Americus, GA to somewhere and back within 10 days...

Hi All,

My name is Connor, I am trying to plan a road trip for my friend and I. We both went to high school together in Kent, England. He's a tennis scholar in Georgia. He's graduating in May and I'll be visiting him for 10 days and we'd like to see some interesting things. We were originally thinking of driving to Niagara Falls and back but I don't think we will have enough time to do that and stop off on the way, google maps said it'd take around 15 hours one way.

Our flights home back to (LHR) are from ATL but via JFK, so we were thinking we could do a trip that'd sort of be a long way to NYC before flying home.

Basically I'm looking for a lot of advice, recommendations on spots and things to see, all whilst being able to get back to ATL or JFK within 8 days.


I look forward to hearing from you all, and really open to any advice you have. We'd like to go and see Braves play but we know we could easily do that within one day. We're interested in a mixture of things, such as seeing hugely historic things like Niagara Falls but also the party lifestyle of Vegas and Miami really interested us but we know we don't have enough time to do Vegas and back...

We want adventure.

(I also want to take him to a Hooters along the way too, it's a long standing joke between us.)

Thank you all in advance,


Connor

Welcome to the RTA Forum!

With 10 days, you really could do almost anything on the east coast, especially if you can end your trip in New York (although you need to check with your airline, as even though you're scheduled to have a layover in NY, it may not be cheap or easy just to skip that first leg - they will simply cancel your ticket if you miss the ATL-JKF leg without notice.)

As you noted, even Niagara Falls is a place you could reach within 2 days driving (the 15 google says is more like 18 in the real world, but still obtainable in 2 days). You could take more time, and explore some great natural places, like the Smokey Mountains and the Blue Ridge Parkway along the way. Certainly, Miami is also another option, that you could do some kind of loop through Florida, or perhaps New Orleans is another "party city" that would be interesting to you, which would be very obtainable (again, maybe a loop that also includes the Florida Gulf Coast and/or places like Memphis and Nashville would work within 10 days).

I think your best bet is to figure out what place is your top priority - once you have a direction, be it south, west, or northeast, then you can start to fill in the gaps and start narrowing down which other places would work well on your trip.

Michael has laid out your basic choices and constraints. Let me first reiterate something he said, namely that it will NOT be easy to change your return flight at this late date. Indeed, even if your airline lets you skip the ATL-JFK portion of your return, they will charge you (perhaps substantially) for the privilege. With that in mind, and understanding your desire for 'adventure', I'll suggest the following.

Adventure is where you find it and truthfully neither you nor we can predict where that might be. What you can plan is to pack as much variety as possible into your RoadTrip, thus increasing your chances of finding adventure. From Atlanta, I think that means heading north into the southern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains and east to the Atlantic Ocean while sampling some of the small town South and a few of its swamps. Also 'adventure' doesn't come pre-packaged, so while it's important that you know what's available, it's probably just as important that you leave your schedule a bit loose with time to enjoy any adventures that you find.

With that in mind, some of the places that you might want to include in your list of possible destinations would include:

Party Lifestyle: Nashville's country/western bar scene and Myrtle Beach's honkey-tonk amusements,

Hooters will be practically ubiquitous in the south (more than a dozen in northern Georgia alone)

Nature: Great Smoky Mountains National Park; Okefenokee Swamp; and Little River Canyon National Preserve

History: dominated by Civil War sites and historic homes such as Andersonville; Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park; and the Hermitage

A bit of all of the above: the Outer Banks

The problem is not finding places that will add to your adventure, it is keeping your 'To Do' list short enough, and your geographic area small enough, that you aren't trying to do too much.

AZBuck