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Get your motor running
Road trip resources and a few of Reid's favorite road trips across the United States
Motorcycles en route to the Sturgis Rally roar past Devils Tower in Wyoming.
How many perfectly good road meals have I wasted on a McBurger and fries when an authentic Maryland crab shack was just a few miles down the road? How often have I spent good money on a commercial campground when free spots in the state park stood empty?
When have I ignorantly stuck to the interstate when the nearby stretch of old state road wound through a particularly pretty collection of countryside, village squares, and historical sites?
Reid's road trips
• Southern Utah
• Mid-Coast Maine
• Mississippi Delta Blues
• The Olympic Peninsula
In short, how many times have I expected my car somehow to steer its way magically onto the American byways chronicled by Steinbeck (Travels with Charley), Least-Heat Moon (Blue Highways), or even Kerouac (On the Road) and ended up instead in National Lampoon's Vacation?
Don’t spend the spring dreaming of the ultimate summer road trip only to end up numbing your bum on endless hours of ruler-straight highways shooting past carbon-copy exits barnacled with identical fast food outlets, mega gas stations, and chain hotels.
Unless you have unlimited time—and pledge to street clear of the Interstate system entirely—making the most out of any road trip requires some advance planning and on-the-road resources...beyond a sheaf of good maps (which are free from your local AAA; www.aaa.com).
Here are some resources that help you find the best—not just the fastest—routes, what to expect along the way, and when it's wise to get out of the car to discover the real America during this summer.
Beyond the Blue Signs
The Road Trip Bookshelf
GUIDEBOOKS:
FUN & INSPIRATION:
Let's start with a few books to make even the Interstate more interesting.
Instead of debating the eternal question—Should we stop here or drive on to the next exit?—end the mystery of what lies around the bend with Explore the Next Exit ($14.95, www.thenextexit.com), a bland but complete directory reproducing the gas, food, and lodging listings on those blue signs for the entire Interstate system. ("Look, honey: just 130 miles to another Stuckey's!")
The charmingly handcrafted series from Mile Oak Publishing is even better, though far more limited in scope—the only titles are Drive I-95 ($23.95, or $21.55 at B&N, www.drivei-95.com), Along I-75 ($24.95, or $17.96 at B&N, www.i75online.com), and Along Florida's Expressways ($24.95, or $22.45 at B&N, www.flonline.info).
In addition to briefs on the usual gas, food, and lodging at or near each exit (plus sights, to break up the drive's monotony), these spiral-bound books are crammed with highway maps (with useful side-roads for bypassing traffic), thoughtful details like the a chart of local radio stations (cruelly ignoring NPR), entertaining facts and history about the places you're whizzing past (you just think it's a boring tunnel in Baltimore; you're actually passing right under the site of the Revolutionary War battle during which Francis Scott Key composed the Star Spangled Banner), and best of all: great non-chain eating options, often just a mile or two from the exit.
Christmas for me has always meant at least two days of sheer I-95 monotony between family members in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, a trip enlivened in recent years by this book's steering me that crab shack on the Chesapeake—not to mention the world's greatest pie in a forgotten whistlestop village in North Carolina.
Speaking of which, also check out Jane and Michael Stern's Road Food ($21.95, or $15.80 at B&N, www.roadfood.com) for a state-by-state guide featuring a selection of excellent, non-chain nosh on the road.
If even the Motel-6 is beyond your budget, or it's just a nice night for a little car camping, carry a copy of Don Wright's Free Campgrounds ($18.95, or $17.05 at B&N), with both Eastern and Western editions—though the title fudges a bit, as any campsite under $12 is listed.
(This is not to be confused with www.freecampgrounds.com, which lists free spots to park an RV; for more on the subject of free campgrounds, see here.)
The Road Already Taken
Random Roadtrip Resources
Info galore: The Tourism Offices Worldwide Directory (www.towd.com) is your links gateway to state and local tourism offices and chambers of commerce Web sites across North America.
National playgrounds: Visit www.nps.gov for information on all the National Parks (and National Monuments and other federal lands). A ton of info, though often poorly organized in a bloody-minded database format.
Getting online: No data plan for your iPhone? Pop into a Panera (www.panerabread.com) for lunch and cadge some free WiFi. No laptop? No problem; public libraries usually offer a few free terminals.
Books-on-tap & bathrooms: The Cracker Barrel chain (www.crackerbarrel.com) is always located right at the exit, offers clean bathrooms, penny candy, and buy-and-return audiobook "rentals" for long hauls. Also: breakfast all day (the fried apples are phenomenal).
Maps, breakdowns, & discounts: AAA (www.aaa.com) is still the king for excellent free state-by-state maps (though I'm also a big fan of the insanely detailed—and, sadly, expensive—DeLorme map books), and they offer members free breakdown assistance across the nation—which, if you need it, will be worth a decade of membership fees. Also—though no one ever bothers to check your card—AAA membership gets you modest discounts at most hotels and motels.
If you like your road trips in pre-approved segments, several books, magazines, and Web sites detail drives carefully constructed to link fascinating sights and towns along some of the country's most scenic stretches of road.
The most comprehensive book is Jamie Jensen's Road Trip USA, broken down into 11 major routes, including Route 66, the Oregon Trail, and the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. It is conveniently available both in book ($29.95, or $21.56 at B&N) and Internet (www.roadtripusa.com) form.
The Harvard students at Let's Go have appropriated a similar formula as the 10,000-plus-page Let's Go Roadtripping USA ($24.99, or $22.49 at B&N, www.letsgo.com), with a nice emphasis on the quirky and fun, but services a bit too low-end for some (lots of backpacker hostels and cheap cafeterias).
Insight Guides' United States: On the Road ($23.95, or $21.55 at B&N, www.insightguides.com) is another admirable attempt to cram the whole country into one guide—though I find their more detailed regional offshoot titles a bit more useful.
There's also an excellent Website (no print version) called Roadtripamerica.com.
Prefer your road trip guides in bite-sized chunks rather than epic cross-country routes? Well, beyond a few of my own treasured Road Trips that I have posted on this site (one for each corner of the country: Southern Utah, Mid-Coast Maine, the Missispppi Delta, and Washington's Olympic Peninsula), try the regular Road Trip features run by several travel magazines and collected on their Web sites: Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel (www.budgettravel.com, under Trip Ideas—disclaimer: I wrote some of them), National Geographic Adventure (adventure.nationalgeographic.com, under Features), and Travel + Leisure (www.travelandleisure.com, under Departments > Driving).
The badlands on the Pine Ridge Oglala Reservation in South Dakota.
I'd hate to open the Pandora's box of specialty guides to the U.S.A.—there are dozens of them—but a few standouts include the award-wining, but unfortunately out-of-print, Bradt's Eccentric America ($18.95, or $7.35 used at B&N, www.eccentricamerica.com), the excellent but also out-of-print National Geographic Guide to America's Hidden Corners ($25, or $1.99 used from B&N) and its more recent and (yay!) in-print cousin National Geographic Guide to Scenic Highways and Byways ($25, or $18 at B&N), and that long-standing paean to factory tours, Watch it Made in the U.S.A. ($21.95, or $19.75 at B&N, www.factorytour.com).
Last but certainly not least are the official (designated by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation) America's Byways, 125 stretches of distinctive, scenic, or historic road from the 1,707-mile Great River Road that parallels the mighty Mississippi to the 4.5-mile Las Vegas Strip (www.byways.org). 
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This article was last updated in April 2008. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998–2010 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
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