When you're in the driver's seat. the opportunities are epic on both sides of the country. But which freewheeling adventure is right for you? Our duelling experts help you decide.
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WEST COAST
By Amy Cooper
Imagine the quintessential American road trip: top down, music up and breeze in your hair as you steer your sweet ride along panoramic clifftops, surf beaches and mountain vistas. Basically, the world's sexiest car commercial. This, my fellow freewheelers, is the glorious, golden USA Pacific coast; perpetually sunny and picture-perfect star of movies, songs and stories, loved by Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Maya Angelou, and generations of pioneers and poets.
Nobody sang North Carolina Dreaming or wished they could all be Delaware girls. And in New York, there are only two reasons to get behind the wheel: an Uber surge, or masochism.
On the West Coast, all roads lead to Hollywood, and the most famous is the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), rolling through sun-kissed California's most spectacular scenery and made for a vintage Chevy with the Eagles on high rotation. The Golden State hugs the southern half of the 2550-kilometre US coastline between Mexico and Canada. To the north, the states of Oregon and Washington transport you to craggier territory with volcanic mountain ranges and vast redwood forests. If I had weeks, I'd do the whole shebang, starting with a sandy crawl up the PCH from San Diego, through eye-candy seaside villages like La Jolla Cove and Laguna Beach, to the bright lights of Los Angeles, dawdling at Santa Monica and Malibu.
Beyond the City of Angels, Big Sur's soaring cliffs, rugged mountains and redwood canyons inspired serial road tripper Jack Kerouac to write: "The beauty of Big Sur is so overwhelming that it can leave you speechless."
The PCH crosses Monterey's famous 80-metre-high Bixby Creek Bridge, featured in the opening credits of Big Little Lies; a dress rehearsal for San Francisco's even more magnificent Golden Gate Bridge, two hours or so to the north. Drive on through Marin County, where the remote rocky headlands of Point Reyes shelter the charismatic elephant seal. In Portland, Oregon, you should probably park. America's craft beer capital has more than 70 breweries and hosts the country's largest annual outdoor craft beer festival. Further north, in Washington, you'll be sleepless in Seattle after a caffeine crawl around the 200-plus roasters in the world's coffee capital.
Nobody sang North Carolina Dreaming or wished they could all be Delaware girls.
But here's the west's real liquid gold: California, Oregon and Washington produce 90 per cent of America's wine, in its most celebrated vineyards. Turn your road trip into a grape escape, tasting through epic regions like Washington's Puget Sound, Oregon's Willamette Valley, and the Californian greats: Sonoma Country, Napa Valley and more.
When you add stunning ocean sunsets to all that wine, wilderness and wonder, there's only one way to point your wheels: west is best.
EAST COAST
By Mal Chenu
The world thinks of the US as one big country, and it mostly is, with the national anthem belted out daily, the stars and stripes flying from flagpoles across the land, and that well-known general attitude of American exceptionalism.
But spend some time on the ground - particularly off the beaten track - and you quickly learn the important role that home towns, home counties and home states play in the domestic psyche. Rivalries rage, from pee-wee baseball to high school basketball, to the prettiest state bird to the best pies, chowder or succotash. (And no, I can't think of that word without adding "suffering" either, thank you very much, Mel Blanc and Sylvester J Pussycat.)
It is this passionate parochial parish-patriotism that makes road trips on the East Coast so enthralling. For a start, the variety extends to 14 East Coast states, whereas the West Coast has only three. In fact, if you drive the whole so-fabled Bug Sur (which is bumper-to-bumper in summer and frequently closed in winter due to mud slides), you never leave California. And drilling down further, the east has many multiples: more cities, towns, villages and hamlets, each with individual charm and a local dish of estimable pride.
While there are countless routes to choose from, a vivid starting point in space and time is New England in the autumn, when the leaves turn. You could start in the far north-east in Maine and be the first in the country to see the sunrise in Acadia National Park before breakfasting on a lobster roll.
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From the leafy north-east, head south and check out the big cities - Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC - before swinging inland through Virginia to check out the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. Then make a left and trek back through the Carolinas towards the coast and stop in Charleston and Savannah, Georgia, before the final southern push into Florida and your encounters with Daytona Beach, Miami, the Everglades National Park and Florida Keys. Or you could get off the main roads, do a completely different itinerary and still have an awesome American adventure. That's the beauty of this infinitely more interesting side of the country.
Whatever your route, you'll be immersed in absorbing history, gorgeous scenery and fascinating regional cuisine, such as steamed cheeseburgers in Connecticut, shoofly pie in Pennsylvania, livermush in North Carolina (yes, it's exactly as bad as it sounds), chicken mull in Georgia and Key Lime pie, the official state pie of Florida.
If you do the West Coast, especially in the south, your regional American cuisine is Mexican. But even if you're not worried about gastronomic engagement, there's still plenty of barren, scorpion-infested desert wasteland to explore out west.
