Road Trip Destinations in the USA
I'm a huge fan of road trips . I would much rather drive anywhere than fly, take a boat, or go by train. I've gone on cross country road trips three times from east coast to west coast and back, and a few more times along each seaboard. Just thinking about it now makes me want to turn off the computer and go, come to think of it.
I've also written about some of the road trips I've taken on the web. Each page I've written documents some of the places that I've been, and includes detailed photos of each place. The pages, in no specific order, are:
This was my first road trip page that I made. It received lens of the day on Squidoo shortly after I published it, which was a great confidence booster for sharing my road trip experiences. This page contains a general overview of the USA's major attractions via road trip, as much as I could fit onto one page anyway. It remains today one of the longest lenses I've created, but there is however, a table of contents in the beginning to navigate throughout the lens. You can find useful tips on planning your next road trip, like what to pack, things to think about when booking your hotel, and how to save money while on the road.
Planning a US Road Trip: The Southern Route
This page is one of my top traffic pages online, with over 21,000 hits to date so far. The southern route was just part of one of my road trips in 2005, but includes some of USA's most well known states and cities. This route is I-10, which runs from Jacksonville, Florida, to Los Angeles, California. The road itself isn't all that spectacular, except for the fact that it runs around 2,417 miles long. According to Google Maps, the trip takes about 1 day and 13 hours. The cities you'll pass through include Mobile, New Orleans (you'll be very close), Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Tucson, Phoenix, Palm Springs , and Los Angeles. The best things along this route are actually near I-10, not on it, like Big Bend National Park, Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, the Florida Panhandle's coastline, and the vibrant French Quarter of New Orleans.
Realistically, this trip should take you around 5-7 days, depending on how much time you'd like to spend in each place. We decided to zip through Texas as quickly as possible to get to Arizona, which was one of the places we really wanted to see. In one day, we drove from New Orleans to Sonora, Texas, which was 12 hours and 712 miles. On our next trip, we had time to stop and smell the roses in San Antonio, my favorite city in Texas. You can also plan an alternate route along I-40, which stops along more of the midwestern states.
There is no official place called "The Grand Circle," but the terms has been circulating around in the past few years to be associated with a circular area of the southwest, including the Four Courners and several noteable National Parks. I've been to most of these destinations, but didn't travel in the circular shape as seen on the Grand Circle lens. If you wanted to plan a Grand Circle road trip, you could fly into one of the cities on the perimeter of the circle, like Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Phoenix, Las Vegas, or even Denver if you don't mind driving more. A trip to the destinations within the Grand Circle will take approximately a week to ten days. Along the way, you'll experience the Narrows of Zion National Park , gaze upon the ancient hoodoos of Bryce Canyon , and walk alongside mind boggling sandstone creations in Arches National Park -- and those are just three of the parks in Utah. The most remote region of the Grand Circle (it's all remote, really) is the Four Courners region. There are no major interstates, highways, cities, or even large towns anywhere closeby. The area includes Monument Valley , an area you've probably seen in westerns and in car commercials, as well as the Valley fo the Gods, and the Four Corners monument itself.
* This one feels like I'm cheating, since I live in New England. The first road trip I ever planned out was to the six states of New England, along with New York. A New England road trip might not be as long as someplace like the Grand Circle, but there are far more towns, parks, islands, and neighborhoods to explore. Each state has its own character and is individual from the other states around it. Vermont might be right next to Massachusetts, but the two states couldn't be any further apart in appeal. Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut and Rhode Island each have their own distinct coastline, food traditions, sports team allegiances, and dialects.
Utah is part of the Grand Circle that I wrote about above, but really deserves its own spot in road tripdom. The state has some incredible variations from north to south, becoming cooler as you head up the mountains of Zion, Salt Lake City, and Bryce Canyon, but becoming deadly hot in Arches, Bryce Canyon, and Canyonlands.
Is Utah the most road trip friendly state in the country? While the roads aren't curvacious or challenging like the cliff hugging curves of California, or skinny like the New England backroads, they're just as impressive. I can't think of anywhere else in the country that the road actually extends to the horizon and beyond with such a beautiful backdrop.
The Northern Route includes some New England destinations like Boston , extends all the way across the northernmost part of the USA, through Chicago, the Continental Divide, and to Washington State. Largely, this route is I-90, which runs from Boston to South Dakota. Even more so than the southern route, the northern route really gives a sense of the enormity of the United States. Some of the sights include Upper New York State, western Massachusetts, Ohio, the rural midwest, Badlands National Park (where the terrain really starts to get different), Mount Rushmore, and a side trip to Yellowstone if you have time. Eventually, the route curves further north to Washington State, to which you can plan your own trip to California or Oregon.
Have a favorite road trip route of your own? You can share it here in the comments section below!
Photo credits: Paraflyer on flickr for the Vermont photo, and Tom Saint for the Sonoran desert photo.
