Waterfalls, lakes, trails, towns and beaches

67 miles · about 1 hour 15 minutes

Jackson Falls

Jackson Falls sits at milepost 404.7 on the Natchez Trace Parkway, reached by a paved 900-foot trail that descends steeply from the parking area. It is the easiest real waterfall to reach from Nashville, and it is free.

75 miles · about 1 hour 30 minutes

Machine Falls

Machine Falls drops more than sixty feet into a mossy bowl and is nearly as wide as it is tall, inside Short Springs State Natural Area northeast of Tullahoma. It is the closest genuinely impressive waterfall to Nashville that most people have never heard of.

76 miles · about 1 hour 20 minutes

Fall Hollow Falls

Fall Hollow is a twenty-foot waterfall a short, mostly level walk from the Natchez Trace Parkway at milepost 391.9. At just over a thousand feet to the overlook, it is the least demanding waterfall walk on this list.

79 miles · about 1 hour 30 minutes

Burgess Falls

Burgess Falls is a series of four cascades on the Falling Water River, dropping more than 250 feet in total, with the final fall plunging over 130 feet into a gorge. It is one of the most photographed waterfalls in Tennessee and one of the most commonly misjudged.

80 miles · about 1 hour 30 minutes

Cummins Falls

Cummins Falls is a wide, terraced waterfall on the Blackburn Fork State Scenic River, inside a 306-acre state park about eighty miles east of Nashville. The pool at its base is the reason people come, and reaching that base is the part almost everybody gets wrong.

91 miles · about 1 hour 45 minutes

Rock Island and Twin Falls

Rock Island State Park sits at the head of Great Falls Lake where the Caney Fork, Collins and Rocky rivers meet, and Twin Falls pours out of the rock face below the powerhouse. It is spectacular, and it is the most genuinely dangerous place on this list.

113 miles · about 2 hours 15 minutes

Virgin Falls

Virgin Falls is the strangest waterfall in Middle Tennessee: a stream emerges from a cave, drops 110 feet, and then disappears entirely into a sinkhole at the base. Getting there is an eight-mile round trip that is far harder than the mileage suggests.

114 miles · about 2 hours

Fall Creek Falls

Fall Creek Falls is one of the highest waterfalls in the eastern United States, commonly cited at 256 feet, and the centerpiece of one of Tennessee’s largest state parks. Cane Creek Falls, Rockhouse Falls and the park’s own Piney Falls are all inside the same park, which is why this is a full day rather than a stop. Note that this Piney Falls is not the Piney Falls near Spring City that also has a page here. Two different waterfalls, about seventy miles apart, same name.

125 miles · about 2 hours

Ozone Falls

Ozone Falls drops 110 feet into a plunge pool inside a natural amphitheater of rock, just off I-40 near Crab Orchard. It is one of the shortest walks to a big waterfall anywhere in the state, which is exactly why it gets busy.

129 miles · about 2 hours 15 minutes

Ruby Falls

Ruby Falls is an underground waterfall inside Lookout Mountain Caverns, reached by a 260-foot elevator descent and a walk through the cave. It is a privately operated attraction rather than a park, which changes everything about how you plan for it.

133 miles · about 2 hours 30 minutes

Northrup Falls

Northrup Falls plunges more than sixty feet over a protruding rock ledge in Colditz Cove, a quiet natural area east of Allardt on the northern Cumberland Plateau. You can walk behind it, and on most days you will have it to yourself.

139 miles · about 2 hours 30 minutes

Stinging Fork Falls

Stinging Fork Falls is a thirty-foot waterfall at the end of a one-mile trail that descends into a gorge west of Spring City. It is a short hike with real payoff and very little company.

141 miles · about 2 hours 30 minutes

Piney Falls

Piney Falls is two waterfalls rather than one: Upper Piney drops about eighty feet, and Lower Piney drops another forty below it. A rock ledge circles behind the upper falls, which is the reason people make the drive.

8 miles · about 15 minutes

Radnor Lake

Radnor Lake is a 1,367-acre wildlife observation area with more than six miles of trails, fifteen minutes from downtown Nashville. It is a Class II Natural Area rather than a recreation park, and the rules reflect that.

