Stennis Space Center tests rocket engines in the middle of a buffer zone of pine forest, and its adjacent science centre off Interstate 10 is the sort of place a nine-year-old remembers for a decade.

The rule for all of these: check the opening pattern first. Small museums on this coast close on days that would surprise you, and the drive is short enough that a second attempt is easy but annoying.