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Life Is a Highway: Great Articles About Road Trips

Hit the highway with this collection of some of our favorite reads about epic road trips.

Alex Dalenberg

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

Venture on an 11,000-mile odyssey across Eurasia, tag along with a mother and son as they discover Historic Route 66, and get lost in a science writer’s harrowing voyage to the Cretaceous Interior Seaway (also known as Western Kansas).

Image of drive toward Mount Pico in Portugal, by © Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images

Taking the Great American Roadtrip

In the spirit of Kerouac and Steinbeck, the celebrated travel writer fulfills a childhood fantasy: to drive across his native land The mixed blessing of America is that anyone with a car can go anywhere. The visible expression of our freedom is that we are a country without roadblocks.

Inside A Black Family’s Cross-Country RV Trip

Journalist Janine Rubenstein took her family on a road trip from New Jersey to California just days before George Floyd’s murder set this nation ablaze. Here’s what they learned about motor homes, the country and life.

Homeward Bound

Make a new canine friend in Maine and chances are good she’s from down south. To understand why—and how they arrive—Kathryn Miles joined 37 very good dogs on a 1,600-mile road trip.

Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended All Life on Earth

A science journalist tours the geological ruins of our planet’s worst mass extinction ... in Western Kansas.

The Great American Chile Highway

This palate-scorching, Mexican hamburger- and adovada-fueled road trip up I-25 from Las Cruces to Denver is not for the faint of heart.

Atomic John

A truck driver uncovers secrets about the first nuclear bombs and makes clear that our belief in the secrecy of the bomb is a theological construct, adopted to counter the idea that someone might use one against us.

Football, My Dad’s Dementia, and Me

Doctors said we could blame my father’s football career for his vanishing memory. So Dad and I decided to take a road trip down south to revisit the schools that made him.

A Literary Road Trip Into the Heart of Russia

In the land of Tolstoy, Turgenev and now Putin, what are the stories Russians are telling themselves?

A Mother’s Road

Alta Editor at Large Mary Melton searches for a deeper connection with her autistic son—and with a divided country—on a 15-day journey along Route 66.

That Time Writer Michael Chabon Packed His Family Into a Minivan With a Stranger in Morocco

Why take your family to France or Florida when you could pack them into a minivan with a stranger in Morocco? Novelist Michael Chabon explains.

Tracking the Elusive Western Shoe Tree

A recklessly picaresque, highly philosophical, gloriously unmapped road trip in search of secret places you’ll have to find yourself.

7 Weeks, 11,000 Miles, and 2 Tiny Cars: The Mongol Rally

It’s a rather insane premise: drive in a tiny, terrible car, from the U.K. to Mongolia and on into Siberia.

A Deeper South

“We were looking for endings: vestiges of a South we had not known in Atlanta.” A road trip through the Old South reveals uncomfortable family truths.

Drifters (Interstate 35)

Fleabag motels, caesuras, femme phases, double bank shots, stale sweat, McDonald’s, bedside Bibles, hatchbacks, counter girls, evolved orchids, tomorrow’s underwear, impetus & traffic signals in Laredo.