On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957
When this semi-autobiographical work was published, the New York Timeshailed it as the “most important utterance” by anyone from the Beat Generation. Though he changed the names, the characters in the novel have real life counterparts. Salvatore “Sal” Paradise (Kerouac) from New York City meets Dean Moriarty (fellow beatnik Neal Cassady) on a cross-country journey fueled by drugs, sex and poetry The novel’s protagonists crisscross the United States and venture into Mexico on three separate trips that reveal much about the character of the epic hero, Moriarty, and the narrator.

Travels With Charley John Steinbeck, 1962
Near the end of his career, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover the country he had made a living writing about. With only his French poodle Charley as company, he embarked on a three-month journey across most of the continental United States. On his way, he meets the terse residents of Maine, falls in love with Montana and watches desegregation protests in New Orleans. Although Steinbeck certainly came to his own conclusions on his journey, he respects individual experience: He saw what he saw and knows that anyone else would have seen something different.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceby Robert M. Pirsig, 1974
A deep, philosophical book that masquerades as a simple story of a father-and-son motorcycle trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceis Pirsig’s first foray into philosophy writing. Their motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco is also a trip through Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. His friend, a romantic, lives by the principle of Zen and relies on mechanics to fix his motorcycle. Pirisg, on the other hand, leaves nothing up to chance and knows the ins and outs of maintaining his bike.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, 1982
After losing his wife and job as a professor, William Least Heat-Moon sets out on a soul-searching journey across the United States. He avoids large cities and interstates, choosing to travel only on “blue” highways—so called for their color in the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Along the way, he meets and records conversations with a born-again Christian hitchhiker, an Appalachian log cabin restorer, a Nevada prostitute and a Hopi Native American medical student.

See the entire list of 11 books in the full story. What titles would you add to this collection?

 

Literary New England and Literary California – If you enjoy a good book, you’ll love these dual road trips through the homes of some of America’s greatest writers. Just a few of the places you’ll explore are the transcendental roots of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts; the Hartford home of Mark Twain; the quintessential New England homestead of Robert Frost; the birthplace of John Steinbeck in Salinas, California, and the San Francisco literary hangouts of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other members of the Beat Generation.

 

Journey into the roots of American music – A lot of remarkable music was born in the United States and this two-part road trip enables you to do a pretty thorough job of exploring the roots of jazz, blues, soul, bluegrass, country and rock and roll. Among other destinations, it will take you from the birthplace of jazz in New Orleans to the Mississippi home of the blues, and from the country music capital of Nashville to the Detroit source of the Motown sound.

 

Stargazing the Southwest – A dark sky filled with thousands of glittering stars is one of the most sublime sights in nature. The region from West Texas to Southern California boasts some of the best stargazing locations in the world, and Arizona has more observatories than any other state or country. You can spend your days seeing the sights of the Southwest and your nights enjoying the majesty of the universe.

 

You can read my full story for an overview of more of these journeys, or check out the entire series of road trip articles.

Here, he introduces his journey:

The mixed blessing of America is that anyone with a car can go anywhere. The visible expression of our freedom is that we are a country without roadblocks. And a driver’s license is our identity. My dream, from way back—from high school, when I first heard the name Kerouac—was of driving across the United States. The cross-country trip is the supreme example of the journey as the destination.

Travel is mostly about dreams—dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile place, testing your adaptability, hoping for some sort of revelation. All my traveling life, 40 years of peregrinating Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania, I have thought constantly of home—and especially of the America I had never seen. “I discovered I did not know my own country,” Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, explaining why he hit the road at age 58.

And, later on, contemplates some of the similarities between the U.S. and some other parts of the world that he has visited:

In my life, I had sought out other parts of the world—Patagonia, Assam, the Yangtze; I had not realized that the dramatic desert I had imagined Patagonia to be was visible on my way from Sedona to Santa Fe, that the rolling hills of West Virginia were reminiscent of Assam and that my sight of the Mississippi recalled other great rivers. I’m glad I saw the rest of the world before I drove across America. I have traveled so often in other countries and am so accustomed to other landscapes, I sometimes felt on my trip that I was seeing America, coast to coast, with the eyes of a foreigner, feeling overwhelmed, humbled and grateful.

The whole article may be long for the web, but it’s a good magazine piece and an interesting look at America from a celebrated travel writer.

