One of the challenges for those of us living on the road is figuring out where to go next. For some road trippers, why not go to all of the lower 48?
For many road enthusiasts, the ultimate road trip is where you touch all of the lower 48 states. Some people have made a competition of trying to do it in 96 hours legally. There are others who like to try to set driving speed records but may have to wait for the statute of limitations to run out on their potential speeding fines. There are some who have taken the time to map out the route to make this possible. Perhaps there's also some debate about whether to just see all 48, or make a loop around and return to a particular destination along the route, which for the casual road tripper would seem a more plausible strategy.
If the goal is to visit all 48 states, you merely only need to go a little bit inside of the border, and not necessarily to a city. This will involve "clipping" a few states. Some take this to an extreme and use a driveway, but let's assume you want to stick to public roads. What are some good options? Needles, California is a good one, as you can go into the state from a city bridge, bypassing the "agriculture checkpoints" altogether. One good one we found was using Interstate 29 and State Highway 11 to clip North Dakota. The Four Corners monument is tempting, but out of the way and has a cost to it, so how about US routes 385 and 138 through Julesburg, Colorado? You'll pick up the other three easy enough on the basic route. There are a few others out there, just peruse a map.
In case any of you were wondering, Freedom Rolling doesn't have plans to do this sort of an adventure anytime soon, especially not against the clock. The subject just happened to come up during a forum discussion of road trips one day, and looking at a map. Draw it out yourself, and see what you come up with. Our original drawing is long gone, sadly, and was quite a bit inefficient, having to do some wackiness in order to reach Kentucky. The aforementioned "clips" were used, and perhaps we'll try drawing it our again in the future, though it looks like many other people and companies have taken quite a bit of time to optimize it.
So if your Internal Compass takes you on the road, and you don't know where to go, see it all.
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