My Dream Itinerary for an American Road Trip

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to do a fly/drive trip to America; well as long as I have known such things existed. I clearly remember seeing an airline advert back in the 80s (was it TWA?) which offered a great deal on a fly/drive, and my brain said ‘wait, what? a Fly – Drive? So I fly there, then get to drive about and see everything? Sign me up!’. And I have often noodled away a coffee break mentally designing an Itinerary for an American Road Trip on Pinterest.

Travel Planners have asked me to create a dream itinerary for an American road trip. All opinions my own. Pretty sure they didn’t ask me to tell you my travel is inspired by cartoon characters, 1950s Doris Day musicals and unpopular country music singers.

We of course loved our family Italian Road Trip – and totally fell in love with life on the road. You see, there’s no one single place that I want to go to in America. I want to see lots of it – and keep on moving, not get stuck in one spot.
I want to stay in New York, in Boston, in Chicago… but not for a whole holiday. And obviously you can’t do it all in one trip – America’s quite a big place – but you can certainly cover a lot of it. So where to? Do I want to do the classic Route 66? Tour New England in the Autumn (Fall)? Follow my country-music-loving heart to the south and Nashville? New York, Buffalo and Niagara? California beaches and Big Sur?
Oh the choices. they hurt my brain. So here’s what I did – without doing any research, I noted down all the things in America I wanted to see, and plotted them on a map. The biggest concentration of dots would be my destination.

So where do I put some dots? Where do I create my Itinerary for an American Road Trip?

• The Rockies – Be still my John Denver heart. This is always top of my list. The Horse Whisperer too. It’s all about Montana, really.
  For some research to see why I love it, just read This House of Sky. Or watch Legends of the Fall, Hostiles, Horse Whisperer or The Hanging Tree.
• New England – I’ll narrow down to Maine & Massachusets for the National Parks (how can you not want to go to Bash Bish Falls? Or Squibnocket Beach?).
• The PCT – Wild is one of my all-time favourite books, and one day I fully intend to walk it all. The Washington stretch is probably my top first choice.

• Arizona & Utah – I have a deep and not-very-secret passion for all things Cowboy movie. I need to see Canyon Country for myself. And ride a horse through it, obviously.
• The Redwoods – I’ve wanted to stroke a Redwood since I saw a picture of them in a library book when I was about 6. So big, they actually broke my brain, I couldn’t stop trying to imagine trees that big for days; everything was measured against how big I imagined them to be.
• Yellowstone – Just one word. Geysers. Oh, and another one. Wolves.
• Glacier Park – admittedly I live in the Northern hemisphere and there are probably closer glaciers for me to see. But I don’t care – this is my road trip. Oops, that’s in Montana again…
• Yosemite – Because Yogi (I’m not sure my kids even know it’s a reference when I always call it a pic-a-nic basket). And Bugs with Yosemite Sam. My childhood right there, people.
• Grand Canyon – I once worked as an IT tech on a Submarine Sonar site (I know, random fact). One of the nearby engineers I loved to stop by and chat to was a wonderful gentle man with a long beard, a quiet voice, a hippie’s heart and the sweetest smile. He had so many stories of his adventures with his wife and kids – and one he told me was visiting the Grand Canyon in the 70s when his girls were small. They drove there overnight, then as the girls slept in the back of the car he and his wife sat on the edge of the canyon wrapped in a blanket with a flask of coffee, and watched the sun rise. I was spellbound. And have wanted to see it ever since.
• Atlanta & Savannah. Gone With The Wind. That is all.
• Dakota – I know it’s part of the Rockies, but Calamity Jane sang about it, and if Doris says it’s beautiful, then I need to go see it…

There’s a gazillion more, I know, but these are all the places lodged in my head from the books and movies I’ve loved, and yearned to see and feel and smell and touch for myself.

So – how does my oh-so-scientific and geographically accurate splodge map look? Where’s my Itinerary for an American Road Trip going?

I’m going to say the signs are I’m heading east, looking at that! Arizona, California, Utah… maybe dipping into Vegas, because really why wouldn’t you, just for a night or two? On up to San Francisco – see that Golden Gate bridge, obviously.

But actually? No.
I don’t care what the splodge map shows.
I’ll do all that on my second Fly Drive road trip. For me, my heart lies in the north – Montana and the Rockies. Wide skies, big lands, high mountains and horses. Yes please.

So – the itinerary? I’m stealing Travel Planners: Denver, Cheyenne, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Yellowstone. Heaven.

Travel Planners offer road tripping holidays, where flights, accommodation and vehicles can be taken care off – so “all you need is your sense of adventure and a Road Trip playlist!”. They offer these fly drive holidays to multiple destinations, such as, California, Utah and Nevada, Colorado, the Deep South, Hawaii, New England, and many more.