There’s a reason road trips are woven into the American DNA. The US doesn’t just have roads, it has routes that crack open canyons, climb into clouds, hug coastlines for miles on end, and cut through forests so dense you’ll forget there’s a world beyond the tree line. These are twelve of the most sumptuously scenic drives in America that curl around the edge of a Hawaiian volcano, or drift through the bluegrass of Tennessee wine country; routes that make you pull over, step out of the vehicle, and just stand there. You know the feeling.
1. Pacific Coast Highway, California
Few drives carry the mythology of Pacific Coast Highway. It runs roughly 656 miles along the California coast, stitching together sea cliffs, redwood groves, and seaside towns with a thread of blacktop. The ocean is always there, sometimes far below you, sometimes close enough to spray salt on the windshield. North of Malibu, the road starts earning its reputation. By the time you hit Big Sur, it’s become something else entirely.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Bixby Creek Bridge, Big Sur Pull over here, because everyone does — and everyone should. The bridge arches dramatically over a canyon that spills straight into the Pacific, and on a clear day, the horizon seems to extend forever. It’s the most photographed spot on the California coast. You’ll understand immediately why.
See it with Trafalgar: Western Discoverer Fourteen days. One epic loop from Los Angeles that takes in the best of the American West, with the Pacific Coast Highway pulling it all together. You’ll cruise the legendary ’17-Mile Drive’ past Lone Cypress and Pebble Beach, roll through the coastal towns of Monterey, Morro Bay, and Santa Barbara, and eventually trace the highway north to San Francisco, where the Golden Gate Bridge closes out the California chapter in style. But this tour earns its name well beyond the coast: the Grand Canyon with a local specialist, Yosemite’s El Capitan and Bridal Veil Falls, the geothermal oddity of Mammoth Lakes, and Las Vegas for whoever you become when the mountains are behind you. It’s California at its most cinematic.
2. Zion Canyon Scenic Drive, Utah
The road into Zion Canyon doesn’t ease you in gently. Within minutes of entering the park, the canyon walls are rising 2,000 feet on both sides of you: cream, pink and red Navajo sandstone that catches the light differently at every hour of the day. The Zion Canyon Scenic Drive runs six miles along the floor of the canyon, following the Virgin River through one of the most dramatic pieces of geology in the American Southwest. Private vehicles can only go so far before the road becomes shuttle-only, which turns out to be a feature rather than a flaw: you sit back, the windows are wide, and the canyon just keeps getting bigger.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Canyon Junction The point where the Virgin River makes a sharp bend and the full scale of the canyon opens up ahead of you, Zion’s massive sandstone monoliths including the Great White Throne and Angels Landing visible all at once.
See it with Trafalgar: Scenic Parks Explorer Zion is the opening act of this epic 15-day national parks journey, and it sets the bar immediately. After driving through the canyon beneath its soaring red rock walls on Day 2, the tour rolls north to Bryce Canyon’s hoodoos, then on through Salt Lake City, Grand Teton, and two nights inside Yellowstone National Park. From there it’s east to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore, south through Denver and Vail, into the canyon country of Moab, and finally Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon with geologist Canyon Tim, who has been reading these rocks for over 30 years. Fifteen days, six national parks, one extraordinary road at a time.
3. Skyline Drive, Virginia
Skyline Drive runs the entire length of Shenandoah National Park: 105 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, rarely dipping below 2,000 feet, with 75 breathtaking overlooks. The Shenandoah Valley rolls away on one side, the Virginia Piedmont on the other, and in between there’s a ridge road that the Civilian Conservation Corps spent years carving out of the mountain during the 1930s. In fall the hardwood forest either side turns amber and copper. In spring, wildflowers line the verges. In summer, the morning mist sits in the valley below and the road above it feels like it belongs to you alone.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Stony Man Overlook At 4,011 feet, one of the highest and most dramatic viewpoints on the entire drive. On a clear day the Shenandoah Valley stretches west almost without limit, the patchwork of farms and forest far below making the world look ordered and peaceful in a way it rarely does from ground level.
