Best Road Trips in America

Route 66

The Mother Road is less a highway than a national mixtape of neon motels, jackrabbit billboards, and dusty diners strung from Chicago to Santa Monica, and rolling into the Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo to find spray-painted cars nose-down in a wheat field still feels like stumbling onto America's id. It's not the most scenic drive in this ranking, but it invented the American road trip as mythology, and every other list owes it a debt.},{

Approx. Length: 2,450 miSuggested Duration: 10-14 daysScenery: 8/10Best Season: Spring/Fall

added by IJR

Blue Ridge Parkway

Four hundred and sixty-nine miles of Appalachian ridgeline unspool with almost no commercial clutter, and in October the hardwoods ignite into a fifty-mile-wide wall of red and gold that stops traffic at every overlook. It's the most meditative entry here, a slow-motion drive designed in the 1930s purely for the pleasure of looking, which is exactly why it belongs near the top.

Approx. Length: 469 miSuggested Duration: 3-5 daysScenery: 9/10Best Season: Fall

added by IJRBlue Ridge Parkway

Going-to-the-Sun Road

Fifty miles through Glacier National Park climax at Logan Pass, where the road clings to a sheer wall above Weeping Wall and mountain goats saunter past your bumper like it's their driveway. It's only open a few months a year because the snow demands it, and that fleeting window is exactly what makes crossing the Continental Divide here feel like an event rather than a commute.

Approx. Length: 50 miSuggested Duration: 1-2 daysScenery: 9.5/10Best Season: Summer

added by IJRGoing-to-the-Sun Road

Beartooth Highway

Charles Kuralt called it the most beautiful drive in America, and switchbacking up to nearly 11,000 feet through alpine tundra and hairpin turns above Yellowstone's northeast entrance, it's hard to argue — you're driving through scenery that looks lifted from the Alps, snowbanks lingering into July. It's short, brutal in the best way, and utterly essential for anyone who thinks they've seen mountain roads.

Approx. Length: 68 miSuggested Duration: 1 dayScenery: 9/10Best Season: Summer

added by IJR

Overseas Highway (Florida Keys)

US-1 hopscotches across 42 bridges and turquoise water for 113 miles, and crossing the Seven Mile Bridge with nothing but ocean on either side is the closest a car ride gets to walking on water. It swaps mountains for horizon, trading drama for a hypnotic, sunburned romance that ends, correctly, at a bar in Key West.

Approx. Length: 113 miSuggested Duration: 2-3 daysScenery: 9/10Best Season: Winter

added by IJRin 2 rankings

Pacific Coast Highway (CA-1)

From Malibu's surf breaks to the fog-wrapped cliffs above Mendocino, CA-1 is the drive against which all coastal routes are measured, its guardrail-optional curves above the Pacific delivering equal parts terror and rapture. The stretch through Big Sur alone — Bixby Bridge arcing over a canyon straight into the sea — is so iconic it's basically shorthand for 'California dream,' and that's before you've even reached Hearst Castle.

Approx. Length: 650 miSuggested Duration: 5-7 daysScenery: 9.5/10Best Season: Spring/Fall

added by IJR

Highway 1 to Big Sur

Carving out the single most photographed 90 miles of the California coast, this stretch narrows PCH down to its purest essence: redwoods dropping straight into surf, McWay Falls tumbling onto a private beach you can't reach, and Nepenthe's clifftop patio waiting at the end like a reward. It earns its own slot separate from the full PCH because Big Sur isn't a highlight of a road trip — it is one, complete unto itself.

Approx. Length: 90 miSuggested Duration: 1-2 daysScenery: 9.5/10Best Season: Spring/Fall

added by IJR

Great River Road (Mississippi River)

Tracing the Mississippi for over 2,000 miles from Minnesota headwaters to the Louisiana delta, this route is less a single drive than a slow cultural immersion — blues bars in Clarksdale, plantation ghosts near Natchez, river towns that gave America jazz and barbecue and Twain. It's sprawling and uneven by design, but no other road connects so much of the country's history to the water that built it.

Approx. Length: 3,000 miSuggested Duration: 2-3 weeksScenery: 7.5/10Best Season: Spring/Fall

added by IJR

Utah's Highway 12 Scenic Byway

This 124-mile byway threads a knife-edge ridge called the Hogback where the road narrows to barely two lanes with thousand-foot drop-offs on both sides, then plunges through slickrock canyons connecting Bryce Canyon to Capitol Reef. It's the most underrated drive in the Southwest — otherworldly red rock without the crowds of its famous neighbors.

