Finding scenic routes

I have found that if you do a web search on "scenic roads" paired with a country name, you will get plenty of hits showing lists of scenic routes. That's how I found the National Tourist Routes in Norway and the Wild Atlantic Way in Ireland for our trips to those nations. I'll bet it works for many other places as well. There are also published books of the best scenic roads in the world. My wife likes to get those from the library and page through them as we are planning our trips abroad. Have fun.

The maps used for plotting driving routes on viamichelin.com highlight especially scenic roads in green. You'll probably have to zoom in quite a bit to see the green.

I believe the green may be shown on at least some other printed European maps. That's something you might look for when map-shopping.

Green scenic routes are common on almost all good printed atlases in Europe and the UK and Ireland.

Better than using computerised maps - Google and Michelin are pretty good - for the sort of planning you are doing is a good national atlas. The AA one is pretty good and fits in many car doors. The big flat one is way too big, and with far too few pages and therefore the scale is too big.

I’d check out the book DK Eyewitnesses Guide Back Roads Great Britton. I have used their Back Roads guide for Italy and was very pleased. They give smaller, scenic routes along with information on places on each route.

We rely on the DK Backroads series of books too. They're excellent. There are versions for Great Britain and Ireland and you can usually find used copies for just a few dollars on Amazon.

I'd also get the British AA road atlas. If you get the bigger size showing all the smaller roads it will also have the National Trust/National Heritage sites plus the smaller historical sites. I'd use this for planning as I agree with Nigel it's too big to carry unless you pull out the pages you'll need for your trip. If it's spiral bound you can undo the spiral when you're ready for travel.

I think you've probably got an AAA store in your area? I'd go by and see what they've got in their store so you can see what they look like in person.

One technique I've used is to program the GPS to avoid highways and/or tolls to test where that takes me. Sometimes the time I lose is too much but others I lose 1/2 hour or so and stay off the major highways.

There are also books and magazine articles on scenic drives. You could probably just Google "scenic drives in x" and get some ideas.

Avoiding the interstates and sticking to the smaller roads you will generally provide more scenic views. Because of the smaller roads one will have to drive slower thereby extending the travel time. Therefore, it’s a balancing act between scenery and getting to the next place you want to reach. If you had an unlimited amount of vacation, then you could travel all the back roads. Once you know the route you’ll take research the small towns en route to see what is there that sparks your interest.

Although in England the default National Speed Limit for rural A and B roads is only 10 MPH slower than Motorways (60/60/70) the driving experience is dramatically different, and total time spent in travel is dramatically longer on A roads and especially on B roads and unclassified roads.

When on A Roads and Motorways when you come across 50 mph (or sometimes 40) construction zones they are usually patrolled by automatic speed averaging speed cameras on yellow columns which will get you. Everybody will slow to the 50 just before the first camera post, be prepared.

With A roads add in speed cameras, lengths of dual carriageway mixed with mostly single carriageway, roundabouts, and some bypasses of towns. And the non-rural speeds will usually be lower. Careful passing the rows of trucks.

With B roads there will be very few, if any dual carriageways, the side lane markings are gone, and often so is the centre line when the road is too narrow to support two full width lanes. You may have stretches of single narrow or very narrow lane with passing places, particularly in rural areas like rural Kent and Surrey, and Wales and Scotland. I know nothing about how roads are across the Irish Sea.

Thank you all so much for your helpful replies. I will definitely check out the DK books as well as the AA atlas, they sound like exactly what I need. Nigel, thank you for your description of the roads, that is very helpful. I will definitely have to do some thinking and planning about which areas are worth the extra time spent to do the smaller roads versus taking the motorway for efficiency. Now that I have an idea of where to start, this should be fun!