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My husband and I, along with our college-age daughter will be driving from Houston, Texas to Cleveland, Ohio. We'd like to leave Sunday the 22nd around noon.
Does anyone have suggestions for routes and stops along the way? We'll be in a Honda Civic or Odyssey.
Thanks, everybody!
-Rachel
When do you want to get there?
How long will you want to stay in Cleveland?
How much time do you have altogether?
Welcome to RTA!
I'm assuming you want to get there before Christmas Day, and you have just enough time to do it via fastest Interstate routes. It will take you 2.5 days. You don't have time for any kind of significant sightseeing or out of the car activities.
Your fastest route is I-10/I-12/I-59/I-65/I-71, with stops in Baton Rouge and Nashville. If you can leave first thing Sunday morning in order to get to Cleveland in the middle of the day Christmas Eve, your stops would be Meridian and Louisville.
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While it may be true that you don't have a lot of excess time on this trip if you want to arrive in Cleveland to celebrate Christmas, that is no reason to make no stops. Indeed, it is all the more reason to make two or three short stops each day to take a short hike, visit a small historic site, or otherwise take a mental and physical break from what could otherwise become a non-stop drive leading to highway hypnosis. With that in mind, some suggestions...
First of all you should, as others have noted, make the trip as short as possible. You don't have time for detours. That shortest route would be US-59 up to Texarkana, I-30 to Little Rock, I-40 to Nashville, I-65 to Louisville, and I-71 to Cleveland, with appropriate connecting routes and beltways around major cities.
Along the way, some possible stops would include the Starr Family Home State Historic Site, DeGray Lake Resort State Park, Hatchie National Wildlife Refuge , Basil Griffin Park , Big Bone Lick State Park, and Alum Creek State Park. Those are, of course, just some of what's available, and all of them are within just a few minutes of the Interstate. Where you would actually stop would depend on your pace and interests.
AZBuck
US-59 may be shorter, but without local information I would hesitate to say it's faster.
According to Streets & Trips, US 59 is shorter by about 70 miles and roughly 50 minutes. Nonetheless, I would opt for glc's Interstate route for safety reasons.
US-59 is 4 lanes for most, if not all, of the trip from Houston to Texarkana. For a savings of 70-80 miles, that is the route I would take. One slight alternative that might be a bit faster, as it is a touch more freeway, would be to take US-79 from Carthage to Shreveport, and then head up US-71, which is interstate quality for much of the drive to Texarkana.
I-59 isnt a bad option either, its a relatively small distance, but I would go with the shorter, and most likely quicker option.