Rick Quinn's Blog

New Mexico’s Golden Autumn is a smorgasbord of leaf-peeping road trip options centered on Santa Fe and Taos.

Scenic Side Trips are nicely planned road trip itineraries that are focused on especially beautiful scenic highways, and if you follow them just as they’re laid out in my book, they’ll guide you to and through just about everything you might want to see in this remarkable region (and a whole lot more besides). Even at that, SST’s, Scenic Side Trips, were never intended to be carved in sto...

Writing a travel book is a heck of a lot of work, but it definitely has its rewards. I had to drive all 25 of my Scenic Side Trips in order to properly describe them, and that aspect of my research incorporated some of the most glorious driving I’ve ever done. That stands to reason. The whole point to the project was to identify the most scenic highways and the most interesting attractions in this extraordinary two-state region, and the...

Arizona and New Mexico: 25 Scenic Side Trips isn’t like most travel guides. I don’t even try to cover everything there is to see along these scenic side roads; instead, I deliberately pull back to a wider focus that puts the routes and the various attractions along the way into a larger context; geographically, geologically, and historically. By concentrating on quasi-permanent things like roads, rather than transitory things like restaurants, I’ve created a useful guidebook that (hopefully!)...

From July of 2016 to December of 2017, a period of almost a year and a half, I spent just about every waking minute of nearly every single day working on, thinking about, or worrying about this book. If I wasn’t poring over maps, researching history and geology, or driving some remote desert highway, I was taking photographs, editing photographs, or driving on some curvy mountain road. In between all of that driving and researching, I was writing, writing, and writing still more, pounding awa...

“Scenic Side Trips” looked fabulous on paper. I’d spent days—weeks, actually, tracing routes on a map with colored highlighters, trying to figure out the best, most efficient way to connect the dots on all the points of interest that I had identified in Arizona and New Mexico. There were hundreds of them; parks and monuments, historic sites, geological marvels, and roadside curiosities of every description, laced throughout by thousands of miles of scenic highways. My goal was to divide all t...

In my third year of college, I took a semester off from school, and I traveled overland from Arizona to the end of the road in southern Chile, hitch-hiking most of the way. That impromptu journey, covering the length and breadth of no less than 12 countries, marked the first phase of my abiding love affair with Latin America. I spent most of my final year of school doing anthropological field work in Colombia, and after I graduated, I stayed, for several more years, shuttling between Colombia...

Road trips have always been my favorite form of recreation, beginning when I was a kid, crossing the country on old Route 66, sprawled in the roomy back seat of my family’s ’57 Desoto.  During my college years and beyond, I covered most of North America, Central America, and even South America, as well as Western Europe and a bit of North Africa, always traveling by road, and loving every minute of it.

When I got a little older and had a family of my own, I entered a new phase of my life; I s...

A road trip is more than just a drive from Point A to Point B; it’s a journey of discovery and, in my opinion, it’s the best possible way to experience the world. Unlike buses, trains, or guided tours, you get to make your own choices, and set your own pace. If you see something that looks interesting, or a scenic viewpoint that appeals to you, you can simply pull over and stop, for as long and as often as you’d like. There are roads that can take you practically everywhere, so the possibili...

I’m one of those people who really, really loves to drive–but it has to be the right kind of road. City streets and urban freeways don’t do it for me, and flat, straight Interstate Highways bore me into a coma. Real driving is a workout, where you use your transmission, not your brakes, and there’s no such thing as cruise control.

Turn me loose on one of those wild, western highways that runs through the canyons, follows the rivers, and...

RoadTrip America Scenic Side Trips is a series of ten guides written by road trip experts affiliated with RoadTripAmerica.com. Each guide features over two dozen scenic and historic routes that that are easily accessible from Interstate highways. Descriptive narrative, gorgeous photography, and detailed maps reveal up-to-date discoveries, fascinating history, roadside attractions, and unique food and lodging. With a RoadTrip America Scenic Side Trips guide and a few extra hours, cross-country...