During Christmas week of 2013, my wife and I would like to do a road-trip from southern-NJ to Nashville. We'd like to take the most scenic and interesting route there. We have from Christmas to New Years for the entire trip, with the plans of doing all the site-seeing on the way there and then taking a more direct route back. If for some reason, we run out of time heading to Nashville and have to turn-around because of items of interests we detoured to, that's OK too. We have no plan on making any hotel/motel reservations or anything like that.

Any suggestions?