6 Fantastic Fall Road Trips

Travel writers share the routes, roads and destinations that stand out

AARP

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Published August 10, 2023

/ Updated September 19, 2024

a road running through fall foliage in new england

Visitors can enjoy stunning fall foliage in Windsor, Vermont.

Ron Karpel / Getty Images

Fall is a magical time of year. When the temperatures start to cool and the leaves begin to turn colors, it’s easy to feel inspired to get out in the world and witness the change of the season. Here, six travel writers describe their favorite road trips that stand out during the fall. Start planning your autumn adventure now.

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U.S. Civil Rights Trail from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama

Bend, Oregon, to Crater Lake National Park, Oregon

Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Hanover to Plainfield, New Hampshire

Fairbanks to Anchorage, Alaska

The Lake Tahoe scenic drive, Lake Tahoe, California

U.S. Civil Rights Trail from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama

the city of alabama and inset writer heather greenwood davis and her son cameron

Writer Heather Greenwood Davis traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, with her son Cameron.

Carmen K. Sisson/Cloudybright / Alamy Stock Photo / Courtesy of Heather Greenwood Davis

In 2018, the year my son Cameron turned 13, I took him to Alabama. Martin Luther King Jr. quotes rolled out across his screens at key times of the year, but Cameron lacked any real grasp of the magnitude of the Civil Rights era. I was worried something was being lost, so when the opportunity to visit the state presented itself, I took him on a road trip through Birmingham and Montgomery.

The timing was perfect. The U.S. Civil Rights Trail had just launched. Today it includes more than 130 sites across 14 states and the District of Columbia. Our drive from Huntsville to Montgomery was easy enough.

The violent racial history of America wasn’t new to me, as part of a Black family, but it was comforting that along with houses and trucks bearing Confederate flags, I saw bumper stickers calling for civil rights protections. Cameron was oblivious to most of that. In full control of our travel playlist, he remained firmly focused on what was happening inside the car. I envied his innocence. That innocence was interrupted in Birmingham.

Barry McNealy of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute gave us a tour through the 16th Street Baptist Church and shared the story of the four schoolgirls — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair — killed by a Ku Klux Klan bombing as they prepared for Sunday school on Sept. 15, 1963. They were about Cameron’s age at the time of their death — a fact that hit us both hard. Across the street at Kelly Ingram Park, we saw sculptures and monuments meant to help visitors understand and remember the impact and sacrifice of youth during the movement. The long history of young activists changing the world wasn’t lost on my boy, who in the years to come would become an activist in his own right. Cameron still points to that day with McNealy as his favorite of our time together.

The learning continued in Montgomery and brought out a mix of emotions. We stood in awe at King’s pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and visited the home he lived in with his family from 1954 to 1960. We explored the Rosa Parks Museum, set in the very spot where she was famously arrested for refusing to give up her seat, and we marveled at her fortitude.

Perhaps the most emotional moment of our trip came at one of our last stops: a visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. There — as you walk through — 800 6-foot-tall columns increase in distance from the ground. By the time you reach the middle of the memorial for lynching victims, the pillars are dangling above you. The image of my little boy walking beneath the hanging pillars haunts me still.

My perpetually happy, swinging arms and bright smile of a son asked me questions on that trip that I had no answers to. I was grateful for the stops for tasty dinners, a space museum and butterfly-filled gardens across the state, for the space to discuss and deconstruct all that we were seeing. Grateful too that we’d opted for a bite-size introduction for this heavy experience.

Heather Greenwood Davis is a travel writer and TV personality based in Toronto.

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Bend, Oregon, to Crater Lake National Park, Oregon

a view of the caldera rim of crater lake national park in oregon inset writer crai s bower bicycling

The caldera of Crater Lake National Park in Oregon formed more than 7,500 years ago. Writer Crai S Bower enjoys the park.

Larry Geddis / Alamy Stock Photo / Courtesy of Crai S. Bower

Bend, Oregon, straddles the Deschutes River in the high desert within the shadow of the Cascade Mountains to the west and the northern edge of the Great Basin to the east. I first passed through Bend in the late 1980s. The logging town served as my last bastion of civilization, i.e., decent beer, before I headed off to study migratory birds at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, 162 miles to the east. Relocating to Bend never crossed my mind. Fast-forward 35 years, and it’s all I think about whenever I visit.

It isn’t just the decent beer, which is now beyond decent and on tap in more than 30 breweries across the city. It’s the endless amount of outdoor recreation surrounding the city.

Usually when I’m in town, I tackle the “Bend Trifecta”: gravel biking along a trail to fly-fish near Lava Island Falls on the Deschutes River after a morning round of golf at the Tetherow golf course. But one day, I decided to switch things up and make the drive to Crater Lake National Park.