10 miles · about 20 minutes

Percy and Edwin Warner Parks

The Warner Parks are more than three thousand acres of forested ridge twenty minutes from downtown, with a trail system that ranges from a 150-yard loop to a four and a half mile circuit. It is the largest municipally administered park in Tennessee and it does not feel like it is in a city.

72 miles · about 1 hour 20 minutes

Window Cliffs

Window Cliffs is a ridge above Cane Creek where erosion has cut natural windows straight through the rock. The trail crosses the creek eighteen times to get there, which tells you most of what you need to know.

78 miles · about 1 hour 30 minutes

Devil’s Backbone

Devil’s Backbone is 950 acres of steep ridge and hollow beside the Natchez Trace Parkway near Hohenwald, with a three-mile loop trail through mature hardwood forest. It is quiet in a way that few places this close to Nashville still are.

94 miles · about 1 hour 45 minutes

Fiery Gizzard Trail

Fiery Gizzard is widely regarded as one of the hardest and best day hikes in the region, running through boulder fields, hemlock gorges and past a string of small waterfalls on the Cumberland Plateau. The Grundy Forest to Raven Point section is the classic.

100 miles · about 1 hour 50 minutes

The Stone Door and Savage Gulf

The Stone Door is a 100-foot crack in the bluff that native people and settlers both used as a stairway from the plateau down into Savage Gulf. The overlook is a short, mostly level walk, which makes it one of the best payoff-to-effort ratios in Tennessee.

125 miles · about 2 hours

Prentice Cooper State Forest

Prentice Cooper is 24,459 acres of state forest and wildlife management area on the north rim of the Tennessee River Gorge, with thirty-five miles of hiking trail, a string of overlooks, and the southern end of the Cumberland Trail running through it. It is also where the Tennessee Wall climbing area is.

137 miles · about 2 hours 15 minutes

Signal Point

Signal Point is a National Park Service overlook on the end of Signal Mountain, looking straight down into the Tennessee River Gorge. During the 1863 siege of Chattanooga it was the Union signal station relaying messages between the trapped city and Bridgeport, Alabama, which is where the name comes from.

140 miles · about 2 hours 15 minutes

Lula Lake Land Trust

Lula Lake is a 1,200-acre private conservation preserve on Lookout Mountain built around a lake and a waterfall of roughly 120 feet on Rock Creek. Access is deliberately restricted to protect it, and the rules are stricter than anywhere else in this guide.

11 miles · about 20 minutes

J. Percy Priest Lake

Percy Priest is a 14,200-acre Corps of Engineers lake that starts ten miles east of downtown Nashville, with nearly nineteen thousand acres of public land around it. It is the closest real lake to the city and the one most Nashvillians mean when they say they are going to the lake.

16 miles · about 25 minutes

Old Hickory Lake

Old Hickory is a 22,500-acre Corps lake on the Cumberland River northeast of Nashville, wrapping Hendersonville and Gallatin. It is a working navigation pool as well as a recreation lake, which is why you will see barges alongside the ski boats.

33 miles · about 50 minutes

Cheatham Lake

Cheatham is a 7,450-acre Cumberland River impoundment with 320 miles of shoreline, less than an hour northwest of Nashville near Ashland City. It is the quietest of the close-in lakes and the one with the best beach.

64 miles · about 1 hour 10 minutes

Center Hill Lake

Center Hill is the clear, deep, bluff-lined lake on the Caney Fork about an hour east of Nashville, with roughly twenty thousand acres of public land around it and nine commercial marinas. It is where Nashville goes when it wants water that looks like a postcard.

64 miles · about 1 hour 20 minutes

Cordell Hull Lake

Cordell Hull is a 11,960-acre Corps lake on the upper Cumberland with 381 miles of shoreline and twenty-two boat ramps. It has the trail network the other Corps lakes mostly lack, including the Bearwaller Gap hiking trail.

67 miles · about 1 hour 15 minutes

Normandy Lake

Normandy is a small TVA lake on the Duck River, 3,230 acres with seventy-two miles of shoreline, between Manchester and Tullahoma. Barton Springs Recreation Area on the south shore is the main public access.

86 miles · about 1 hour 35 minutes

Tims Ford Lake

Tims Ford is a 10,500-acre TVA lake on the Elk River with 309 miles of shoreline, running thirty-four miles upstream of the dam. Tims Ford State Park sits on the north shore with a marina, cabins and a Jack Nicklaus golf course.

