Truckers spend up to 70 hours a week on the road. As they crisscross North America, they witness unforgettable scenery, a fantastic benefit of a career in the trucking industry.
The team at Financial Fuel Service is ranking our favorite scenic highways in North America. Here’s a look at our top three.
1.) Route 66
Known as the Mother Road, Route 66 begins at Adams Street and Michigan Avenue, travels 2,400 miles across the Midwest and Southwest, and ends near Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles.
When the Bureau of Public Roads launched the nation’s first federal highway system in 1926, the organization connected municipal, county, and state roads to create Route 66. The new highway stimulated the economies of rural towns, increasing the availability of lodging, fuel stations, and roadside dining.
Route 66 tours the remarkable geographic diversity of the Midwest and Southwest: prairies, rolling hills, plains, farmland, and barren painted deserts. Though the natural scenery is what may attract many tourists to this road, the American history it features is what is unique: vintage motels and diner and early 20th boom towns.
2.) Route 1
The longest north-south highway in the United States, Route 1 starts on the northern border of Maine, passes through 15 states, and ends in Key West. In the mid-1920s, the federal government was transitioning to using named highways to numbered highways. Route 1 more or less follows the old Atlantic Highway, which traversed the original 13 colonies for three centuries.
In the Northeast, Route 1 allows road trippers to visit quaint, historic New England towns, their lighthouses, rocky jetties, and beaches.
3.) Blue Ridge Parkway
The Blue Ridge Parkway snakes through the Appalachian Mountains for nearly 500 miles, touring the forested mountain and deep, rocky canyons of Virginia and North Carolina.
At milepost 355.4, drivers can turn off the Blue Ridge Parkway and take NC 128 to the summit of Mt. Mitchell, the tallest in the eastern U.S. at 6,684 feet. At milepost 316.3, visitors can see the Grand Canyon of the Southern Appalachians, Linville Falls, in western North Carolina.
In the border region between North and South Carolina, Whitewater Falls, the highest waterfall east of the Rockies, plunges more than 400 feet, with its lower waterfall dropping another 400 feet.
The Blue Ridge Parkway also gives visitors a glimpse of Appalachian heritage, particularly the history of the region’s music at the Blue Ridge Music Center and the Birthplace of Country Music Museum.
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