Road Trips
The ridge line and the coast road
6 collections · 64 patches
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Blue Ridge Parkway
America’s most-visited stretch of scenic road: 469 miles of Appalachian ridge line linking Shenandoah to the Great Smokies.
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Pacific Coast Highway
California State Route 1 — the cliff-edge drive from the redwoods north of San Francisco to the beaches of San Diego.
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Great River Road
Two thousand miles down the spine of the country, following the Mississippi from the headwaters at Lake Itasca — narrow enough to walk across on stepping stones — through Minneapolis, past a pre-Columbian city larger than London was at the time, under the Gateway Arch, along Beale Street, and into New Orleans. Eleven stops, ten states of river.
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Overseas Highway
US-1 from Miami to Key West, hopping the Florida Keys one bridge at a time on the bones of Henry Flagler's Overseas Railroad — an undertaking called impossible until it opened in 1912, and destroyed by a single hurricane in 1935. Eleven stops from the Art Deco District to the last buoy on the continent, by way of the first undersea park in the country and the only place on earth the Key deer lives.
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Texas Hill Country
The hundred miles between Austin and San Antonio taken at the pace the hills deserve: a swimming hole under a collapsed cavern roof, a river coming down limestone steps, a president's ranch, a German market town founded in 1846, a billion-year-old granite dome that creaks as it cools, and two dance halls older than most of the roads between them.
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Natchez Trace Parkway
Four hundred and forty-four miles from Natchez to Nashville along a route worn first by animals, then by the Natchez and Chickasaw, then by boatmen walking home upriver after selling their flatboats for lumber. No commercial traffic, no billboards, and no traffic lights on any of it. Eleven stops from an eight-acre ceremonial mound to the columns of a burned mansion, by way of the house Elvis was born in.
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