Highway 97 offers the most direct route to Crater Lake, but I took my time — adding about four hours — to explore the 66-mile-long Cascade Lakes National Scenic Byway (Forest Route 46) from Bend to Crescent. The route winds past lakes, Cascade peaks and meadows filled with Douglas asters and other seasonal wildflowers. From Crescent, I followed Highway 97 for 43 miles to the national park.

Crater Lake is the deepest lake in America, about 1,943 feet. The partially filled caldera formed when Mount Mazama imploded 7,700 years ago. Surrounded by mountain peaks, many capped with freshly fallen snow, the lake can be seen from 30 overlooks along Rim Drive. It’s easy to spend hours stopping at uncrowded overlooks for different views of the water. I hiked the advanced 1.1-mile Cleetwood Cove Trail down to the lake’s shore where I could easily lose myself in the cerulean water.

At sunset, the autumn chill, downright cool on Rim Drive at 6,560 feet, meant it was time to head to the Crater Lake Lodge, a grand timber structure that opened in 1915. Like other Western national park lodges, it’s known for its dining room with astounding views. But Crater Lake Lodge may offer the best vista of all the lodges. My pan-roasted steelhead trout dinner is somewhat lost in the sapphire blue water shimmering in the autumn breeze below me.

Crai S Bower writes and photographs stories for numerous publications, including EnRoute, AAA Journey and The Saturday Evening Post.

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Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

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A trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, brought Sheeka Sanahori, center with her son, up close to the city her parents, pictured here, told her about while she was growing up.

Getty Images; Courtesy Sheeka Sanhori

My eyes darted back and forth between the serene hills of Mexico’s Central Highlands and the highway that cut a winding path between the arched peaks. It was mid-November 2019, and my 3-year-old son was in his car seat in the back of the rental car, my mom sitting next to him. My dad sat in the front passenger seat next to me. The drive began on a bustling freeway, but traffic slackened as we got farther into it.

I was doing my best to drive cautiously, to put my parents at ease as I drove through a foreign country, but I couldn’t help but occasionally peek at the arid terrain around us. Inside the car, the mood was full of anticipatory excitement. Keeping a 3-year-old occupied with songs and toys was the focus, but thoughts remained on reaching the destination ahead.

We’d left the busy highways of Mexico City after a brief stay, before driving about four hours north toward the real purpose for our trip. For my parents, the road to San Miguel de Allende represented a nostalgic drive through the memory of their early years together. I was tagging along to merely soak up some of their world before I came into it.

In the late 1970s, before I was born, my parents moved to Durango, Mexico. My mom taught first grade and my dad coached basketball. A successful championship win at their first school led to a job opportunity at the private American school in Querétaro. When they moved, they chose to live an hour north in the historic town of San Miguel.

My childhood was filled with stories of the wondrous old city, its cobblestone streets, baroque architecture and the painters and writers from around the world who called it home. Thanks to the stories I heard around the dinner table and the photographs of colonial churches that hung on the walls of my childhood home, I could almost picture San Miguel.

It had been 38 years since my parents stepped foot in their beloved San Miguel, but they were hopeful that it would look the same. In 2008, UNESCO recognized the city as a World Heritage Site, so there was a better chance that memories of their old apartment, their favorite watering hole and the iconic salmon-hued Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, the church at the city center, would be just as they remembered.

Once we reached the city limits, we parked at an overlook to take in the whole of the city. It was a cloudy day, but the sun still felt bright on our shoulders. My parents, both in their 70s, carefully shuffled to the iron fence that safely corralled tourists away from the cliff’s edge, then turned their faces to me so I could snap their picture.

The memories of San Miguel began to sharpen as the city lay at their backs, and with it came the heartbreak of a city that had moved on without them. San Miguel had grown; it was more sprawling than they remembered. The next day, as we walked through the neighborhood of their first apartment, they realized it looked so unfamiliar, even the sidewalk once used for daybreak strolls to the bakery was unrecognizable.

But San Miguel’s El Jardin, the park square at the city center, was exactly as it always had been: the brick path lined with neatly manicured laurel trees providing shade for wrought iron benches. Names on the brightly-colored stores surrounding the square had changed, but the concrete facades remained immutable. And the emblematic neo-Gothic parish continues to watch over visitors to the square, be they residents, tourists or those who have loved San Miguel as both.

Sheeka Sanahori is a freelance travel journalist and video producer. She writes about family travel, ancestry travel, food and the South.

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Hanover to Plainfield, New Hampshire

the historic cornish windsor covered bridge in new hampshire

The historic Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge connects with Vermont.

Craig Zerbe / Getty Images

When I was growing up in New Hampshire, fall was my favorite season. There’s nothing better than a crisp New England fall morning, when mist hovers above the ground as the sun peeks through the trees. Spring is supposed to be the season of renewal, but for me, it’s when the green leaves of summer turn yellow, red and orange and cool mornings give way to warm afternoons.

