This Meteorologist Created the Perfect Road Trip

In this week's Maphead, we learn how you can spend a year crossing the U.S., enjoying 70-degree weather every day.

Your cross-country road trip just got upgraded.

Courtesy Brian Brettschneider

It's the height of August heat in the Northern Hemisphere, when a lot of people start to think about a summer getaway to somewhere with brisk breezes and cool nights—the mountains, maybe, or the ocean. But lots of us get the same itch in winter: the need to get a sunny, tropical break from the snow and the gloom. A lot of travel, it turns out, is just climate control. If you like sunny, pleasant weather year-round—boy, do I have the itinerary for you.

Travel with all the comforts of your home thermostat.

In 2015, an Anchorage-based meteorologist named Brian Brettschneider decided that 70ºF was his ideal temperature, and wondered if it was geographically possible to enjoy that pleasant weather all the time. Using weather data from the National Center for Environmental Information, he plotted a 13,235-mile, yearlong road trip through North America, specifically designed to keep travelers at a balmy 70ºF from January to December.

You'll spend more time in Texas than in any other state.

Brettschneider's route begins at the southern tip of Texas on January 1, and winds slowly northward. You won't enter Oklahoma until early April, and will spend that month on a leisurely drive east toward Washington, D.C. In May, you head back west, through Chicago and into Wisconsin, and your summer will be spent on a giant loop through Canada and Alaska. Your northernmost point, Fairbanks, Alaska, will be reached in early July.

Chase the sun back south to L.A.

As temperatures cool, you head south again, spending August on the Oregon coast and heading back east in September all the way to Nebraska. The autumn is a wide swing west, from Missouri through Oklahoma and the Southwest all the way to Las Vegas and then Los Angeles. During December you only need to cover 120 miles, gradually inching south to reach San Diego by New Year's Eve.

You could be the first pioneer of the Temperate Trail.

Brettschneider also whipped up a shorter itinerary that sticks to the lower 48, and an 80 ºF trip for hotter-blooded travelers. But it's the original map that has gone viral on the Internet, shared over half a million times. "The 70ºF road trip map will probably be on my tombstone after I'm dead and buried," Brettschneider told me. Has anyone ever actually spent a year driving it? Brettschneider says that some bike and motorcycle enthusiasts have told him they're going to try his route, but he's "not sure if anyone has actually gone through with it." Reader, do you have a delicate, flower-like constitution for weather and a year to spare? You could be the first!
