Guides
How to Plan a Slow Road Trip on the Lincoln Highway Without Missing the Old Alignments
Lincoln Highway old alignments decide the trip: use this two-day-per-state plan, with driving times for every leg and one stop marked skippable.
What to take away
- The Lincoln Highway changed line at least twice in most states, so the 1913 road and the 1928 road sit miles apart in Iowa and Nebraska.
- Two days is enough for one state block. A full New York to San Francisco crossing takes three to four weeks at three hours of driving a day.
- Stated driving times per leg are what keep a slow trip slow, so write them down before you leave.
- Cut the Latrobe museum stop first when a day runs late.
The old road is a set of lines on a map rather than one line, and driving it gets easier once you accept that.
What this route assumes
This plan assumes three to four weeks for the whole crossing, or two days per state for a sampler. It assumes you drive your own car and accept double-back driving when a turn goes wrong. Phone coverage thins in the Alleghenies and across the Nebraska sandhills, so plan each day from paper. Choosing the road before the services is the same work as backroad itinerary building, and the order of decisions there holds here.
The first day, hour by hour
The sample day runs the 1913 line across Pennsylvania, Gettysburg west to Ligonier, and it holds under five hours of driving. Start with the National Park Service travel planning page, which sets out where the signed route parts from the historic line.
- 7:30 a.m. Gettysburg to Chambersburg, 50 minutes of driving, the Cashtown gap behind you.
- 9:00 to 10:30. Chambersburg to McConnellsburg, 45 minutes, plus a walk around the square.
- 11:00 to 1:30. McConnellsburg to Bedford, one hour behind the wheel, then lunch.
- 2:00 to 4:30. Bedford to Ligonier, 90 minutes of driving and two ridge pull-offs.
- 5:00 p.m. Stop in Ligonier for the night.
Concrete markers with the letter L follow the alignment the association settled on last. Finding one proves the final line, not the 1913 one.
The second day
The same shape repeats in Iowa, where the old road runs Clinton to Council Bluffs by way of DeWitt, Cedar Rapids, Marshalltown and Denison. Day two runs 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. with about four hours of driving and two long stops in county seats. Historic highway routes vary widely in how well they are signed, and Iowa marks its old line better than most states.
Example: two alignments in one Iowa afternoon
Take a single afternoon between Cedar Rapids and Marshalltown. The 1913 line bends north through smaller towns. The 1928 line straightened and skipped two of them. Drive the older one and you spend an extra 25 minutes on main streets that lost their traffic in the 1930s and never got it back. The route history on the Lincoln Highway page tracks those shifts state by state, which is how you tell which line you are standing on.
What to cut when time is short
The first stop to skip is the Lincoln Highway Experience in Latrobe. It is a good museum and it takes 90 minutes you will not have if the mountains west of Bedford are still ahead.
Second, skip the second county seat of any day, because squares look alike by four in the afternoon. Keep the ridge pull-offs: ten minutes each, and they carry the reason for driving the old line rather than the four-lane. Fitting these decisions into one plan is the work set out in backroad travel itinerary.
Getting between the stops
Use the interstates to reposition after dark or when weather closes the ridge roads, and not as the tour itself. Each leg below carries a stated driving time.
Show the numbers
| Gettysburg to Bedford, PA | 1,913 |
|---|---|
| Bedford to Ligonier, PA | 1,913 |
| Clinton to Cedar Rapids, IA | 1,913 |
| Cedar Rapids to Marshalltown, IA | 1,928 |
| Grand Island to Kearney, NE | 1,913 |
When a leg runs 20 minutes long, cut the next stop instead of driving faster. That single rule keeps a four-state trip from turning into a highway sprint.
Common questions
Can you drive the whole Lincoln Highway in a week? No. At three hours of driving a day, the crossing takes three to four weeks, and a week covers two or three states at most.
How do I know I am on an old alignment? Match the road against a historic map rather than the signs. Old concrete and narrow bridges help, but the map is the test.
What should I sort out before booking anything? Season and dates first, because a July crossing of the Platte valley is a different trip from an October one. The slow travel mistakes piece covers the checks worth making before anything is reserved.
