Scenic Driving North Carolina

I normally read and review hiking guides, but I thought I would take a small step into another domain: driving guides. With what I found here, I may or may not be coming back for more. This guide describes 30 road trips from across the state of North Carolina. The 16 drives in the Appalachian Mountains and the 6 drives on or near the Outer Banks mean that a majority of the drives are concentrated in those two areas. This isn't unexpected, as a majority of North Carolina's tourist attractions are in those regions. Also, the remaining drives add enough geographic diversity so that anyone living in North Carolina can probably find a drive within 50 miles of their house. Each drive contains some basic information about scenic attractions along the drive, the length of the drive, campgrounds near the drive, and a rough map showing the main features of the drive. The drive descriptions are quite detailed, and many of them give interesting historical information about the towns and attractions visited along the drive in addition to simple turn-by-turn driving directions. You should be warned that, while the maps give a rough idea of the route, you will likely need a more comprehensive and detailed map to successfully navigate many of these drives. To that end, if you purchase this book you should also purchase a DeLorme North Carolina Atlas and Gazeteer (the best print resource available for rural road driving) or at least a Rand McNally Road Atlas. In addition to the maps, this book has a couple of other shortcomings. While the author gives a very rough approximation of the time it takes to complete the entire drive, he gives no information about how long each stop along the drive will take on average. Different attractions suit different people, so few people will want to stop at every attraction along these routes. Adding information about how long each stop takes, even if only an average or a minimum, would make this guide useful to more people. Also, most of these drives start at one point but end at another. Unfortunately, the author gives no indication about how to get back to the starting point, so readers are left to find their own way. Since retracing the scenic route is usually neither most efficient nor most desirable, that more detailed map mentioned above becomes even more critical. In summary, you will get some good trip ideas in this book, but a few additional points of information would make this guide more useful, hence the loss of one star. Also, you can get most of this same information in a more useful form for free (i.e. from the state department of tourism or AAA). Thus, this book might be worth buying if you want to augment this free information with some more detailed info. or a second opinion, but I would not buy this book as a primary travel resource.