See it with Trafalgar: Historic Highlights Skyline Drive forms the scenic thread connecting two of this 8-day tour’s most powerful days. On Day 6, the road carries you north through the rolling hills of Shenandoah on the way to Gettysburg,. where a Local Specialist brings the battle that turned the Civil War to life on the very ground it was fought, before dinner that evening in Gettysburg’s most famously haunted 19th-century tavern. It’s a tour where the landscape and the history are inseparable: Monticello and Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, Colonial Williamsburg’s costumed blacksmiths and Federalists, Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, and even lunch with an Amish family on their working farm in Lancaster County. Skyline Drive sets the scene: ancient mountains, a young nation, and all the stories in between.
4. Trail of the Ancients Scenic Byway, Utah, Colorado & New Mexico
This 500-mile loop through the Colorado Plateau is as much history lesson as it is road trip. The landscape is ancient: red rock towers, mesa tops, and sky arches that have been standing for millions of years. Woven through it all are the remnants of the Ancestral Puebloans: cliff dwellings tucked into canyon walls, petroglyphs etched into boulders, and sacred sites that demand quiet.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado Nothing quite prepares you for rounding a bend and seeing Cliff Palace, a 150-room dwelling built into the rock face over 700 years ago. It’s one of the most significant archaeological sites in North America, and it’s staggering.
See it with Trafalgar: Best of the Canyonlands Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings are a highlight of this 7-day canyon country journey, which also takes in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, the soaring mesas of Monument Valley with a Navajo guide, and a scenic drive along Desert View Drive, parts of which follow the original Route 66. Starting in Denver and ending in Las Vegas, it covers the most dramatic terrain in America in a week. Big landscapes, deep history, real local voices.
5. Overseas Highway, Florida
The Overseas Highway doesn’t just connect Miami to Key West, it drives over the ocean to do it. Built on a series of bridges and causeways across 42 islands, the road puts open water on both sides of you for miles at a stretch. The turquoise of Florida Bay on the left. The deeper blue of the Atlantic on the right. It’s one of those drives where you genuinely can’t believe this is a public road.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Seven Mile Bridge The name does the heavy lifting. You drive seven miles above open water, the horizon stretching in every direction, the feeling of floating not entirely metaphorical. Just before sunset, the whole thing turns pink.
6. Hana Highway, Maui, Hawaii
The Hana Highway is not a highway in any traditional sense. It’s 64 miles of tight switchbacks, one-lane bridges (over 50 of them), and waterfalls that appear without warning from the jungle above. The road clings to the northeastern coastline of Maui, passing black sand beaches, bamboo forests, and sea caves. You won’t want to hurry. You literally can’t.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Wailua Falls Twin falls tumbling 80 feet into a pool of deep green water, framed by tropical vegetation so lush it looks almost theatrical. It’s the kind of waterfall that ends up on postcards, which doesn’t make standing in front of it any less extraordinary.
See it with Trafalgar: Best of Hawaii Maui is one centrepiece of this 10-day island-hopping tour, which also takes you through Oahu’s Pearl Harbor memorial, the black sand beaches of the Big Island, and the volcanic landscapes of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. On Maui, you’ll have the chance to snorkel, dive, and observe marine life to your heart’s content. The Hana Highway scenery sets the backdrop; the people you meet along it give it meaning.
7. Beartooth Highway, Montana & Wyoming
Open only from late May to October and for good reason. The Beartooth Highway climbs to nearly 11,000 feet through terrain so remote, so wind-scoured and dramatically beautiful that Charles Kuralt once called it “the most beautiful road in America.” Snow often lines the road well into June. The views from the top stretch over a landscape of alpine lakes, granite peaks, and tundra that looks like the surface of somewhere other than Earth.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Beartooth Pass Summit At 10,947 feet, you’re standing on the roof of the American highway system. On a clear day, the panoramic view covers several mountain ranges and drops into valleys thousands of feet below. There’s a reason people turn around at the top and drive it again.
