An American road trip is less about the destinations and more about the moment-to-moment discoveries: twisting coastal highways, mountain passes that feel infinite, and riverside roads that thread through history and culture. 

The 55 Best Road Trips in America from Reader’s Digest rounds up the country’s most compelling drives, from bucket-list classics to lesser-celebrated corridors. Whether you seek dramatic landscapes or cultural waypoints, the list offers routes that define what a great road trip feels like in the U.S.

For many travelers, the perfect road trip combines scenery, sense of place, and story. Some historic routes are as much cultural journeys as physical ones. Others bring you face-to-face with vast natural beauty — canyons, coastlines, mountains, rivers — that reward every mile behind the wheel. 

Here are five of the most celebrated ways in America to see the country from the driver’s seat.