The Five Best USA Road Trips
The Travel Pages recommends its five best USA road trips, including the Pacific Coast Highway, the Alaska Highway, and of course Route 66.
Photo (c) Mike Gerrard
From The Grapes of Wrath to Little Miss Sunshine, from Bonnie and Clyde to Thelma and Louise, cinema audiences can’t get enough of American road trip movies. If it’s books that inspire you then how about On the Road, Travels with Charley, or Blue Highways, not to mention titles as diverse as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Lost Continent?
Little wonder, then, that fly-drive holidays are among the most popular ways for visitors to want to see America. It helps that Americans love road trips too, which has led to a network of cheap but perfectly good motels and hotels, budget (but often brilliant) diners, and quirky roadside attractions – the world’s largest spinach can, anyone?
Throw in cheap gas and dozens of car rental firms competing for your custom, and an American road trip can prove to be a surprisingly affordable experience.
Where to choose, though? The USA has almost 50,000 miles of Interstate – and that’s just the boring fast roads, the American equivalent of motorways. Throw in the back roads, the black tops, the freeways, the turnpikes, the scenic byways and the regular highways, and the choice of where to go can be bewildering.
We’ve been lucky enough to travel thousands of miles in the USA on road trips, from Alaska to Florida. We’ve driven through blizzards in Idaho, thunderstorms in Arizona, been snowed in in Wyoming, and sweltered in Alabama.
Here, then, is our personal list of the five best USA road trips, in no particular order. How you do it is up to you as that’s another choice to make: do you want to travel on a roaring Harley Davidson, in a dawdling motorhome, or go topless in California – in a convertible, that is?
Our Five Best USA Road Trips
1) The Pacific Coast Highway
This west coast road has been called the best free attraction in America, and having driven it several times for our website, Pacific Coast Highway Travel, we can’t argue with that.
Most people drive the section between Los Angeles and San Francisco, though if you’ve got enough time (say at least three weeks) you can drive the whole stunning west coast. That takes you from the Mexico border through California, Oregon and Washington, to the Canadian border north of Seattle.
Even if you only do the LA-San Francisco stretch, you’ll still see the legendarily beautiful Big Sur coast, one of the most dramatic stretches of coast you’ll find anywhere in the world. Here the mountains come pushing right up against the ocean, with the road pushed through inbetween – though it can be blocked after winter storms, making for a long detour. Go between spring and autumn, though, and you’ll have the drive of your life.
2) The Alaska Highway
Photo (c) Mike Gerrard
Drive north from the US border through Canada’s British Columbia and you’ll come to Dawson Creek. Here’s the start of the 1700-mile Alaska Highway, which was built in an incredible eight months of activity in 1942, to connect Alaska to the lower 48 states. It’s an achievement to be proud of, and we’re proud that Donna’s grandfather was one of those workers, and we have some lovely photos of him and his unit out there in Alaska.
This drive will take you through some of the most breathtaking scenery in North America, including the Yukon, and then around the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which contains the second-highest mountain in North America. Needless to say, the scenery will blow you away. We’ve only driven part of the highway, but the Alaska scenery was amongst the most magnificent we’ve seen anywhere in the world.
3) Route 66
Photo of The Travel Pages’ Donna Dailey (c) Mike Gerrard
Route 66 is the big one, of course, the ultimate US road trip, almost 2,500 miles of it, from Chicago to Los Angeles. Most people drive it in that direction, heading away from the colder, northern weather, and building up to crossing the Rocky Mountains before reaching the promised land of California. In fact Route 66 meets the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, with a plaque marking the spot. For Americans it’s more than just a road, though They call it the Main Street of America, the Mother Road, as it took settlers and other hopefuls towards a brighter future in the golden west.
4) US Route 1: the East Coast
Route 1 is the Pacific Coast Highway of the east coast, running all the way from the Canadian border with Maine to the end of the Florida Keys, where you run out of road. It’s almost 2400 miles and takes in – or bypasses, if you prefer – several of America’s major cities including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Miami. The last stretch is also called the Overseas Highway (American roads often have several different names and/or numbers). This skims the ocean and links the various islands that make up the Florida Keys, ending in Key West.
5) The Great River Road
This isn’t a road created by history or need, it’s an early form of tourism marketing – but it is still a fantastic drive. It runs for about 2000 miles following the course of the Mississippi River as it meanders from Minnesota in the north all the way to the hot and steamy Mississippi Delta. Along the way you’ll pass through ten different US states and have chance to visit cities like Memphis and New Orleans.
