America’s Ultimate Drive: New York to Los Angeles

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It’s one of America’s most storied drives, and greatest road traditions, traveling from Atlantic to Pacific, between the country’s two largest cities. The journey is celebrated in history, and literature (from “The Grapes of Wrath” to “On the Road”), very much a part of the nation’s fabric. From wagon trains stabbing westward to the days when America got its kicks on Route 66, people have long made their way from coast to coast.

Leaving the grips of New York City, the country opens up. From the multi-lane traffic in New Jersey, into the green heights of the Appalachians, through the broadening skies of the Midwest, the drive takes you down through the desert, all the way to the sea. Those in a hurry can make a Cannonball Run—the unsanctioned, unofficial speed record spanning almost 3,000 miles (celebrated in a 1981 film of the same name)—in just a little more than 25 hours, with a team traveling at an average speed of 110 miles per hour. But really, that’s not the way to do it. Take your time. Five days is ambitious. Even with a week, you’ll still miss a few things. Build in enough days to see everything you can, before you watch the sun sink into the Pacific.

A Little History

There’s no other place where it’s simpler to drive clear across the continent. While this was once an arduous journey—for the details, dust off your high school history textbook—the nation really started moving with the advent of Route 66, often known as the Mother Road. Operating for a relatively brief period—just a few decades—the route got started in 1926, became a hard-luck icon of the Dustbowl years in the 1930s, and reached its peak in the 1940s and 1950s. At that time, it took the form familiar from movies like the Disney franchise “Cars,” a busy two-lane strip surrounded by drive-in restaurants and motor-court motels and bigger-than-life roadside attractions, everything from a towering T-rex to the Hackberry General Store, to the Leaning Tower of Texas.