caseylarsh
01-27-2008, 01:23 PM
I'm going with two or three of my friends this summer to the Dallas area to pick up a friend who will be coming back with us. We will be starting out around Indianapolis. We'd like advice about what we should stop to see along the way. We don't need to go on an extremely direct route if there are attractions a bit out of the way worth seeing. We're young, and not sure what types of things are on the way to Texas. We just want to have some fun!
AZBuck
01-28-2008, 06:04 AM
Welcome aboard the RoadTrip America Forums!
There are at least three different routes between Indianapolis and Dallas that would qualify as both semi-direct and fun. The one that most mapping routines would recommend is down through central Illinois (I-70 and I-57), then follow the Mississippi to Memphis (I-55), and finally on to Dallas via I-40/I-30). If you used parts of the Great River Road rather than just I-55, enjoyed the nightlife in Memphis, and wandered a bit through the hill country of Arkansas and the Red River Valley, this trip would be very relaxing and fun.
A Second possibility is to continue westward on I-70 to St. Louis, head down through the Ozarks of Missouri and Oklahoma paralleling I-44 to Oklahoma City and then drop down to Dallas from the north. Yet a third option is to start out going south from Indianapolis into central Kentucky. Visit Mammoth Cave National Park. Continue on to Nashville and pick up the Natchez Trace Parkway to Jackson, MS and then finish up driving across northern Louisiana.
Each of those routes is between 900 and 1100 miles and could be done in two days of fairly easy driving. If you can give the one-way drive three days, then you'd really have some time to see things along the way.
AZBuck