Some road trips are about getting somewhere. Others are the somewhere. The Mercury News put together a list of ten American drives that fall squarely into the second group, and I read it nodding the whole way through like the writer was reading my trail journal back to me.

The piece doesn't give much away in the summary, just ten drives where the road itself is the destination, but that framing is what I love. It treats the driving as the activity, not the commute. A lot of people never make that shift in their heads. You don't rush a road like Going-to-the-Sun. You crawl it, you stop at every pullout, you let a mountain goat back up traffic for twenty minutes and you don't even mind.

Since I can't tell you exactly which ten made their cut, I'll tell you which drives I'd put on any list like this. Highway 1 down the California coast, for one. And I've said this before and I'll keep saying it: drive it southbound so the ocean stays on your side the whole way. Pulling out across oncoming traffic to gawk at Big Sur is how people die. Southbound you just drift right into the overlooks. Easiest upgrade anyone can make to that trip, and it costs nothing.

A few of my own rules for drives like these. Plan twice the time you think you need, because the stops are the trip. Check road status the morning of; Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier can hold snow into July, and I learned that one the hard way, sitting in West Glacier eating huckleberry ice cream for three hours waiting on a plow. Pack real layers even in summer. Mountain passes make their own weather, and a beautiful August morning at the trailhead can be a soggy windy mess at 6,000 feet by lunch. Ask me about the ridge trail sometime. Actually, don't.

The Overseas Highway out to Key West gets a mention from me every time this subject comes up, because it's the one drive that feels like flying. A little over a hundred miles of bridges and open water between Key Largo and Key West, turquoise on both sides. Go early. The afternoon sun flattens the water and the traffic thickens, and early morning you get the pelicans working the shallows while the road's still quiet.

And Scenic Byway 12 in Utah might be the most underrated stretch of pavement in the country. It runs roughly 124 miles between Torrey and Panguitch, climbing over Boulder Mountain and dropping through red rock canyons that look fake in photos and somehow bigger in person. You can link it to Bryce and Capitol Reef without really trying. That's a week, easily.

The whole list is worth a read if you're mapping out fall, which is really the best season for most of these. Maple and oak color lighting up the Blue Ridge, cottonwoods turning in Utah, empty pullouts in Glacier after the summer crowds clear out.

When's the last time you took a drive with nowhere to be at the end of it? Ten routes like these are a good place to start fixing that.