92 miles · about 1 hour 40 minutes

Lake Barkley

Lake Barkley is a 57,000-acre Corps lake on the Cumberland in western Kentucky, joined to Kentucky Lake by a canal, with Land Between the Lakes on the peninsula between them. It is the other half of the biggest inland water complex in the region.

97 miles · about 1 hour 50 minutes

Dale Hollow Lake

Dale Hollow is 27,700 acres of unusually clear water with 620 miles of shoreline on the Tennessee and Kentucky border. It holds the world record smallmouth bass and it is the lake people drive past three closer ones to reach.

97 miles · about 1 hour 50 minutes

Kentucky Lake

Kentucky Lake is the largest man-made lake east of the Mississippi: 160,300 acres, 2,064 miles of shoreline, and 184 miles long. Paris Landing State Park on the Tennessee end is the nearest major public access from Nashville.

18 miles · about 30 minutes

Long Hunter State Park

Long Hunter is roughly 2,600 acres along the east shore of Percy Priest Lake, thirty minutes from downtown, split into the Baker’s Grove, Couchville and Bryant Grove sections. The Couchville Lake loop is paved and level and the Volunteer Trail is not.

27 miles · about 40 minutes to the northern terminus

Natchez Trace Parkway

The Natchez Trace Parkway is a 444-mile National Park Service road that begins southwest of Nashville and runs to Natchez, Mississippi, with no commercial traffic and no billboards. The first hundred miles south of Nashville are the best scenic drive in Middle Tennessee.

27 miles · about 40 minutes

The Narrows of the Harpeth

At the Narrows, the Harpeth River loops about five miles and comes back to within two hundred feet of itself, and in 1818 Montgomery Bell cut a tunnel through the solid rock between the two channels to power an iron forge. That tunnel is a National Historic Landmark and it is still there.

32 miles · about 45 minutes

Stones River National Battlefield

Stones River National Battlefield preserves the ground of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, fought from the last day of 1862 into the first days of 1863, along with a national cemetery and the Fortress Rosecrans earthworks. It is forty-five minutes from downtown Nashville and it is free.

33 miles · about 45 minutes

Cedars of Lebanon State Park

Cedars of Lebanon is a 900-acre park inside a 9,400-acre state forest, protecting one of the largest remaining cedar glade ecosystems in the country. Twenty-nine plant species here grow nowhere else on earth, including the Tennessee coneflower and, improbably, prickly pear cactus.

37 miles · about 55 minutes

Montgomery Bell State Park

Montgomery Bell is 3,782 acres of lakes and hardwood forest an hour west of Nashville, with a lodge, three lakes and twenty miles of mountain bike trail. It is the closest state park with a full resort operation.

37 miles · about 55 minutes

Bledsoe Creek State Park

Bledsoe Creek is a compact 169-acre park on an arm of Old Hickory Lake near Gallatin, with a seventy-seven site campground and about five miles of trail. What makes it worth the drive is the cluster of eighteenth-century history around it.

63 miles · about 1 hour 10 minutes

Old Stone Fort

Old Stone Fort is a 2,000-year-old Middle Woodland ceremonial enclosure built between roughly 30 and 430 AD, using the cliffs above the Duck River to enclose about fifty acres. It was never a fort. Settlers guessed wrong and the name stuck.

83 miles · about 1 hour 30 minutes

Fort Donelson National Battlefield

Fort Donelson preserves the river fortification where Grant won the first major Union victory of the Civil War in February 1862 and earned the nickname Unconditional Surrender. It sits on the Cumberland at Dover, next to a national cemetery.

93 miles · about 1 hour 30 minutes

Mammoth Cave National Park

Mammoth Cave is the longest known cave system on earth, with more than four hundred miles of mapped passage, an hour and a half up I-65 in Kentucky. It is the single best big-ticket day trip from Nashville, and the one most likely to go wrong if you do not book ahead.

112 miles · about 2 hours to Golden Pond, nearer 1 hour 40 to the Dover end

Land Between the Lakes

Land Between the Lakes is a 170,000-acre national recreation area on the peninsula between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, with three hundred miles of undeveloped shoreline. It is the largest block of public land within easy reach of Nashville.

134 miles · about 2 hours 5 minutes

Reflection Riding Arboretum and Nature Center

Reflection Riding is 317 acres of arboretum, native plant nursery and wildlife center at the base of Lookout Mountain, adjoining National Park Service land. It keeps critically endangered red wolves, along with bobcats, sandhill cranes, bald eagles and raptors.