I’ve taken many fall road trips, and one of my favorites is when my adult daughter and I visited Windsor, Vermont, and Cornish, New Hampshire. We began our day trip in our hometown of Hanover, New Hampshire, the picturesque home of Dartmouth College and a beautiful destination in its own right (about 125 miles north of Boston). Hanover sits about midway up the state on the banks of the Connecticut River, which separates New Hampshire from Vermont.

We crossed the river into Norwich, Vermont, where we stopped at Dan & Whit’s general store for coffee. The store’s motto is “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it,” and that’s not just a marketing slogan. The deceptively small entrance opens to aisles that snake behind the butcher’s counter and up and down ramps to shelves stocked with everything from maple candy and baked goods to hiking boots and fishing gear.

About a mile down the road, we hopped onto Interstate 91 South and drove about 20 minutes to Windsor — the “birthplace of Vermont.” One of the joys of driving in Vermont is that billboards are banned, so there is nothing to spoil the gorgeous views.

Our first stop was Artisans Park. We ordered a craft beer at Harpoon Brewery Taproom and Beer Garden and watched master glassblowers at work at Simon Pearce. There’s also a distillery, preserves and cheese shops, plus outdoor dining, cornhole, badminton and a playground, making the park the perfect destination for multigenerational families. Adventurous travelers can book day or overnight river trips at Great River Outfitters.

Heading south on Route 5, we had sweeping views of the foliage just across the river in New Hampshire, passing Mount Ascutney State Park (popular with hikers and hang gliders) on our way to the American Precision Museum. Housed in an 1846 armory building, the museum has the largest collection of historically significant machine tools in the country.

We crossed back into New Hampshire over the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge (1866) and headed north on Route 12A. Within five minutes, we reached Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park, the former home of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who established Cornish as an art colony in the late 19th century (attracting, among others, painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish). Visitors can tour the house, other historic buildings and art exhibits, and stroll along numerous walking trails.

Our last stop was Riverview Farm in Plainfield for the quintessential autumn experience of picking apples and finding our way through a corn maze. We topped it off with a cup of hot cider and a maple doughnut in the late afternoon sun, just as we did when I was a kid.

Jaimie Seaton has lived in and reported from South Africa, the Netherlands, Singapore and Thailand. She’s written on travel for Skift, The Independent and CNN.

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Fairbanks to Anchorage, Alaska

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A first-time trip to Alaska showcased fall colors set against rugged mountainous landscapes. Writer Gwen Pratesi and her husband, Roger, hiked the Root Glacier.

Courtest Gwen Pratesi; Riverbed Productions

A road trip with my husband from Fairbanks, Alaska, down through the Kenai Peninsula and on to Anchorage in late August 2017 changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. It fostered a love for a place so different from the rest of the U.S. and so far away from home. Although my husband had traveled to Alaska several times before, it was my first trip to the state known as The Great Land. During our 10-day adventure, I was overcome by the boundless beauty and wilderness. We drove along extensive stretches of nearly empty roads, flew across remote lands and stopped at almost every turn to take photos.

I had never seen fall’s brilliant colors, which show up in mid- to late-August in Alaska, set against rugged mountainous landscapes like these — some still snow-capped from the previous winter. A kaleidoscope of colors was painted across the valleys and tundra, from yellows and golds to reds and purples. I also learned that a fall trip to Alaska brings much more than autumn colors and a brisk chill in the air. We discovered the rapid change in seasons from summer to fall with early closures of major attractions, lodges and outfitters, visiting them on the last few days of their summer season. We also had the opportunity to view the northern lights, one of the highlights of our trip.

In the early morning hours in Fairbanks and in the small village of Copper Center, we were treated to magical displays of the aurora borealis dancing across the clear night sky. It was early in the aurora season in Fairbanks, which extends from Aug. 21 to April, but the stars seemed to align for us to witness the phenomena for the first time during our last night in Fairbanks and again as we headed toward Anchorage.

In Alaska, “road trips” frequently involve bush planes, helicopters, ferries or boats to reach remote destinations, as most of the state’s communities (approximately 80 percent) are inaccessible by road. From Copper Center, we flew by small plane to the small village of McCarthy, located outside of Kennicott.

