New cruises to include Vicksburg stop
VICKSBURG, Miss. -- American Cruise Lines will offer eight riverboat cruises between New Orleans and Memphis beginning in 2012 with stops in Vicksburg and Natchez.
Officials said American Cruises new sternwheeler will follow much of the routes run by the old Delta Queen and Mississippi Queen steamers.
The Guilford, Conn.-based small ship operator is the second company to announce cruises along the river.
In June, Seattle-based Cruise West announced they will restart river cruises on the Mississippi and its tributaries in March 2011 aboard its 207-foot Spirit of America.
American Cruise Lines excursions will start Aug. 11, 2012, from New Orleans on a seven-night trip to Memphis, stopping in Natchez and Vicksburg. Other stops on the first leg include Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, La., Baton Rouge, St. Francisville and Helena, Ark.
Later, the company said it will offer a series of seven-night cruises will feature small ports along the Mississippi and Cumberland rivers between Memphis and Nashville and the Ohio River between St. Louis and Pittsburgh.
American Cruise Lines said it is building a quintuple-decked paddlewheeler at Chesapeake Shipbuilding in Salisbury, Md.
Steamboats plied the river on excursions to and from New Orleans until two years ago.
The Delta Queen, built about 1926, the Mississippi Queen, which began cruising in 1976, and the American Queen (1995) all originally were owned by the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., which was founded in 1890.
The line was sold at a bankruptcy auction in 2002 to Delaware North Cos. Inc. of Buffalo, N.Y., which kept the Delta Queen headquarters in New Orleans but sold the three boats in 2006, the year after Hurricane Katrina.
That buyer, Ambassadors International Inc. of Newport Beach, Calif., announced in 2008 that the cruises were over and put the boats up for sale.
The American Queen remains docked. The Delta Queen is a floating hotel in Chattanooga, Tenn., and the Mississippi Queen was sold in May for scrap.
The steamboat Natchez remains in New Orleans, but makes only local trips.
http://www.americancruiselines.com