See it with Trafalgar: National Park Wonders The Beartooth sits between two of this tour’s anchors: the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. Over 9 days, you’ll ride through the American frontier, admiring the peaks of the Grand Tetons, spotting bison at Yellowstone with naturalist guides who explain the geysers, hot springs, and deep canyons around you, visiting the historic town of Cody (made famous by Buffalo Bill), and standing before the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills. It’s the West as it was always meant to be experienced.
8. Kancamagus Highway, New Hampshire
Thirty-four and a half miles and no commercial development of any kind. The Kancamagus Highway (“the Kanc” to anyone who’s driven it) cuts clean through White Mountain National Forest along Route 112, climbing to just under 3,000 feet at Kancamagus Pass before descending to the Swift River valley below. It’s been designated an American Scenic Byway, and in fall it earns that designation in the most emphatic way possible: the maples, beeches and birches either side of the road turn a color that photographs struggle to do justice.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Kancamagus Pass Summit The high point of the drive, where the forest opens up and the White Mountains spread out around you in every direction. In peak foliage season, usually mid to late October, the hillsides are so densely coloured that the whole landscape looks lit from within.
See it with Trafalgar: Autumn Colours The Kancamagus is a dedicated highlight of Day 4 on this 9-day New England journey, timed specifically for peak foliage season. Before the Kanc, the tour walks Boston’s Freedom Trail, visits Lexington and Concord where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired, and stops at a regenerative farm in Vermont for a Be My Guest lunch with owners Mari and Laura of Green Mountain Girls Farm. After it, the road leads to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, where Cadillac Mountain offers the first sunrise on the US eastern seaboard, lobster dinners with a local naturalist, and a panoramic drive along the rocky Maine coast.
9. Pacific Coast Highway 101, Oregon & Northern California
Highway 101 doesn’t get the same headlines as its California cousin further south, but from the Oregon border down through the redwoods of Northern California, it earns every mile. The road hugs one of the wildest stretches of the Pacific coastline in the country with its sea stacks, crashing surf, rocky headlands, and offshore rock formations where thousands of seabirds wheel overhead. Then it trades the ocean for the trees, ducking inland into forests of ancient coast redwoods so tall and dense that the sky disappears. It’s two completely different drives stitched into one unforgettable route.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Avenue of the Giants, Humboldt Redwoods State Park A 31-mile road that peels off Highway 101 and into the largest expanse of ancient old-growth redwood forest on the planet. The trees here have been standing for over a thousand years. You drive through them slowly, in near-silence, the canopy closing over the road above you. It’s been called the finest forest drive in the world — and it’s hard to argue with that.
See it with Trafalgar: Best of the Pacific Northwest Highway 101 is the spine of this 8-day journey from Seattle to San Francisco. On day five, you’ll wind along the scenic loop through Bandon State Natural Area, pulling over at Face Rock State Scenic Viewpoint to take in the offshore rock spires rising from the Pacific. From there, the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway threads ten miles through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park — old-growth groves otherwise barely accessible by road. Day six brings the Avenue of the Giants itself, plus a stop at Blue Ox Historic Village in Eureka, one of the last working Victorian craftsman workshops in the country, before the route delivers you into San Francisco. The coastline, the redwoods, the people…this tour gives you all of it, in order, at exactly the right pace.
10. Desert View Drive, Grand Canyon, Arizona
Most people see the Grand Canyon from a single point on the rim, take the photo, and leave. Desert View Drive is the argument against that approach. The 23-mile road runs along the South Rim from the main visitor area to Desert View Watchtower in the east, and every pull-off along it reveals a different angle on the same impossible landscape — different light, different depth, different colors in the canyon walls. The further east you drive, the quieter it gets and the wider the views become. By the time you reach the end, the Colorado River is visible far below, the Painted Desert stretching away to the horizon beyond it.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Desert View Watchtower Built in 1932 by architect Mary Colter and modelled on ancient Ancestral Puebloan towers, the Watchtower sits 70 feet high overlooking the canyon’s eastern rim. From the top, the views extend across four states on a clear day. It’s the highest point on the South Rim, and one of those rare spots where the scale of what you’re looking at takes a moment to fully sink in.
