10 Correspondents, 10 Drives

California
Route 1

The Pacific Coast Highway, which runs along much of the California coast, is probably one of the most iconic stretches of road in the country, memorialized in film, sought out by tourists. My favorite stretch is in Malibu, 25 miles or so of highway that will reward you with a sunny blur of California coast: beaches, mountains, ocean, wetlands and surfers.

Driving north out of Santa Monica on Route 1 (or the P.C.H. as it known here), the highway’s charms are hidden at first. You will pass “Millionaire’s Row,” home to the likes of David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose deceptively modest houses are hidden by shrubs. Traffic should ease once you pass Malibu Lagoon State Beach. But don’t pass it. Stop and walk the boardwalks that crisscross the lagoon, then head out to the beach to watch surfers tackle what many view as the best waves in the United States.

From here, the coastline reveals itself at every turn and over every hill: sparkling surf on your left, green hills and red cliffs on your right. Pay the fee and park at Point Dume State Beach, which, with its soaring cliffs and dolphins and sea lions splashing in the water, is hard to beat on a clear morning. (But beatable it is: go at sunset). Dawn or dusk, take the well-marked trail at the end of the parking lot to the top of the cliff.

El Matador Beach, up the road, is an otherworldly, secluded patch of rock formations, pools and sandy coves. Be forewarned, though, that you have to walk down a lot of steps to reach it. For a dramatic return, take Route 23 through the Santa Monica Mountains back to Los Angeles — a curvy, ear-popping, heart-stopping 14 miles or so. It spills out onto Highway 101, a return to what is probably what you think of when you think of Los Angeles. But after this drive you will never think of the city that way again.
— ADAM NAGOURNEY

Colorado
Highway 285

In the best rock songs, which are also by no coincidence the best driving songs, there’s a moment when all the gears come into play — a pause just before the chorus when everything in the universe seems, for the briefest of moments, to expand and your scalp tingles and lifts a millimeter toward infinity.

U.S. Highway 285 in Colorado hits that perfect note at Kenosha Pass, when after roughly 65 miles of circuitous if not tedious two-lane mountain driving heading southwest from Denver, you come around a bend and, without warning, roar down into the high, vast expanse of the South Park Valley.

For emotional and psychological wallop, there is nothing like South Park: 900 square miles of mostly treeless alpine beauty — 9,000 feet in elevation or better on the valley floor, ringed by mountains higher still that hold their snowpack like a grudge. The poet Walt Whitman stopped at Kenosha on a trip west in 1879.

“The whole Western World is, in a sense, but an expansion of these mountains,” he wrote in his journal during a stop overlooking the valley.

Decades before the first windmilled power chord, Whitman’s words sent scalps tingling in expanded consciousness.
— KIRK JOHNSON

Georgia
Highway 441

Finding the old South in the South isn’t always easy, which is what makes a little stretch of Highway 441 east of Atlanta so sweet.

The trip starts in Athens, a college town not far from Atlanta whence sprang both R.E.M. and a fanatic creature known as the University of Georgia Bulldog fan.

In minutes you’re in the country, fruit stands popping up at reliable intervals. Boiled peanuts, peaches and mayhaw jelly comprise the holy trinity. The latter tastes like a cross between apples and strawberries, and is coaxed from red berries that grow in the swamps in the spring.

Your essential pit stop is Reed’s Odds & Ends, where the bathrooms are clean and the Cokes are cold. It’s like a big country garage sale and church fund-raiser all mixed together. Load the car with quilts, vintage dinnerware, hubcaps and, perhaps, a ceramic dog.

The drive ends in Madison, one of the few places near Atlanta that weren’t burned during the Civil War. The town is small, but has about 100 restored antebellum homes.

After you look at how the kings and queens of cotton lived, drive just across the tracks to Adrian’s Place, a classic Southern meat-and-three, where a plate of fried chicken with yellow squash, collards and some peach cobbler will let you know you are, indeed, in the South.
— KIM SEVERSON

New York
Route 28

Carved out of the wild heart of upstate New York, Route 28 is shaped like a kindergartner’s C — wiggly, squiggly and questionably curved — looping north to south, from the Adirondacks all the way down to the Catskills. Quick it ain’t: a two-hour highway drive from Warrensburg to Kingston can take three times that long on Route 28.

But its pleasures are worth it. In the north, Route 28 meanders near lakes like George past ski joints like Gore. Its Adirondack portion crosses the churning headwaters of the Hudson River. Farther south, it passes by splotches of fresh water, tiny towns with names that tell you who lived there before (Indian Lake) and why (Old Forge), and skirts classic-sounding outposts like Utica and Rome. Then it drops down to Cooperstown, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, where legends like Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and George Herman Ruth, aka The Babe, have their plaques hung for all posterity.