Approx. Length: 124 miSuggested Duration: 2-3 daysScenery: 9/10Best Season: Spring/Fall

added by IJR

Grand Circle Road Trip (Southwest National Parks)

Looping through Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Arches, Canyonlands, and the Grand Canyon, this thousand-mile circuit is basically a greatest-hits tour of Earth's geology, with Monument Valley's buttes providing the money shot every Western needed. No single road trip in America packs in more jaw-drop-per-mile national park real estate, which is exactly why it's worth the week it demands.

Approx. Length: 1,200 miSuggested Duration: 10-14 daysScenery: 9.5/10Best Season: Spring/Fall

added by IJR

Cabot Trail (Cape Breton, though partly Canada context)

Wrapping around Cape Breton's highlands where the Appalachians finally meet the Atlantic, the Cabot Trail delivers whale-watching pullouts, Acadian fishing villages, and a fall foliage display that rivals New England's without the crowds. It's the honorary international guest on this list, but its inclusion is earned — few roads anywhere combine coastal cliffs and mountain switchbacks this dramatically.

Approx. Length: 185 miSuggested Duration: 2-3 daysScenery: 8.5/10Best Season: Summer/Fall

added by IJR

Interstate 90 Coast-to-Coast

America's longest interstate runs from Seattle to Boston, and while much of it is unglamorous slab concrete, the stretch through Montana's Big Sky country and South Dakota's Badlands proves that even a workhorse highway can deliver Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills as roadside attractions. It's on this list not for elegance but for scale — this is the drive that actually gets you across the whole country.

Approx. Length: 3,020 miSuggested Duration: 2-3 weeksScenery: 7/10Best Season: Summer

added by IJR

Blues Highway (Highway 61)

Running from New Orleans to Memphis through the Mississippi Delta, Highway 61 is a pilgrimage route disguised as a road, passing the crossroads in Clarksdale where legend says Robert Johnson sold his soul. The scenery is flat cotton fields and shotgun shacks, but the cultural voltage — this is the road that birthed the blues and rock and roll — makes it one of the most important drives in the country.

Approx. Length: 220 miSuggested Duration: 2-3 daysScenery: 7/10Best Season: Spring/Fall

added by IJR

Hana Highway (Maui)

620 curves and 59 bridges through waterfalls and rainforest to reach the remote town of Hana.

Approx. Length: 64 miSuggested Duration: 1-2 daysScenery: 9.5/10Best Season: Year-round

added by IJR

Oregon Coast Highway (US-101)

Sea stacks rise out of the fog at Cannon Beach, and the entire 101 delivers a nonstop parade of dramatic headlands, lighthouses, and public beaches Oregon smartly kept open to everyone. It's PCH's moodier, less crowded cousin — colder, wilder, and arguably more atmospheric for it.

Approx. Length: 363 miSuggested Duration: 3-5 daysScenery: 9/10Best Season: Summer

added by IJR

Million Dollar Highway (Colorado)

A vertigo-inducing stretch of US-550 through the San Juan Mountains' old mining towns.

Approx. Length: 25 miSuggested Duration: 1 dayScenery: 9/10Best Season: Summer/Fall

added by IJR

New England Fall Foliage Loop

Stitching together Vermont's Route 100, New Hampshire's Kancamagus Highway, and Maine's coastal roads, this loop times a drive to nature's own calendar, when maples go crimson and covered bridges look like they were built for postcards. It's the road trip that only exists for about three weeks a year, which is precisely what makes chasing it feel urgent and worth the crowds.

Approx. Length: 500 miSuggested Duration: 5-7 daysScenery: 9/10Best Season: Fall

added by IJR

Loneliest Road (US-50, Nevada)

Life magazine dubbed it 'the loneliest road in America' and Nevada leaned in, printing survival guides for the stretch across the Great Basin's empty sagebrush valleys and ghost towns. It's the anti-scenic-drive scenic drive — the appeal is existential solitude, hundreds of miles where you might not see another car, and that stark beauty has its own strange pull.

Approx. Length: 409 miSuggested Duration: 1-2 daysScenery: 7.5/10Best Season: Spring/Fall

added by IJR

Texas Hill Country Loop

Looping through Fredericksburg's German bakeries, Luckenbach's honky-tonk dance floors, and hillsides that erupt in bluebonnets every April, this drive proves Texas has a gentler side hiding between the ranches. It's less about jaw-dropping vistas than small-town charm and wildflower season timing, earning its spot as the most underrated regional loop in the country.

Approx. Length: 250 miSuggested Duration: 2-3 daysScenery: 7.5/10Best Season: Spring

added by IJR