If you are looking forward to taking off in August, but don’t have plans yet, you may want to consider taking a literary road trip across the United States.
The folks over at Atlas Obscura have created a detailed map with the routes that characters have taken across country from 12 different books including: Wild by Cheryl Strayed, On the Road by Jack Kerouac and The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, among others. Check it out:
The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times.