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The Ultimate Motorcycle Road Trip Across the US

Posted by Karl Steinmeyer on Aug 7th 2015

Following up to the 50 tips for motorcycling across the US, I began to wonder just how many miles would you really need to ride to visit all the 48 connected states. (Hawaii and Alaska are not going to make the agenda on this adventure.) 

After spending a few hours trying to develop a trip on Google Maps myself, I began to wonder if I was the only one who had tried to put together this sort of plan. What I discovered was not only did someone complete this task ahead of me, they did it using machine learning. 

Using a Python script with data from Google Maps API this guy calculated the distances of 2,500 routes between the 50 US landmarks. From there, he used a genetic algorithm to visualize the most efficient route.

Enter Randy Olson.

"What I've been trying to do on my blog is make machine-learning problems more accessible," Randal Olson. SoDiscovery news correspondent Tracy Staedter proposed him interesting idea. 

Why not take a note from a Where’s Waldo article and go on the ultimate road trip across the United States? 

During this trip there would be a visit to every state. Visiting every state has been something that I always wanted to do so I was up for this the second I stopped fantasizing about it. 

Note: If you are not interested in some of the technical details of my journey then skip down to Road trip stopping at major United States landmarks. That section is near the bottom.

Planning the Road Trip

One of the most challenging things of this trip was planning the stops. It was hard to put together a road trip that would be interesting to everyone. To make the trip interesting Tracy developed a couple of rules.

  1. The trip must have a least one stop in each of the 48 contiguous United States.
  2. The trip would stop at some national landmarks including the National Natural Landmark, Historic Sites, National Parks, and Monuments.
  3. The trip has to be a car trip and cannot travel outside of the United States.
  4. There were 50 major landmarks outside of Hawaii and Alaska but including Washington D.C and two in California that the Discovery News wanted me to visit.
  5. The results of this trip would show some inner city sights, historical sites, and some of the natural wonders this country has to offer. I had to find a path to cover everything that would be the most efficient route.

Completing the United States Road Trip

The first step was to find the distance from landmark to landmark when taking the trip on the road. There is not a straight line between the landmarks so it was a challenge to find the shortest route using the roads. We used Google Maps to get directions between two of the landmarks, and used over 2,500 different sets of direction to get the distance between 50 landmarks. This was a large task. Google Maps API was free to use so it was easy to calculate the distance between all of the landmarks as well as the driving time.

With the 2,500 distance from landmark to landmark we had to figure out what order to visit them in to keep the shortest distance between landmarks. This meant to find the route with as little backtracking as possible. This was difficult when visiting he Northeast and the state of Florida.

If you did some of the math on the computer you may find the best route is 9.64 X 1054 years. This is well after the Sun has entered the stage of being a Red Giant. This will why Google maps only showed some of the best routes. Unless you pay for the best way across country it was going to take some more math to figure it out.

This problem was so big that one cannot help but to make fun of it. We needed a simpler answer to take the road trip of a lifetime. In order to find the best route between landmarks Randy developed an algebra problem and used random solutions and continued to examine them in order to find the best route.

Landmark Road Trip Across the United States

The trip would cover 13,699 miles.

Note: There is an extra stop in Cleveland between Vermont and Michigan to stay in the United States. This would avoid going into Canada even though it would have been a more direct route.


Click on the map for the Interactive Version


Best Route

Without considering traffic the road trip would take 224 hours of driving time. It would take around two to three months to complete. You could start at any point as long as you follow the directions from that point on. You will be able to stop at every major landmark and you will not spend more time than needed driving through cornfields in the Midwest.

