Pennsylvania to LA in Winter (Mid-Dec), which route to take?

[lux210]

I am going to move to LA for graduate school, which starts in January. Therefore, I am now thinking to take a road trip from Allentown, Pennsylvania to LA. I am having a 2006 VW Jetta 2.5L (FWD). I don't know if my car is capable to do that during winter. I am really concerning about the weather condition.

I will have another friend to come with me on the road trip. We are planning to take about 2 weeks to do that. The timeline is flexible. Our goal is to get to San Jose to visit a friend before Christmas. Since it's winter, I am thinking to drive toward south so that snow would not be a big problem. Is there a route suggestion? I will definitely visit Washington D.C. on the trip. And we would like to see some scenic views or interesting places to stop by.

Please feel free to give me any suggestion/advices. Thank you in advance.

lux210

[Midwest Michael]

Welcome to the RTA Forum!

First the bad news - There simply is no route we can recommend that will generically see good weather all the time, as every cross country route can and does see winter conditions at some point during the year. You simply can't go far enough south (in the United States) to avoid the chance of snow or ice.

Your best bet is to simply build a route that factors in the places you most want to see, and then start filling in the gaps.

Now the Good News: With 2 weeks, you've got a nice amount of time to make this trip, and since you could make the drive itself in a week, you've got plenty of room to adjust if you do run into a winter storm. Even in the worst cases, you could get off the road for a day or two, wait for the conditions to improve, and then continue safely on your way. Just make sure you build that flexability and extra time into your plan.

[RoadDog]

I'd suggest Route 66, which you can pick up in Illinois.

Interstates 55, 44 and 40 closely follow it and it would be like a trip back in time.

[glc]

If you are going to go to DC, I would not go north to Chicago just to drive along the routing of Route 66. I'd head for St. Louis and take I-44/I-40. There are 2 ways to do that:

I-66/I-81/I-64
I-270/I-70/I-68/I-79/I-70

You can, of course, take I-81 all the way to I-40, bypassing STL altogether.

Follow I-40 to Barstow, then CA-58 to Bakersfield. From there, there are various choices to get to San Jose.