The 12 Essential American Road Trips, Just in Time for the Country’s 250th

The country is hard to read at a distance right now, politically caricatured from afar by algorithm bubbles. The 250th arrives this summer and the official run-up has been mostly conferences and merchandise. Meanwhile, the people who do the actual work of American history—preservationists, archaeologists, descendants and at least one Pulitzer winner—have spent the last two years substantially rebuilding what the country gets to look at. Add all this together, and you’ve got a strong argument for getting in a car—by any honest measure, it is a banner year to drive.

The American road trip is older than the interstate that supposedly invented it; older than the Beats who wrote it down—the form Whitman caught walking, Steinbeck caught driving, Didion caught at a hotel pool in Death Valley. None of them got the country at a remove. The 12 routes below run from the founding to the present, each one anchored by something genuinely new on the ground in 2026—a freshly excavated battlefield, a museum addition, a national monument that did not exist three years ago, a book that rewrites the official version—and each drivable, in whole or in partial segments, in two weeks or less.

A note on logistics. Gas is hovering above $4.50 a gallon on average, and rental cars are not exactly a bargain right now either—both real factors worth planning around. One workable strategy: fly into one of the hub cities and consider renting an EV, since charging infrastructure has expanded substantially since the 2021 infrastructure law: Tesla Superchargers, Electrify America, ChargePoint and EVgo now cover most of the interstate corridors below. Here are 12 itineraries built around what those people have made worth seeing.