See it with Trafalgar: On Best of the Canyonlands, Desert View Drive is right in the heart of Day 5 on this 7-day canyon country journey. Before you even reach the rim, you’ll have spent the morning in Monument Valley with a Navajo guide in an open-air vehicle, winding through the towering sandstone buttes that have defined the American West in the imagination of the world. Then the road follows the ancestral lands of the Navajo along Desert View Drive itself, with a stop at the Desert Intertribal Cultural Heritage site, where the stories and traditions of the 11 Grand Canyon tribal communities come to life. At the South Rim, geologist Canyon Tim, with over 30 years of experience reading these rocks, gives a private talk that turns the view from breathtaking into something you actually understand. You’ll overnight inside the national park itself, which means catching the first light of dawn on the canyon before the crowds arrive. That alone is worth the trip.
11. Seward Highway, Alaska
Alaska has a way of making everywhere else feel slightly ordinary, and the Seward Highway is a good place to start understanding why. The 125-mile road runs south from Anchorage along the edge of Turnagain Arm: a long, dramatic inlet where bore tides surge in at up to 10mph and beluga whales surface close to the shore. The Highway then climbs into the ancient Chugach Mountains before descending to the port town of Seward on Resurrection Bay. Poetic, right? It’s been designated an American Scenic Byway and an All-American Road, the two highest designations the federal highway system awards. Very few roads earn both.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Turnagain Arm The stretch of highway hugging Turnagain Arm is the one that stops people mid-sentence. On one side, the Chugach Mountains rise steeply from the road. On the other, the Arm stretches wide and silver, framed by snow-capped peaks on both shores. On a clear day, it’s almost aggressively beautiful.
See it with Trafalgar: Majestic Alaska Day 9 of this 10-day Alaskan adventure follows the Seward Highway south to the port of Seward, but the road is almost upstaged by what happens when you get there. A cruise into the icy heart of Kenai Fjords National Park puts you alongside humpback whales and glacial icebergs, with lunch on board as the ice cliffs of Columbia Glacier rise around you. Before that the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, a non-profit rehabilitation centre for the state’s native wildlife, gives you close encounters with moose, bears, lynx, and reindeer all guided by a local specialist who knows each animal by name.
12. Route 100, Vermont
If fall had a road, it would be Route 100. Running 216 miles from the Massachusetts border to the Canadian line through the spine of the Green Mountains, it’s the classic New England drive: threading through covered bridges, white-steepled village greens, farm stands selling cider doughnuts, and hillsides that turn ochre, scarlet and gold every October. It’s not a fast road. It doesn’t want to be. The whole point is to roll unhurried through small towns that look like they’ve been posing for postcards since before postcards existed.
🏔 Scenic pit-stop: Stowe, Vermont The prettiest town on the prettiest road in New England. The white spire of the Community Church rises above a classic village green, the mountains frame everything behind it, and in fall the maples along the streets go completely ablaze. It’s the image most people have in their heads when they think of fall in America.
See it with Trafalgar: Autumn Colours On this 9-day New England journey, you’ll pass through this iconic road on your way to and from Stowe, timed perfectly for peak foliage season when the Green Mountains are at their most extraordinary. Earlier in the tour you’ll walk Boston’s Freedom Trail, visit Lexington and Concord where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired, and enjoy a farm-to-table Be My Guest lunch at Green Mountain Girls Farm in Vermont, where owners Mari and Laura practise regenerative farming in one of the most beautiful valleys in the state. Later, the tour heads to Maine for lobster dinners in Bar Harbor, sunrise on Cadillac Mountain, and a panoramic drive along the rocky Atlantic coast. Route 100 sets the tone for all of it: slow down, look around, this is what you came for.