Another Road Trip - Where to Next?

Not only did we recently spend time planning and prioritizing Blanche’s upfit, we also set up a firm schedule and narrowed down the options for our next road trip. I purchased a used copy of Road Trip USA by Jamie Jensen. It’s chock-a-block full of ideas and routes for “cross country adventures on America’s two-lane highways.” There are eleven routes in all. Some are long trips and some are short. Some travel north/south while others are east/west. Some are themed like following the Oregon Trail, the Appalachian Trail or the Great River Road, a route along the mighty Mississippi. Others are iconic like Route 66 – the Mother Road.

We read about each one and weighed the pros and cons of each. We’ll be traveling in the summertime, so we immediately ruled out southern routes and after some thought, all the north/south routes as well. Though we haven’t done the entire length of Route 66, we’ve done significant portions of it many times, so we ruled it out. We’ve also done major sections of the Loneliest Road (US50), especially the portions through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. It just didn’t appeal to our sense of adventure.

That left the Oregon Trail which sounded interesting, but upon further reading, it was the Great Northern that grabbed our attention. US-2 was named after the Great Northern the ‘pioneer railroad that parallels the western half of the route’. This 3600-mile journey, also known as the High Road, hugs our northern border and passes through thirteen states and two Canadian provinces.

The bright orange route shown above is the path of the Great Northern Auto Trail, aka US-2.

US-2 spans 2,571 miles and was designed to be separated into two segments in the original 1926 highway plan. The western section begins in Everett, Washington, and ends in St. Ignace, Michigan. The eastern segment begins in Rouses Point, New York, and ends at I-95 in Houlton, Maine. Various connector highways and roads in the US and in southern Ontario and Quebec, Canada account for the extra 1,000 miles of the total route.

Western terminus of US-2 in Everett, WA Photo credit: SounderBruce

Of note, ‘a large portion of the western segment of US 2, and a shorter piece of the eastern segment, follow the old Theodore Roosevelt International Highway. This auto trail… was organized in February 1919 to connect Portland, Maine with Portland, Oregon.’

The route will take us over the Cascade Range across the Great Plains, through the Great Northwoods, Michigan’s UP (Upper Peninsula where David’s mom was born), through Ottawa and Montreal, then back into the States near Lake Champlain, over the Green Mountains and the White Mountains and finally end at Acadia National Park. We’ll actually travel a bit further to Houlton, Maine, the official eastern terminus of US-2, and then return to Acadia NP for a few days. There are large stretches of nothing and several stretches of lots of something. We’ll explore and discover as we go.

Once we’re on the East Coast, we’re thinking we’d like to resume riding our bicycles on segments of the GART (Great American Rail-Trail) which begins in Washington, DC. We’ve done small sections of the route already in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. We’ll figure out the logistics of where to leave Blanche and how to retrieve her when we need to. We also haven’t decided on the autoroute home, but for sure, the Lincoln Highway, America’s first transcontinental autoroute from Times Square, New York to Lincoln Park in San Francisco is an option.

So, Blanche is nearly ready and so are we. We’ll be off soon. Join us! You’ll love the ride… and you won’t have to pay for the gas!