Natchez, Mississippi, seems like such a tranquil southern berg. How could one possibly end up in the emergency room? Let me tell you.

But before that, some backstory.

We first visited Natchez on a family road trip years before we bought The Epic Van. Natchez is known for the Natchez Trace, a 440-mile trail that begins along the Mississippi River. It was created first by animals, including bison heading north to the salt licks in Tennessee. Native Americans used the trails and built mounds and settlements along the path. Then settlers discovered them. Traders from the north floated their goods downriver on rafts, sold them at the port in Natchez, dismantled the rafts and sold the wood, took their cash and walked back north along the trace. Make-do roadhouses were built about a day’s walk apart to host travelers.

On that first trip, Nate and I left Arizona, rolling across New Mexico and Texas, picking up Tom and my mother, Jeannine, in Houston. We pointed our noses toward Mississippi and the Natchez Trace, with plans to drive all the way to Baltimore. There, Tom and Mom would fly home, and Nate and I, with more vacation time, would drive back to Arizona through the middle of the country.

It was a road trip that lived in family lore for all the fun and crazy you can imagine. And Mom’s favorite part, one she talked about whenever the trip came up, was sitting on the second-floor balcony of an Antebellum home turned bed and breakfast in Port Gibson near Natchez, sipping a glass of wine and watching the Spanish moss sway in the stately oak trees.

So it seemed appropriate that, on the one-year anniversary of Mom’s death, we would be in a place we shared and loved so much.

Back to now. We crossed the Mississippi, dug into some southern tamales (totally different than southwest ones), strolled through Natchez Memorial Park, and wandered through town, where we stumbled onto a wonderful photo exhibit at the Historic Natchez Foundation documenting the cotton era that built the town.

I was thinking about my mother, her adventurous nature, her positive outlook and her ability to find joy. And about how much she would have loved that we were back in Natchez.

Tom decided to get some steps walking to architectural gems near downtown, while I wandered the shops looking for crafts I remembered from our previous trip. We agreed to meet back at the van at a prescribed time.

My “Time to go” alarm went off, and I looked at my phone to check the van’s location, which I had marked with a dropped flag on my Google map (Who says seniors can’t embrace technology?).

“There it is,” I thought smugly as, WHOMP, I tripped on uneven pavement, faceplanted and smacked my little head.

There was blood. A lot of it.

I managed to get to my feet but couldn’t stand upright or the blood gushing from my forehead would soak my clothes. I had nothing in my bag to put on the wound. A lovely passerby helped me to a bench in front of a restaurant, and the owner brought me a cloth for the blood.

I dialed, one-eyed, and Tom collected me. We headed to the ER where, after several hours and an MRI, I got three stitches over my eyebrow and a prescription for antibiotics.

We rolled back to our camp spot, me with my tail between my legs.

There’s something about falling that makes you feel even older than your driver’s license says, and it took me a couple of days to regain my sunny disposition.

I channeled my mother’s attitude. She never complained, so neither would I.

We walked the sunken trace trail, visited Mount Locust, one of the oldest structures in Mississippi which served as an inn for travelers along the trace, saw the Emerald Mound, the second-largest Indian mound in the country, and found my crafts at The Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi.

In a couple of days, I had a great shiner, but renewed nomad determination.