Manhattan to Miami

Need a fun drive from Manhattan to Miami over CHristmas. Would love suggestions for places to stay over, diners, realistic drive times, hidden gems!
ideas for Savannah?

Welcome aboard the RoadTrip America Forums!

Let's start with the easy stuff. If you want to have a 'fun' drive then realistically you're going to have to have at least three days available to make this drive. And even at that, you'd have to stick pretty much to I-95 with the occasional side trip, perhaps to Charleston, SC or a semi-hidden gem such as Lexington, VA. If you can spare a fourth day, then you can really start to enjoy some places along the way as well as the drive itself. The extra time would let you come down the Delmarva Peninsula and the Outer Banks of North Carolina and experience the ocean in the off season. You could perhaps even follow the old Ocean Hiway. Although not as well known as its cross-country counterparts such as the Lincoln Highway and Route 66, this was a route meant to connect the main vacation points on the Atlantic and would take you by a ton of old attractions, diners and quaint places to stay.

As for the best way to find good places to eat and stay. For restaurants, the best advice I can give you is the old tried and true "Inquire locally". Most towns today have visitor centers, or even libraries in a pinch. Make use of them. These people know their towns far better than I or anyone else on these forums, so make use of them. The 'trick' is to describe as precisely as possible what you're looking for and then ask them where they'd go if that's what they were after. If you just ask for a generic 'good place to eat' you'll just get the generic list of sponsors. Libraries are also, surprisingly, your best source for finding a B&B. That's because almost all libraries today offer some access to the internet. Once you know the area you'll be in on a given night, just do a search for {bed breakfast townname}. My wife's trick is to pick one whose decor appeals to her. That almost always means that she's found one whose owner will share her attention to detail and comfort, and that method of picking a place that looks like we'd be comfortable, has seldom led us wrong.

AZBuck

I definitely second asking around for good places to eat, etc. I always ask at the hotel I've just checked into about good local cuisine. I have had some superb meals and some really odd meals from doing this, but all were memorable.

I like to plot out my drive and then look up tourist bureaus for the states and larger towns I'll be driving through. From there I can follow links to smaller towns and "hidden gems". You never know what you will find doing that. I once discovered the country's oldest standing brothel in Arkansas that happened to share a name with me. It is no longer in use as a brothel but made for a cool stop on a roadtrip and was actually a pretty interesting museum to the building's past.

Laura