The Perfect and Best Road Trip

Someday the perfect road trip.

The map, created by Randy Olson with help from Tracy Staedter, pinpoints a mix of 50 major national landmarks, national historic sites, national parks and national monuments. If you follow the route suggested, you’ll travel across all 48 contiguous states and never leave the country.

Planning to drive this road trip will net you 13,699 miles of driving — or about 224 hours. Doing it all in one go would take about 9.33 days. Taking 2–3 months to finish it is probably best. Olson used a genetic algorithm that found the best routes with little backtracking. The result is a map using “true distance,” which is the “shortest route by road between every landmark.”

This is definitely on my bucket list.