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Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1) at southern end of Big Sur, California
Photograph: Shutterstock

Big Sur was just named the best road trip in the world!

You can't beat those Pacific views.

Erika Mailman
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Erika Mailman
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With airline travel in disarray (although prices will improve in September), travelers itchy to get out of town are turning to road trips in larger numbers. In fact, in the last 12 months, there has been a 116 percent increase in Google searches worldwide using the search term ‘road trips.’

Automotive industry experts Motorcycle Insurance has delved deep into Instagram hashtags, search data, and Tiktok views (data was collected in July) to come up with its list of the 28 most popular road trip routes worldwide—and we’re proud to announce that the US has the best road trip of all: Big Sur, California.

Even if you haven’t driven along Big Sur, you’ve seen it in car commercials. It’s a stunning, narrow stretch down the California coast with winding turns. On one side, seacliffs overlook the Pacific and on the other, the Santa Lucia Mountains loom. Big Sur’s famous sinuous route earned it 1,469,416 Instagram hashtags, 368,000 global average for monthly search volume, and 90,500,000 TikTok views. Not too shabby, roadway!

And while California won out, another three road trips in the US placed in the top 10.

#4 is Ocean Drive, an awesome thoroughfare through Miami, Florida’s South Beach. It’s lined with Art Deco hotels and restaurants, and although it was closed to car traffic during the pandemic to favor pedestrian traffic and sidewalk dining, it opened back up to cars in January.

#5 is Badlands National Park in South Dakota, with striking rock formations, canyons and spires—its Highway 240 loop road winds past these incredible natural geologic wonders for a 39 mile trip. It should take an hour, but that’s only if you don’t stop to gawk.

#6 is Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Air, an intense gorge which sprawls between Washington and Oregon for 75 miles with a river at its bottom, at times 4,000 feet below. It boasts 75 waterfalls and 13 kinds of wildflowers that only grow here. The Columbia River itself flows on for 1,243 miles.

US drives that also appeared in the top 28:

  • Highway 61 at #15, a 1,400 mile stretch between New Orleans, Louisiana and the city of Wyoming, Minnesota
  • San Juan Skyway at #17, a mountainous 235-mile pass through Colorado, including a section called the Million Dollar Highway

On a global scale, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia was the second most popular road trip in the world, Costa Smeralda in Sardinia was third, Ruta 40 in Argentina was seventh, the Gobi Desert in Mongolia was eighth, the Cabot Trail in Canada was ninth, and Australia’s Great Ocean Road came in 10th.

But overall the US has the highest number of combined Insta tag, monthly searches and TikTok views over any other country in the study, and we do have six out of 28 spots!

And although the Loneliest Road in America didn’t make the list, we still love it personally. Read the full report here.

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