Amalfi Coast, Italy- The Costiera Amalfitana, or Amalfi Coast, is widely considered Italy’s most scenic stretch of coastline, a landscape of towering bluffs, pastel-hued villages terraced into hillsides, precipitous corniche roads, luxuriant gardens, and expansive vistas over turquoise waters and green-swathed mountains. Deemed by UNESCO “an outstanding example of a Mediterranean landscape, with exceptional cultural and natural scenic values,” the coast was awarded a coveted spot on the World Heritage list in 1997.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts- A drive around Massachusetts’ vintage Cape Cod serves up miles of beaches, restful resort towns—and, yes, lobster and clam shacks. There are capes all along the New England coast, but when anyone talks of “the Cape,” the meaning is immediately clear. This drive takes in virtually all of Cape Cod: the quiet villages along the bay side, the beautifully desolate dunelands of the outer Cape’s national seashore, lively Provincetown, and the busy resorts that face Nantucket Sound.

North Island, New Zealand (Lord of the Rings route) – Boasting some of the most varied and rugged landscapes on Earth, New Zealand has long been a source of adventure. In addition, its eclectic Polynesian and European heritage makes it a remarkable center of culture and history. Given New Zealand’s varied attributes, it is little wonder it was the pick of Kiwi Peter Jackson as the stand-in for Middle-Earth in his film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy.

Hana Highway, Hawaii- A restorative for mind and body, Maui’s Hana coast delivers black-sand beaches, plunging waterfalls—and a doozy of a drive. Peel a fresh mango purchased from a roadside stand, get ukulele music going on the radio, and embark on one of Hawaii’s great drives: the Hana Highway on the island of Maui. On your left will be the azure ocean; on your right, rushing waterfalls, limpid pools, patches of taro plants, and luxuriant jungles of bamboo and fruit trees. But this highway serves up more than beauty: It’s an impressive feat of engineering, dug out of Maui’s precipitous eastern coastline with hand tools. Clinging to the cliffs, it slinks around some 600 curves and across 59 bridges (over half of which are just one lane wide). This serpentine coastal route offers a perfect antidote to the vagaries of mainland winters—and a complete escape from daily life.

Check out the entire article to see the other drives selected by National Geographic Traveler. What other routes would you select?

In fact, though, archaeologists continue to produce evidence that large societies not only inhabited this region, but also built large edifices in the form of mounds that are only now being understood and appreciated. Check out this article for an in-depth tour of some of these sites.

The earthworks left behind by the long vanished civilizations of the Midwest are harder to spot than the pueblos and kivas of Arizona and New Mexico. For a long time many of them were hidden in plain sight or dismissed as little more than heaps of soil. But the more today’s archaeologists learn about the Midwestern mounds, the more intriguing is the picture that emerges from 1,000 or more years ago: a city with thousands of people just a few miles from present-day St. Louis, a 1,348-foot earthen serpent that points to the summer solstice, artifacts made of materials that could only have arrived over lengthy trade routes.

The mound builders lived over a wide area. But on a road trip of a few days in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, you can get a sampling of their work — and, along the way, find some modern-day diversions. Start from St. Louis, which early European settlers called Mound City because of the Indian constructions that were soon flattened to build the modern city.

Next I crashed with a cousin, John, a young professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smart, tense, busy with summer school, he gave me a tour of the neat, green campus, then said, ”I want to show you another part of town.” He drove me a short distance from the university to a road lined with falling-down houses, where African-Americans lived. I had never seen such poverty.

He asked to look at my Greyhound map, and he traced with his finger the route I was taking to Texas. ”Look,” he said, ”when you get to Mississippi, stay on the bus. Don’t get off. Go straight through.” Just a few days earlier three civil-rights workers, two of them white and from the North, had disappeared near Meridian. The word was that they’d been murdered. This was Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Bad things were happening, beatings, burnings. John was afraid the South was going to blow.

After North Carolina the trip was different because I was different, on the alert. In Atlanta, on Peachtree Street — a name I knew from ”Gone With the Wind” — I saw a restaurant with a side window for serving blacks and drinking fountains labeled ”black” and ”white.” I lost my wallet there and slept overnight in the bus station and then later in a park in Montgomery, Ala. A recruiting street preacher found me there, brought me to a soup kitchen breakfast, then gave me the third degree: ”Have you found the Lord? Are you saved?” I honestly didn’t know.

