Spring road trip - maybe Denver - San fRancisco and back (different route)?

[bredman11]

Aiming to spend 3 - 4 weeks on road trip. Pretty flexible, but from UK thought Denver (or SF) a good start point? Have visited LA and SoCal, Nevada (and death Valley) and LV to Southern Utah and Grand Canyon/N Arizona. Aim of this trip is to see a bit more of the Western/Northern states, particularly interesting small towns and ideally with great scenery in between! Could start in San Fran, and finish in Denver? Or open to other ideas which achieve much the same thing. Enjoy meeting people particularly the kind you bump into in small towns or inns/hotels

Have had recommended: Denver, Buffalo, Cody, Elko, Yellowstone and Tahoe, and SF in the north; and pikes Peak, Moab, Canyonlands to Yosemite and SF via the more southerly route.

Any thoughts or inputs?

[Midwest Michael]

Welcome to the RTA Forum!

It typically will be quite a bit cheaper to do a big loop than to do a one way trip - where you'll deal with car rental drop fees and higher airfare.

Have your previous trips included Yosemite and San Francisco before?

If so, what I might do is a loop out of Denver or Salt Lake City. For example, from Denver, you might start by going north to Rocky Mountain NP, then up to South Dakota for the Black Hills, Badlands, Mt. Rushmore and then back across to Yellowstone and the Tetons. From there, head back south towards Utah, visiting the parks of the Moab area. Keep going southeast to Mesa Verde (adding in Natural Bridges and Monument Valley if you missed them before) and then back across Colorado to places like the the Million Dollar Highway, Great Sand Dunes, and Pikes Peak, to name some options.

Another option would be continue going west from Yellowstone and head over to Oregon. Visit Crater Lake, and then head down the coast of Northern California to SF, then visit Yosemite and Tahoe, before taking US-50 (the lonliest road) back across to Utah.

Those aren't your only options, but its some samples to build off of, depending upon how much time you actually end up with, what kind of pace you like to travel at, and what you are interested in.

[AZBuck]

Welcome aboard the RoadTrip America Forums!

There are actually a couple of other gateway cities that you should be looking at as well as Denver and San Francisco, including Seattle, Salt Lake City, or even Minneapolis. Any of those five cities could serve as the starting and ending point of a loop trip that takes you through the greater Northwest including some great national parks, great mountain scenery, and unique small towns. All of the locations that have been recommended so far would certainly be worth a look-see, but I might, since you've already seen the desert and red rock southwest, skip Moab and Canyonlands on this trip and aim more for Rocky Mountain National Park, Glacier National Park, some of the passes over the northern Rockies, the Grand Tetons, the Snake River and Columbia River gorges. There are significant cost advantages to ending your RoadTrip in the same city in which you start it, both on airfares and car hire, and it would be easy enough to design a route and itinerary that is constantly seeing new sights and towns even as you return, so you should have a very compelling reason to finish up somewhere else.

AZBuck