Day Trip

This weekend my brother, girlfriend, and I went to Frederick, Maryland for my cousin's wedding. I viewd this as a June road trip warm up. I used it to get excited and to remember the greatness that is a road trip. The route was simple (I 78 to I 81/83 then US 15) but it was a nice drive through historical countryside. US 15 was new for all of us and was a great experience. That night we looked up some things on the internet at the Marriott we were staying and found that by taking US 340 from Frederick westward we could get to West Virginia in roughly 20 minutes. My brother had never been to West Virginia so we went. On the way we crossed over the Potomac River into Virginia for roughly a half of a mile before going into West Virginia across the Shenandoah River. We went back the next morning, Saturday, to take some pictures and to head into Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. We got some great pictures of some mountainous countryside, found a portion of the Appalachian Trail, and wandered around the tiny historical town. Later Saturday night we went to the historical section of Frederick

Thanks for the reminder that RoadTrips don't have to be grand multi-thousand-mile treks to be an adventure. I've also had the pleasure of driving through the area you explored and there are still many other little gems in that general vicinity to fill another day or more, including fort Frederick, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the Great Falls of the Potomac, Catoctin Mountain National Park, the town of Emmitsburg and many others. I'm glad you enjoyed your day trip.

AZBuck

Short little trips into the surrounding area where we live in NJ was how I got started in road tripping when I first was able to drive. My friends and I would drive into the the little traveled roads around our town until we would find a US route or an interstate. At most we would end up an hour or two away from our town and spend 5 hours or so doing this.

You might enjoy my article about the joys and freedoms to be achieved by engaging in a 20-hour road trip.

Also, we are establishing a list of Day trips from hub cities in the United States, eventually we hope to have 200+ of these. But here are few dozen of the ones we've identified thus far.

Mark

If you want to use mine with some of AZBuck's info for your list you can. Harper's Ferry is a little less than 70 miles out of DC and Baltimore (depending on if you take I-70 or I-270 to get to one of these cities) If you need more details, information, pictures, etc just let me know.