Traveling across most of the US!

Greetings all! My girlfriend and I are planning on traveling from North Carolina to California and back, aiming to see as much of the country and experience as much of it as we can. Any advice or pointers on MUST SEE or MUST HAVE/TRY things?!?! We are really into good food and drink, as well as the beauty of the outdoors and exciting events like the annual balloon fiesta in Albuquerque. If anyone has any places they'd recommend stopping or things they'd recommend trying in certain areas, any help would be great!!

Thanks

Hello and welcome to the RTA forums !

This sounds like quite some adventure, how long are you planning to be on the road for and when do you travel ? It's difficult to make meaningful suggestions at this point for a road trip of this scale as there would be thousands of route options and even more attractions to choose from and what you are looking for can be found in most places. To get started I would recommend doing lots of research and getting a nice wall size map of the USA which you can study to find points of interest and then research some more. The RTA site has endless amounts of info if you do a little digging, for example searching the forums you will find threads like this on that has A to Z listings of places in each state. You can look in the Road trip field reports section for great tales and photos. In the tool bars above you will find routes, attractions, road tripping tips and the RTA Map centre where you can save maps and find attractions along routes.

The National parks web page is also a good place to visit for natural wonders that are not to be missed and this very handy RTA thread lists all State parks in all 50 States !

Once you have done some research and started getting some dots on the map we can certainly offer suggestions, fill in some blanks and offer new ideas and answer any questions you may have.

Welcome to RTA! You've come to the right place! Look around the website, especially at the Map Center, and see what interests you. For us to do any personal help, we'd need to know how long you have to travel? When are you planning to travel? (You posted in the Fall/Winter forum, so we assume this might either be soon or next fall?) It takes 5-6 days to go one way from NC to CA, depending on your starting/ending points and of course on the weather.

The Balloon Festival in Albuquerque is Oct 4-12 in 2014. If you are planning to go, be sure to get your motel reservations SOON. Motels/hotels and RV parks fill to the brim during the Festival. My husband has been through ABQ during the Festival, on a commercial truck, and says that the sight is colorful, but the traffic is bad.

Beauty of the outdoors -- depending on how long your trip will be, try to schedule in some national parks. For most of them, you can spend an entire day to three days, just driving the scenic loops/routes. More time is needed if you want to get further than 1/4 mile from the parking area on a trail.

We can help more if we have a little more information from you.


Donna

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Originally Posted by DonnaR57

The Balloon Festival in Albuquerque is Oct 4-12 in 2014. If you are planning to go, be sure to get your motel reservations SOON. Motels/hotels and RV parks fill to the brim during the Festival.

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Agree 100 %. If you’re planning on going to the Balloon Fiesta, take care of your hotel reservations ASAP. Everything will be booked up solid if you wait too long.