Philadelphia has the shortest average drive to a genuinely different landscape of any large city on the east coast. A beach is ninety minutes away, Amish farmland an hour, and mountains two, which means the deciding factor is almost never distance but which weekend you pick. The real constraint driving out of Philadelphia is other […]

Minneapolis has the shortest usable road-trip season of any large American city and one of the best payoffs inside it. Lake Superior's north shore, the Boundary Waters and a national park reachable only by boat all sit within five hours, and most of them work properly for about four months. The organising fact here is

Atlanta is within two hours of the southern end of the Appalachians and within five of two different coastlines, which is an unusual range for one city. The eight drives below are ordered by distance, and the two things most likely to disrupt them are Friday outbound traffic and a ferry with a hard passenger

Texas is large enough that a road trip from Dallas can mean two hours or nine, and the difference matters more here than in most places because the state's best national park is 570 miles away. The eight routes below are ordered by distance, with the seasons that make each one bearable. Two things govern

Nashville sits within a day's drive of the most visited national park in the country, a 444-mile parkway with no advertising on it, and the Mississippi Delta. The eight drives below are ordered by distance, and the one thing that most often ruins them is October weekend traffic in the Smokies. Two features shape driving

Seattle is boxed in by water and mountains, which is what makes the driving good and the logistics fiddly. Three of the routes below involve a ferry or a border, one crosses a highway that closes for roughly half the year, and two enter parks that have used timed-entry systems in recent seasons. The pattern

Phoenix is the rare city where the best road-trip season is winter and the worst is summer. Every route below gains elevation, which is the point: from a low desert at over a hundred degrees in July you can be in pine forest in two hours and on a canyon rim in three and a

Denver has the best road-trip geography of any large American city, and also the most rules. Two of the eight drives below run over passes that close for roughly half the year, two enter parks that have used timed-entry reservations in recent seasons, and one is a loop most people attempt with too few nights.

Chicago sits at the bottom of a lake with good roads running in every direction, which means the honest answer to where to drive depends less on distance than on season. Two of the eight routes below are best in April, three peak in October, and one is genuinely better in winter. The city's real

Detroit is one of the better American cities to drive out of: two Great Lakes shorelines are inside half a day, a car-free island sits four and a half hours north, and a second country starts on the far side of the river. The eight drives below are sorted by how far they take you.