Boston to San Fran Jan 5

Hi!

If you are interested in history and legends here are a few ideas:

Starved Rock State Park, IL

Western Heritage Trails Museum, Council Bluffs, IA

Follow the path of the old Oregon Trail (I highly recommend Gregory Franzwa's book "The Oregon Trail Revisited" which will give you information about the emigrants, and how to find what's left of the original trail today and lots of other infos.)

Chimney Rock, NE

Scottsbluff NM, Scottsbluff NE

Ft Laramie, WY

Register Cliffs, WY

Yellowstone and Grand Teton NP, WY

All national parks in Colorado

Interstates are great if you're in a hurry, but you would see so much more interesting things by using byways and secondary roads!

You could use highway 50, the loneliest route in America, to go through Nevada and visit ghost towns along the way.

On your way back, the main Interstates are I-70, I-40 and I-10.

I-70 is pretty hilly, beautiful country, you go through the Colorado Rockies, then you cross the Great Plains of KS and MO. You could visit the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

I-40 is roughly following the old route 66 path so you'll find lots of stuff left from that era if you go off the interstate from time to time. You'll go through AZ (Kingman, Flagstaff, Petrified Forest NP), NM (Gallup, Albuquerque, Santa Rosa), TX (Amarillo, Big Texan Steakhouse), OK (OKC),...

I-10 is the southern route: AZ (Phoenix, Tucson, Saguaro NP, Ft Bowie, Tombstone), NM (White Sands), TX (El Paso, San Antonio, Houston), LA (New Orleans), etc. Cactuses, Adobe houses, far west/ghost towns and Mexican food are on the program.

But as I said earlier, if you have plenty of time for that trip, use back roads, you'll have more things to see and more opportunities to have a chat with the locals.