We were mesmerized by the scenery during the flight as we flew through the mountains and over glaciers into Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve, the largest national park in the U.S., to visit the Kennicott Glacier Lodge. Hiking the Root Glacier, one of the few that are easily accessible in Alaska, was another first as we strapped on crampons (traction devices you attach to your hiking boots to walk on ice and snow) and set out for a 4-mile round-trip hike to see the eerily blue ice caverns. I also explored the Kennecott Copper Mine, which ceased operations in 1938, and became a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

The Alaska Marine Highway from Valdez to Whittier was another off-road side trip, taking the ferry ride aboard MV Aurora with the car across the rainy, foggy and very choppy Prince William Sound. While not a perfect sunny fall day, we were still able to view some of the marine life, including a few whales, sea otters and Steller’s sea lions perched along the rocky coastline. After disembarking, we hit our last stretch of roadway by car from Whittier, which afforded impressive views of the Chugach Mountains and Turnagain Arm along the Seward Highway en route to Anchorage.

My road trip to Alaska in 2017 inspired a fascination with and love for the state, resulting in many return trips during every season throughout the last eight years. After these visits and gaining an appreciation for this special place, I can see myself living there — and have an undeniable connection to this great land, its natural beauty and the people who call Alaska home.

Gwen Pratesi is a James Beard Award finalist in journalism and an award-winning travel journalist based in Florida. Her work appears in many publications, including U.S. News & World Report, The Points Guy, Cruise Critic, Travel + Leisure, Garden & Gun, Frommer’s and others.

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The Lake Tahoe scenic drive, Lake Tahoe, California

scenic lake tahoe and inset writer christopher hall

The scenic drive around Lake Tahoe includes mountain-and-lake vistas that left a strong impression on writer Christopher Hall.

Dennis Frates / Alamy Stock Photo / Mac McKenzie

Years ago, on a crisp October afternoon near Lake Tahoe, North America’s largest alpine lake, I witnessed a true wonder.

Flame red kokanee, dwarf freshwater salmon, were returning from Tahoe to Taylor Creek, where they were born. Watching them struggle upstream, I knew that eagles and merganser ducks would eat some before they reached their goal. Others would complete the journey, spawn and — exhausted, their life cycle done — dissolve back into the waters from which they first emerged.

Something about that autumn afternoon — the mysterious force impelling the fish onward, the honey-thick light bathing Tahoe and its ring of soaring peaks, the way the aspens shimmied like dancers covered in a thousand gold coins — touched me deeply. After more than 50 years of visiting Lake Tahoe in all seasons, it remains a lasting memory from a favorite fall road trip destination, a 3.5-hour straight shot on Interstate 80 from my San Francisco home.

Autumn is a quiet time at Lake Tahoe, the 6,223-foot-high sapphire-and-turquoise jewel of the Sierra Nevada that straddles the California-Nevada state line.

The sun-and-sand crowds of summer are gone, and you can almost hear a clock ticking down to the first snows of late November, when skiers and boarders start to arrive en masse for the winter-spring fun.

Even leaf peepers are scarce, most of them preferring more colorful destinations than Tahoe’s vast basin, which is largely covered in evergreen forest dotted here and there with aspen stands. Lodging and restaurants are easy to book, and traffic thins on the scenic drive around Tahoe, a stunning, 72-mile succession of sweeping mountain-and-lake vistas and peekaboo water views through the trees. The world temporarily forgets about Tahoe, and that’s fine by me.

Tahoe’s daytime air temperature begins its slow slide from the 70s into the 40s as the season progresses.

I love the softly popping fires that make chilly, starry nights cozy, and the lumberjack-size breakfast of a smoked salmon omelet or buckwheat pancakes from the homey Fire Sign Cafe to fuel a long hike or bike ride around town. On the occasional rainy day, I love to study the exquisite work of early 20th-century Washoe weavers at the Marion Steinbach Native American Basket Museum, or the Lake Tahoe History Museum’s funky collection of gambling memorabilia, a nod to the casinos that still flourish on the northern and southern ends of the lake’s Nevada side.

During one of my most memorable trips, on a late October afternoon a few years before I witnessed the stirring return of the kokanee, I drove a near-empty Highway 89 along Tahoe’s west shore to Ed Z’Berg Sugar Pine Point State Park. There, while walking through fragrant pine forest, I came upon aspens that had recently shed all their leaves, paving the trail with gold. It was a startling, beautiful sight but, more than that, a reminder that autumn in the high country is fleeting. Catch it while you can, before winter roars in, and like the last notes of a soulful cello sonata, hold its feel close.

San Francisco journalist Christopher Hall has covered cultural topics for a wide variety of national publications, including Smithsonian, Architectural Digest, National Geographic Traveler, Saveur and The New York Times.

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Editor's note: This article was originally published on August 10, 2023. It has been updated to reflect new information.

6 Fantastic Fall Road Trips

Travel writers share the routes, roads and destinations that stand out

U.S. Civil Rights Trail from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama

Bend, Oregon, to Crater Lake National Park, Oregon

Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Hanover to Plainfield, New Hampshire

Fairbanks to Anchorage, Alaska

The Lake Tahoe scenic drive, Lake Tahoe, California

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