Louisiana rewards exploration beyond the French Quarter. Within a two-hour drive of New Orleans, you can reach two very different places that show a side of the state the city doesn't.
Baton Rouge, the state capital, is 80 miles upriver on I-10 — about 90 minutes each way. The 34-storey Art Deco New State Capitol, built under Governor Huey Long and still bearing the bullet holes from his 1935 assassination, is the tallest state capitol in the US and worth the detour alone. The Old State Capitol, the USS Kidd museum ship on the riverfront, and the LSU Rural Life Museum fill out a full day.
St. Francisville, 110 miles northwest, is a small antebellum town with an extraordinary concentration of plantation houses. Rosedown Plantation has formal gardens considered among the finest surviving nineteenth-century examples in the South. Oakley House is where Audubon painted many of the birds in Birds of America. The Myrtles, famous as one of America's most haunted houses, runs evening ghost tours worth timing your visit around. Allow a full day if you plan to tour more than one house.
Closer to the city, Destrehan Plantation sits just 23 miles upriver on River Road — a half-day excursion to the oldest documented plantation house in the lower Mississippi Valley.
