Few concepts are intrinsically tied to the American summer like the road trip. This rite of passage has many forms, from the ones you were forced into as a youth to those carefree ones in college, or maybe your adolescent ones with family and friends. Great? Yes (some, in retrospect). American? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a little room for improvement by borrowing a travel hack that’s popular in Europe.
Open jaw flying is an itinerary-building technique that can cram more sightseeing into a trip. Popular in Europe where intercontinental flights are often affordable, open jaw flying means flying into one city and then continuing to another, and maybe a third, before returning home from a different airport. Layer that idea over a road trip, where, with good planning, the distance between cities can be capped to a manageable car ride of up to three hours, and you start to see how adding two one-way tickets can broaden the trip. Picture this: Flying into New York City, making your way to Boston, and then continuing to Maine, which is where you fly home from.
Picking a larger city with a sizable airport to start and end your trip from means easy access to the usual bevy of car rental providers, so you can visit multiple locations without backtracking to your starting line. The most basic road trip doesn’t typically involve flying or a rental car, so traveling open jaw certainly adds cost. But we argue the benefits are worth it: You’ll see way more than you would from the driver’s seat of your car, and you’re never in the back long enough for the “Are we there yet?” to start creeping up. Besides, cramming adults (and maybe even a kid or two) into a car for hours sounds like a pressure cooker — if that appliance came with a side of overpriced Popeyes from the Grover Cleveland rest area off the Jersey Turnpike.
We’ve outlined a few epic travel routes that you could crush with little planning this summer. These itineraries start and end at sizable cities that serve as a base to land, rent (or, in some cases, return a rental) and then hop on a flight back home. And they work just as well if you reverse the bookends (just keep the town in the middle the same) to accommodate flights.
— Sal Vaglica
Trendy Nashville has been growing for years, and in 2022, the city added nearly 100 new residents a day. But Tennessee’s capital is also almost perfectly situated between Memphis and outdoor-centric Chattanooga. With the longest leg of this road trip lasting only about three hours in the car, traveling time in the car is kept to a minimum to see and do more in town.
New England
Perhaps second only to driving cross-country, a romp along the East Coast is a classic road trip route. Starting in Boston, when the city decamps to the Cape on weekends, you’ll find fewer crowds, but ending in Portland does require booking ahead of time as peak lobster season starts in late June. Between the two, spend some time in a classic, New England ski town with plenty of reasons to visit off-season.
When it comes to landscapes, there might not be a more diverse region in the upper 48 than a ride from northern California up into Canada. Easy-to-reach Seattle and the international feel of Vancouver, British Columbia bookend this route, with a stop over to check out big mountain views and outdoor adventures in Bellingham.