Road trip guides
Guides we wrote by hand for drives we have actually made — the stops worth the exit ramp, the drive math, and what we would skip. Then plan your own version free.
206 miles down I-77 and I-26. It is an easy three-and-a-half hours, which is exactly why most people arrive stiff and starving. Here are three stops worth the exit ramp — a lily-covered river, a state capital that eats well, and a town 25 minutes short of Charleston.
About 245 miles of I-40, roughly four hours if you never lift your foot. You cross the Piedmont, the foothills and the front wall of the Blue Ridge in one afternoon. Here is where we get out of the car.
Roughly 320 miles down the Shenandoah Valley with mountains on both sides the entire way, and truck traffic that will talk you out of stopping. Stop anyway — these three are minutes off the ramp.
About 535 miles and eight hours of pine trees, billboards and brake lights. Nobody enjoys this road. Three stops, all within ten minutes of an exit, turn it from an endurance test into a day.
About 90 parkway miles at 45 miles an hour, which is the entire point. Three hours of driving before you stop for anything, and the three stops we would never skip.
Ninety miles from the Piedmont to the High Country in under two hours, through the Yadkin Valley wine country and up the Deep Gap climb. Most people drive it straight through. There are three reasons not to.
About 525 miles and eight hours of driving to the theme parks. Most families do it in one grim push and arrive too fried to enjoy day one. Here is where we get out — a lake in the South Carolina pines, a city worth a real meal, and the oldest town in the country.
1,000 miles and about fifteen hours, almost all of it on I-80 through Iowa and Nebraska. People call it the most boring drive in America. It is not — it is the most unplanned one. Here is where we stop.
About 700 miles and eleven hours of driving, and every one of those hours can go wrong in traffic. The stops matter less than when you take them. Here is how we time this drive, and where we get out.
About 1,065 miles and sixteen hours, from the Texas plains to the South Rim. This is the rare long drive where the road itself is the attraction. Here is where we stop, and why we would never do it in one push.
250 miles up I-75 and I-24, about four hours if you never lift your foot. It crosses two mountain ridges and one of the best river cities in the South. Here is where we would get out.
About 270 miles of Mojave between the coast and the Strip. Everybody runs it flat out and everybody sits in the same Friday backup. Here is where we get out — a forest made of glass bottles, a silver town that went broke, and the last real coffee before Nevada.
Roughly 460 miles of coast if you take the slow road, and you should. This is not a drive to optimise — it is the drive. Here is where we get out: an aquarium worth half a day, the cliffs at Big Sur, and a beach full of elephant seals.
About 355 miles from the Front Range to red rock, over the Continental Divide and down the Colorado River. Most people drive it in one shot and miss the best hot spring in the state. Here is where we get out.
About 530 miles from Music City to the Gulf. Straight through it is a grinding eight hours of interstate. Broken properly it is one of the best music-and-food drives in the country — here is where we get out.
About 280 miles from Boston to Bar Harbor, and the interstate version misses the entire point. Here is where we get out — a working brick seaport, Maine's best food city, and the harbour that put the schooners back to sea.
About 280 miles from the Strip to the South Rim, and one of the most rushed drives in America — most people do it as a same-day bus trip and see a car park. Here is where we get out: a dam you can walk across, the longest surviving stretch of Route 66, and the town that owns the train.
About 160 miles down the Overseas Highway, and the only road in America where you drive 42 bridges over open water to get to the end of the country. Most people do it in one push and remember the traffic. Here is where we get out: a reef you snorkel from the road, the bridge you can walk out onto, and the best beach in Florida.
About 120 miles up I-17 and one of the biggest landscape changes you can drive in two hours — saguaro desert at 1,100 feet to red rock and pine at 4,500. Most people do it as a straight shot and arrive in Sedona traffic. Here is where we get out: a cliff dwelling off the exit ramp, a copper town clinging to a mountainside, and the canyon road everyone skips.
About 175 miles straight down I-5 and the most-driven corridor in the Pacific Northwest — three hours if the traffic behaves, five if it does not. Almost everyone treats it as dead time between two good cities. Here is where we get out: a glass furnace on a waterfront, a volcano that took the top off itself, and a fur-trade fort inside the city limits.
About 470 miles straight down I-65, and almost everyone does it in one seven-hour push with a gas-station sandwich at Indianapolis. That is a waste of a good road. Here is where we get out: a motor speedway you can drive a lap of, a whiskey-and-baseball afternoon in Louisville, and the longest cave system on earth.
About 235 miles from the theme parks to South Beach, and almost nobody stops — it gets driven like an airport transfer with tolls. Here is where we get out: a beach where the state's rockiest shoreline blows seawater into the air, a red-brick lighthouse you can climb, and two blocks of Atlantic Avenue for dinner before the city starts.
About 215 miles of I-40 from Music City to the mountains, and most people drive it straight into a two-hour crawl through Pigeon Forge. Here is how we do it instead: a waterfall you wade to on the Cumberland Plateau, a gold ball from a World's Fair in downtown Knoxville, and the quiet back door into the national park along the Little River.
About 160 miles from the Strip to Springdale, and most people drive it without lifting a foot off the gas — casino, desert, canyon. Here is where we get out: a red-rock state park most visitors never hear of, dinosaur footprints found by a man leveling a field in St. George, and a pioneer ghost town under the cliffs five miles from the park gate.
About 250 miles from downtown Atlanta to the squares of Savannah, and most of it is the long, straight pine corridor of I-16 that people grit their teeth through. Here is where we get out: the town where Fried Green Tomatoes was filmed, an earth lodge whose floor is a thousand years old, and a World War II bomber museum one exit short of the city.
About 195 miles from downtown Dallas to the Capitol in Austin, all of it on I-35, the busiest and most complained-about road in Texas. Here is where we get out anyway: a Czech bakery that never seems to close, a dig site where a herd of Ice Age mammoths still lies where it fell, and a cave that was discovered by the crew building the interstate.
About 320 miles from downtown Salt Lake City to the West Entrance at West Yellowstone, Montana — up I-15 through northern Utah and eastern Idaho, then US-20 into the mountains. Here is where we get out: a railroad station from the days when every train west stopped in Ogden, a waterfall that runs right through downtown Idaho Falls, and a thundering falls in the forest that most park-bound drivers pass within ten miles of and never see.
About 120 miles from downtown San Diego to central Los Angeles — mostly I‑5 north along the coast, through La Jolla, Del Mar, Carlsbad and Oceanside up into Orange County and then the long sprawl of LA. Here is where we get out: a rare coastal pine reserve and bluff trails right outside the city, a wooden pier and harbor with easy walking, and a broad surf beach with a long pier that is the last big beach stop before Los Angeles.
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