Of course I got off the bus in Mississippi, more than once. In Jackson I wanted to find Eudora Welty, but her name wasn’t in the phone book. By this time lack ofsleep, combined with hot weather, gave the days a kind of hallucinatory looseness. I was at ease on the road for the first time.

I also found this other paragraph interesting, because of the author’s sense that his experience may be difficult to re-create in the contemporary U.S.

I couldn’t know that within the year Malcolm would be dead; that the bombing of North Vietnam, and the anger in response to it, would begin; that Kerouac’s Beat would become a period artifact, replaced temporarily by something called Flower Power. Or that in a new century Americans would stop making quest-journeys, would spiritually stay put, put on weight, wait for the world to come to them.

What do you think? Have Americans become complacent? Have we stopped making quest-journeys?

“Nothing but sagebrush for 130 miles,” said the construction worker in the orange vest who was temporarily blocking U.S. Highway 20 in southeastern Oregon. As the Volvo idled in the midday heat, I looked past her at the landscape – at the dry, slowly rising hills matted with blue-green-purple tufts of hip-high scrub - then down at my map, and was impressed with her precision: For almost exactly 130 miles to the east, south and west, there was indeed nothing but sagebrush. This really was the desert. I shut off the engine and crossed my fingers, hoping the car and I would survive…

These car troubles, which I should have expected in my final week on the road, only deepened my desire to see Oregon’s deserts. I wasn’t drawn simply to their reputed beauty and remoteness, but by their place in American road-trip history. This was, in a way, where the fabled tradition began.

Back in 1903, the automobile was a novelty, expensive and unreliable. And with no gas stations and few paved roads outside of major cities, horses and railroads offered more reliable transport than a creaky chassis powered by a breakdown-prone internal combustion engine.

Which is probably why Horatio Nelson Jackson, a 31-year-old doctor, bet friends at the University Club of San Francisco that he could drive a car from coast to coast. They scoffed. A few days later, Jackson was at the helm of a $3,000, two-cylinder Winton automobile, accompanied by Sewall K. Crocker, a mechanic and chauffeur, and heading east.

The 1940s and 1950s are generally considered the Golden Age of the American road trip, immortalized in Bobby Troup’s song and Jack Kerouac’s book and the actions and memories of adventurous souls like my dad, who roamed the country in his 1951 Ford and chronicled his trips by tracing his routes in blue felt pen on a U.S. map. …

Then came the rise of the interstate system and the chain-store, fast-food culture that sprung up around its edges. Conventional wisdom said these developments sucked a lot of the romance out of the road. And with the rise in cheap airfares and gas prices, the news just kept getting worse for the long-distance road trip. Sure, people still drove from the Pacific to the Atlantic, but they couldn’t help thinking that maybe they’d missed out on a special era.

At least that’s what I thought until not too long ago. Now I think we’re in the midst of the new Golden Age of the American cross-country road trip. …

What solidifies this era as a new Golden Age, though, is that the reemergence of the road has happily coincided with the ability to tell dynamic stories on the Web. Now instead of writing a book like Kerouac or marking those lines in felt-tip on a map, travelers can use video and flash and Google Maps and blogs and audio to interpret what they’ve seen on the road and bring it to life in unexpected ways. In the age of the Web, the road trip has arrived as an artistic statement.

They go on to list several websites dedicated to cross-country trips.  These include: Matt Frondorf’s drive, in which he recorded a time lapse video of 3,304 photos, or one per mile; Amanda Congdon’s adventure in a hybrid vehicle, in a trip sponsored by an environmental group; and Michael Hess’ unique blog, which plots Jack Kerouac’s journey in On the Road by using Google Maps.

For more insight into cross-country travel, you can also check out this interview that Rolf Potts did a few months ago with Jamie Jensen, author of Road Trip USA.

In Europe, you have towns and cities where people walk around; in America, we drive. It’s the difference between the passegiata (the evening promenade you see in Italy), and the weekend car cruises of American Graffiti, listening to Chuck Berry sing “Driving around in my automobile…”

It’s hard to imagine America without cars, and people who come here from other countries want to have the quintessential American experience.  They don’t want to see ancient ruins or monuments or works of art; they want to drive around for days and weeks on end, doing that Jack Kerouac On the Road thing.