The best road trips aren’t just scenic roads you happen to drive down — they’re drives worth building an entire trip around, where the road itself is the destination. The United States has more of these than almost anywhere, from coastal cliffs to alpine passes to desert two-lanes. What follows is ten of them, chosen for variety across the country and for the quality of the driving, not just the scenery at the end.
Because a great drive you can’t actually access isn’t much use, we’ve included the practical details that matter for planning each one: how long it is, when it’s open, and any restrictions. Two of these are seasonal and closed for much of the year; one has a strict vehicle-length limit; one is a former highway you assemble yourself. Once you’ve picked one, our guide to planning a road trip turns it into a full itinerary.
1. Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1), California
California’s Highway 1 through Big Sur is the drive most people picture first, and for good reason: it threads along cliffs above the Pacific, past the arched Bixby Creek Bridge and empty coves, with the ocean on one side and mountains on the other. After a long closure from the Regent’s Slide, the road reopened end to end in January 2026, restoring the full run through Big Sur. It’s worth checking current conditions before you go — sections still see rolling repairs and one-way traffic controls after winter storms — but the iconic stretch is drivable again.
2. Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia and North Carolina
The Blue Ridge Parkway is 469 miles of deliberately slow driving through the Appalachian highlands, linking Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. There are no billboards and no commercial trucks — they’re not permitted — and the speed limit tops out at 45 miles per hour. That’s the point: this is a road designed for the drive itself, best taken over several days with stops at overlooks and trailheads rather than rushed.
3. Going-to-the-Sun Road, Montana
This roughly 50-mile road crosses Glacier National Park over the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, and it’s one of the most dramatic mountain drives in the country. It’s also strictly seasonal: the full road only opens once crews clear the snow, typically between mid-June and early July, and closes again in autumn — in 2026 it opened fully on June 22. Vehicles longer than 21 feet or wider than 8 feet are prohibited on the central section, so plan your vehicle accordingly and check the park’s opening status before building a trip around it.
4. Overseas Highway (US-1), Florida Keys
The Overseas Highway runs 113 miles from the Florida mainland out to Key West, hopping across the islands on 42 bridges — including the famous Seven Mile Bridge — with open ocean on both sides. It’s a genuinely unusual driving experience, a highway that spends much of its length out over the water. The drive is short enough to do in a day but rewards a slower pace, stopping at the Keys along the way rather than racing to the end.
5. Route 66, Chicago to Santa Monica
The most storied American road trip is also the most demanding to plan, because Route 66 hasn’t been an official highway since 1985 — you assemble it from surviving “Historic Route 66” alignments across eight states, 2,448 miles from Chicago to the California coast. With 2026 marking its centennial, it’s having a moment. It deserves its own preparation, which is why we’ve written a separate Route 66 planning guide; treat it as a two- to three-week undertaking rather than a casual drive.
6. Beartooth Highway (US-212), Montana and Wyoming
The Beartooth Highway climbs 68.7 miles between Red Lodge, Montana, and Cooke City, near Yellowstone’s northeast entrance, cresting at Beartooth Pass at 10,947 feet. The switchbacks and the high-alpine scenery make it one of the finest mountain drives in the country — and one of the shortest seasons. It’s generally open only from around Memorial Day weekend to mid-October, weather permitting, with temporary closures possible even in summer, so it’s strictly a warm-season plan.
7. Hana Highway, Maui, Hawaii
The Road to Hana is proof that a drive can be the whole point. Around 64 miles of Hawaii’s Route 360 winds along Maui’s eastern coast through rainforest, past waterfalls and black-sand beaches, crossing 59 bridges — 46 of them a single lane wide — around some 620 curves. It takes far longer than the mileage suggests and demands patient, attentive driving, which is exactly why it’s best treated as a full day’s experience rather than a route to somewhere else.
8. Great River Road, along the Mississippi
The Great River Road follows the Mississippi River for about 3,000 miles through 10 states, from the headwaters in Minnesota down to the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana. Nobody drives all of it on one trip, and that’s fine — it’s designed to be sampled. Pick a stretch that suits your time, whether the bluffs of the upper river in Minnesota and Wisconsin or the Delta country of the Deep South, and you get river towns, history, and changing landscape at whatever length you choose.
9. Scenic Byway 12, Utah
Utah’s Scenic Byway 12 packs an enormous amount into about 124 miles, connecting Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef national parks through some of the most surreal red-rock country in the Southwest. Unlike the seasonal mountain roads, it’s paved and open year-round, which makes it one of the more flexible drives on this list. The scenery shifts constantly — canyons, slickrock, forested plateaus — and the parks at either end make it easy to build a longer trip around.
10. Park Loop Road, Acadia National Park, Maine
At 27 miles, Acadia’s Park Loop Road is the shortest drive here, and a reminder that a great road trip doesn’t have to be long. It runs mostly one-way, clockwise, around the eastern side of Mount Desert Island past rocky Atlantic shoreline, with a spur road climbing Cadillac Mountain — the first place to see sunrise in the country for part of the year. It’s an easy day’s loop that works as a trip of its own or the centerpiece of a longer New England drive.
Turning a drive into a trip
Picking the road is the fun part; the planning is what makes it happen. Once you’ve chosen one of these, the process is the same for all of them: set a realistic length, map the route around the stops you care about, and be honest about seasons and access — several of these drives are simply closed for part of the year. Build the actual route in Google Maps to get real distances, and work through the rest with our step-by-step road trip planning guide.