Here are the landmarks:

  • The Grand Canyon in Arizona
  • Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah
  • Craters of the Moon National Park in Indiana
  • The famed Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming
  • Pikes Peak in Colorado
  • Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
  • The historic Alamo in Texas
  • The Platt Historic District in Oklahoma
  • Toltec Mounds back in Arkansas
  • Graceland (Elvis’ home) in Tennessee
  • Vicksburg National Military Park is Mississippi
  • New Orleans, French Quarter in Louisiana
  • USS Alabama in Alabama
  • The famed Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida
  • Okefenokee Swamp Park, Georgia
  • Fort Sumter National Monument in South Carolina
  • Lost Worlds Caverns, West Virginia
  • Wright Brothers National Memorial Visiting Center in North Carolina
  • Mount Vernon, Virginia
  • The White House in Washington D.C
  • The Colonial Annapolis Historic District in Maryland
  • New Castle Historic District, Delaware
  • Cape May Historic District in New Jersey
  • The Liberty Bell in Pennsylvania
  • The famed Statue of Libery in New York
  • Mark Twain’s House and Museum in Connecticut
  • The Breakers in Rhode Island
  • USS Constitution in Massachusetts
  • Acadia National Park in Maine
  • Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire
  • Shelburne Farms in Vermont
  • Fox Theater in Detriot Michigan
  • Spring Grove Cemetery in Ohio
  • The Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky
  • The West Baden Spring Hotel in Indianan
  • Abraham Lincoln’s Home in Illinois
  • Gateway Arch, Montana
  • C.W. Parker Carousel Museum in Kansas
  • Terrance Hill Governor's Mansion in IA
  • Talisin in Wisconsin
  • Fort Snelling in Montana
  • Ashfall Fossil Bed in Nebraska
  • The famed Mount Rushmore in South Dakota
  • Fort Union Trading Post in North Dakota
  • Glacier National Park in MT
  • Hanford Site, Washington
  • Columbia River Highway in Oregon
  • San Francisco Cable Cars in California
  • The San Andres Fault in California
  • Hoover Dam in Nevada

If you like the city life than the trip above may not appeal to you. If you love the outdoors then this is a trip for you. 

Popular Cities for a Road Trip

This route covered the major landmarks in the country. There are some great cities that you may want to visit along the way.

Click on the map for the Interactive Version

Some cities in North Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia were missing from this trip. Out of the top 400 cities in this country these states did not make the list. This may be odd because Flint, MI was on the list and that cities ranked 7th in the country for the most crime committed.

Here is a Full List of Great US Cities to visit:

  • Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
  • Wichita, Kansas
  • Denver, Colorado
  • Albuquerque, New Mexico
  • Phoenix, Arizona
  • Las Vegas, Nevada
  • San Francisco, California
  • Portland, Oregon
  • Seattle, Washington
  • Boise, Idaho
  • Park City, Utah
  • Jackson, Wyoming
  • Billings, Montana
  • Sioux Falls, Sotuh Dakota
  • Omaha, Nebraska
  • Des Moines, Iowa
  • Minneapolis, Minnesota
  • Milwaukee, Wisconsin
  • Chicago, Illinois
  • Indianapolis, Indiana
  • Louisville, Kentucky
  • Columbus, Ohio
  • Detriot, Michigan
  • Cleveland, Ohio
  • Manchester, New Hampshire
  • Portland, Maine
  • Boston, Massachusetts
  • Providence, Rhode Island
  • New Haven, Connecticut
  • New York City in New York
  • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  • Wilmington, Delaware
  • Baltimore, Maryland
  • Washington DC (nations capital)
  • Virginia Beach, Virginia
  • Charlotte, North Carolina
  • Charleston, South Carolina
  • Orlando, Florida
  • Atlanta, Georgia
  • Nashville, Tennessee
  • Birmingham, Alabama
  • Jackson , Mississippi
  • New Orleans, Louisiana
  • Houston, Texas
  • Little Rock , Arkansas
  • Branson, Missouri

Here is the full list of Optimized Road Trips.

This trip especially was interesting to me, as I live in Michigan.

Pure Michigan Road Trip - optimized

Click on the map for the Interactive Version

Summing it Up

A planned out road trip can help you get to see things that you thought you would never see. When riding a trip of this scope on a motorcycle - planning and packing are essential to a successful trip. While it would be "fun" to go ahead and try and wing it out there for a few months, I'll save that for the weekenders.

Have a Happy Trip. 

The original article "Computing the optimal road trip across the U.S." by Randy Olson on March 8, 2015 can be found here.

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