20 American road trips where the journey beats the destination

From the Pacific Coast Highway to the Natchez Trace, these 20 drives cover the full range of American landscape — and all of them are better experienced at road-trip pace than any other way

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The road trip is the American travel format — not because Americans invented driving, but because the country was built at a scale and with a geography that makes the car the most natural way to encounter it. A flight from New York to Los Angeles takes five hours and delivers you from one coastal city to another with 2,800 miles of continent entirely bypassed. The same journey by road takes five days and passes through the Appalachians, the Ohio River Valley, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Mojave Desert — five distinct landscapes, five distinct regional cultures, and a physical understanding of the country's scale that no other mode of travel provides.

That is the case for the road trip as a format. The case for the specific roads on this list is different: each one was chosen because the drive itself — the specific sequence of landscapes, the quality of the light on a particular stretch, the towns and stops along the way — is the experience, not merely the mechanism for reaching an experience. These are not drives you take to get somewhere. They are drives you take because the road is the point.

The 20 trips here range from iconic routes that have been driven by millions to regional roads that are largely unknown outside the states they pass through. They span every region of the country: the Pacific coast, the desert Southwest, the Rocky Mountain states, the Great Plains, the Deep South, New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the upper Midwest. Several are short enough to complete in a day. Several justify a week or more. All of them reward the traveler who is willing to stop — at the overlook that is not on the itinerary, at the diner that looks right from the road, at the geological formation that deserves more than a drive-by glance.

Pacific Coast Highway, California

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Highway 1 along the California coast — the Pacific Coast Highway, though that name technically applies to a longer route — is the most driven scenic road in the United States and has earned that status. The stretch from San Luis Obispo north through Big Sur to Carmel and on to San Francisco, roughly 250 miles, offers a sustained sequence of coastal drama — cliffs falling to the Pacific, sea stacks rising from the surf, the road carved into the rock hundreds of feet above the water — that has no equal on the American coast.

Big Sur is the section that defines the drive. The 90-mile stretch of coastline between San Simeon and Carmel has been largely undeveloped because the topography — steep mountains meeting a turbulent ocean, with no natural harbor and no flat land — made development impractical. The result is one of the last stretches of undeveloped Pacific coast in California, accessible by a road that was blasted and carved into the cliffs over a period of 18 years and completed in 1937. The Bixby Bridge, a single-arch concrete span completed in 1932, is the most photographed bridge in California and offers, on a clear day, a view of coast and ocean that justifies stopping on its own.

The drive is best done northbound — San Luis Obispo to San Francisco — because the ocean is on your left, keeping it in direct view throughout rather than across the car. Allow three days at minimum: one day from San Luis Obispo to Big Sur, a full day in Big Sur with stops at McWay Falls, the Henry Miller Library, and Pfeiffer Beach, and a final day from Big Sur to San Francisco via Carmel and the 17-Mile Drive through Pebble Beach. Fog is present year-round but most common in June and July — what Californians call June Gloom. September and October offer the clearest skies and the warmest temperatures.

Highway 1 is subject to closures from landslides, which are common after heavy rain seasons. Check current conditions through Caltrans before departure and have an alternative inland route via US-101 as a backup.

Going-to-the-Sun Road, Montana

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Going-to-the-Sun Road, which crosses the Continental Divide through Glacier National Park in Montana, is 50 miles long and takes a minimum of two hours to drive — not because traffic is heavy, though it can be, but because the landscape demands that you stop. The road climbs from the valley floor at Lake McDonald through dense cedar forest, past waterfalls, across alpine meadows, and over Logan Pass at 6,646 feet, with views of hanging glaciers, thousand-foot rock faces, and the particular quality of high-altitude light that makes mountain photography look like overprocessed images even in person.

The road was completed in 1932 and is itself a feat of engineering that merits attention. The narrow two-lane road was carved into cliff faces in sections where no other alignment was possible, with the outboard lane extending over drops of hundreds of feet with only a low stone wall between the car and the void. Vehicles over 21 feet in length are prohibited on the central section. The Gardner Wall section, where the road traverses a near-vertical cliff face high above the valley, is the stretch that passengers tend to grip the door handle through, regardless of their normal attitude toward heights.

The road is typically open from late June to mid-October, with the exact dates varying by snowpack. The park's popularity has necessitated a timed entry permit system for private vehicles during peak season — check the National Park Service website for current requirements before arrival. The best strategy is to drive the road at dawn, before the day-use permits have filled and before the tour buses arrive at Logan Pass. The light at 6am on a clear July morning at Logan Pass, with the peaks above catching the first sun and the valley still in shadow below, is the kind of thing people describe years afterward.

Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia and North Carolina

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The Blue Ridge Parkway runs 469 miles from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, following the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains through terrain that is among the most beautiful in the eastern United States. It was designed specifically as a scenic drive — no commercial vehicles, no billboards, no intersections with grade crossings — and that design intention, executed over a construction period that ran from 1935 to 1987, produces a road that is as close as the American highway system comes to a work of landscape architecture.

The parkway has no entrance fee and no permit requirements. It passes through farmland, forest, and open ridgeline, with overlooks positioned at intervals that give views east over the Virginia Piedmont and west into the Appalachian valleys, depending on which side of the ridge the road is on. Mabry Mill, near Meadows of Dan in Virginia — a restored 19th-century grist mill beside a pond, photographed in autumn so frequently that it appears in every collection of American landscape photography — is the most visited single stop on the parkway, and genuinely worth the stop even accounting for the crowds.

The fall color season — mid-October in the northern Virginia sections, late October in the North Carolina sections — is the peak period, when the hardwood forest turns amber and red and the views from the ridge are defined by the color rather than the haze that limits visibility in summer. Allow four to five days for the full parkway at a pace that permits stops; three days is achievable but leaves little time for the hiking trails that access terrain the road cannot reach.

The southern terminus near Asheville, North Carolina, gives access to one of the most interesting small cities in the South — Asheville's food scene, music culture, and proximity to the Smokies make it an excellent base for the southern end of the parkway.

Route 66, Illinois to California

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Route 66 — the original "Main Street of America," running 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica — is no longer a functional highway in most of its length. It was decommissioned as a U.S. highway in 1985, replaced by the interstate system that made it obsolete. What remains is a patchwork of historic alignments — some well-maintained, some crumbling, some disappearing into the desert — and a mythology so powerful that the road attracts a specific category of traveler who is not driving from Chicago to Los Angeles but driving Route 66 as a thing in itself.

The mythology is partly earned. The route passes through a cross-section of American landscape and culture — the Illinois flat lands, the Missouri Ozarks, the Oklahoma plains, the Texas Panhandle, the New Mexico high desert, the Arizona plateaus and the Painted Desert, the Mojave Desert — in a sequence that feels like a compressed America. The towns along the route were built for the road and declined when the interstate bypassed them; many are caught in a specific period of American vernacular architecture — the motor court, the neon diner sign, the drive-in — that has been preserved partly by decline and partly by........

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