How it works

Every route on this site follows real roads, and every 2026 trip is proven to be the fastest possible order for its stops.

Where do the drive times come from?

The routes run on the road map of OpenStreetMap, the free world map that volunteers keep up to date. Drive times come from that road network, so they follow actual highways and speed limits rather than straight lines on a map. Cars have a pesky habit of staying on roads.

Each stop leads you to the place a car can actually pull in, usually a visitor center or the main parking lot. A few stops are islands: the Statue of Liberty, Fort Sumter, Mackinac Island, and Channel Islands, Dry Tortugas and Isle Royale national parks. For those, the route takes you to where you park for the boat, and the ride out is part of the visit.

Drive times assume no traffic and don't count the time you spend at each stop.

The real trip map around Yellowstone: the park's photo marker at its center and the route ending at Old Faithful West Parking — The drive ends where a car can pull in. For Yellowstone that's the Old Faithful West parking lot.

How do we know a route is the fastest?

Finding the fastest loop through 49 stops is a famous puzzle in math, called the traveling salesman problem. The number of possible orders runs 62 digits long, so no computer could ever try them all.

It doesn't have to. The solver starts by working out the least driving time any loop could possibly need. Then it searches until it finds a loop that hits that mark. Once it does, a faster loop can't exist. Then a separate method does the whole job again and has to land on the same answer.

That's what "proven optimal" means here. The 2015 maps came close to the best route. The 2026 trips are the best route.

12,413,915,592,536,072,670,862,289,047,373,375,038,521,486,354,677,760,000,000,000

Possible orders for the 49 landmark stops

Even at a billion orders a second, checking them all would take about 4 times 10 to the power of 44 years. The Sun will have burned out long before then.

The 2026 U.S. Landmarks trip is the proven fastest: 13,801 miles and 274 hours of driving.

How were the landmarks chosen?

Each state's landmark is the place travel writers name most often. I gathered 14 published lists that each pick a top place in every state, from outlets like U.S. News & World Report, Reader's Digest and Fodor's. Then I counted the votes. The place named most often wins its state.

Every winner also had to work as a road-trip stop: open to the public, a single place rather than a whole city, and reachable by car or by a short boat ride from a parking lot.

Independence National Historical ParkPennsylvania, named on 13 of the 14 lists
French QuarterLouisiana, named on 12 of the 14 lists
Las Vegas StripNevada, named on 10 of the 14 lists

The 3 winners the lists named most often.

The national parks

There are 63 U.S. national parks. The 2026 trip visits all 51 in the lower 48 states, skipping only the parks in Alaska, Hawaii, American Samoa and the Virgin Islands. That's the 47 parks from the 2016 trip plus 4 created since: Gateway Arch, Indiana Dunes, White Sands and New River Gorge. Each park stop is a main visitor center, and each one has notes on seasons and access.

All 51 park stops. The 4 parks created since the 2016 trip are labeled.

How does the trip builder work?

When you build your own trip, the search for the best order runs right in your browser, and it proves its answer the same way. Nothing gets sent to a server, and you don't need an account. You can pick as many stops as you like, and even the full list solves in a few seconds on a phone.

1Arches National Park331 mi, 6 h 55 min to Grand Canyon National Park
2Grand Canyon National Park250 mi, 5 h 39 min to Zion National Park
3Zion National Park85 mi, 2 h 10 min to Bryce Canyon National Park
4Bryce Canyon National Park123 mi, 3 h 4 min to Capitol Reef National Park
5Capitol Reef National Park156 mi, 3 h 15 min to Canyonlands National Park
6Canyonlands National Park29 mi, 49 min to Arches National Park

The fastest loop through Utah's 5 national parks and the Grand Canyon: 974 miles and 21.9 hours of driving. Open it in the builder.

Credits

What	From	License
Road network, places, route data	© OpenStreetMap contributors	ODbL 1.0
Basemap tiles	Protomaps, from OpenStreetMap and Natural Earth	ODbL; public domain
In-browser route solver	HiGHS (highs-js)	MIT
Map rendering	MapLibre GL JS, PMTiles, the Protomaps basemap style	BSD-3-Clause
Map labels and icons	Noto Sans glyphs and icons from protomaps/basemaps-assets	OFL 1.1; MIT
Stop photos	The National Park Service and others (see the photo credits)	Mostly public domain; a few CC BY, credited
National park data	National Park Service API	Public domain
Type	Newsreader (Production Type); Overpass (Delve Withrington, Red Hat)	OFL 1.1
The 2015 projects	Dr. Randal S. Olson	Code MIT; writing CC BY 4.0

Downloaded route files (GPX, KML, GeoJSON) are derived from OpenStreetMap and carry the ODbL notice. If you reuse them, credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors" and share adapted databases under the ODbL. The posters are rendered maps (Produced Works under the ODbL) and carry the same credit.

Thanks to Bill Cook, whose 2015 work showed how close the original maps came to the best possible route, and whose research on the traveling salesman problem helped make exact answers practical.