136 miles · about 2 hours 10 minutes

Cloudland Canyon State Park

Cloudland Canyon is more than 3,500 acres on the western rim of Lookout Mountain, built around a gorge cut by Sitton Gulch Creek with two waterfalls at the bottom of it. The rim views are free and easy and the waterfalls are neither.

139 miles · about 2 hours 15 minutes

Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park

This is the oldest national military park in the country, spread across multiple units from the Chickamauga battlefield in Georgia to Point Park on top of Lookout Mountain. The Lookout Mountain units pair naturally with a Chattanooga day.

140 miles · about 2 hours 30 minutes

Pickett CCC Memorial State Park

Pickett was certified a DarkSky International Dark Sky Park in 2015, the first in the Southeast, and it keeps an astronomy field open year round. It also has natural sandstone bridges, rock shelters, and glow worms.

141 miles · about 2 hours 20 minutes

Booker T. Washington State Park

Booker T. Washington State Park is 353 acres on a peninsula reaching into Chickamauga Lake, the closest state park to downtown Chattanooga. It was established in 1938 as one of Tennessee’s first state parks for African Americans, and it is named for the educator who led Tuskegee.

147 miles · about 2 hours 40 minutes

Big South Fork

Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area protects a gorge system on the Cumberland Plateau with sandstone arches, whitewater and one of the best trail networks in the state. Bandy Creek is the main hub and the practical starting point.

148 miles · about 2 hours 30 minutes

Shiloh National Military Park

Shiloh preserves the ground where more than twenty-three thousand men fell over two days in April 1862, in what was at that point the bloodiest battle in American history. The park has two units, one in Tennessee and one at Corinth, Mississippi.

220 miles · about 3 hours 30 minutes to 4 hours

Long day or overnight

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

The Smokies are the most visited national park in the country, protecting more than 522,000 acres of southern Appalachian forest and around 850 miles of trail. There is no entrance fee, but since 2023 there is a parking fee, and the difference between those two things is the single biggest source of visitor frustration in the park.

224 miles · about 3 hours 30 minutes

Long day or overnight

Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Cumberland Gap protects 24,000 acres around the mountain pass that Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road carried roughly three hundred thousand settlers through between 1775 and 1810. It is free, and it is dramatically emptier than the Smokies.

33 miles · about 45 minutes

Leiper’s Fork

Leiper’s Fork is an unincorporated village of galleries, a general store and a music scene disproportionate to its size, sitting just off the Natchez Trace southwest of Franklin. A lot of people who write songs for a living live around it.

54 miles · about 1 hour

Bell Buckle

Bell Buckle is a railroad village of about five hundred people with a restored depot-era main street of antique shops and craft studios. It is best known nationally for a festival built entirely around RC Cola and MoonPies.

66 miles · about 1 hour 10 minutes

Bowling Green and the National Corvette Museum

Bowling Green is the only place on earth where Corvettes are built, and the National Corvette Museum sits directly across the highway from the GM assembly plant. It is an easy hour up I-65 and it works for people who do not care about cars.

68 miles · about 1 hour 15 minutes

Granville

Granville is a restored Cumberland River town run by more than two hundred volunteers that markets itself, without irony, as Tennessee’s Mayberry Town. It has an 1880s general store with live bluegrass and a museum devoted to I Love Lucy.

71 miles · about 1 hour 25 minutes

Red Boiling Springs

Red Boiling Springs was a major mineral springs resort from the 1840s into the 1930s, drawing thousands to drink and bathe in five distinct types of mineral water. Three of the historic hotels survive and one of them still fills clawfoot tubs with sulfur water.

72 miles · about 1 hour 20 minutes

Lynchburg and the Jack Daniel Distillery

Lynchburg is a town of about six thousand built around a courthouse square and the oldest registered distillery in the United States. The county is still dry, which is a fact visitors find hard to believe while standing in the middle of it.

79 miles · about 1 hour 25 minutes

Cookeville

Cookeville is the Upper Cumberland’s regional hub and home to Tennessee Tech, but the reason to drive out is that four significant waterfall parks sit within a short radius of it. If you are chasing waterfalls, this is where you base the day.

90 miles · about 1 hour 40 minutes

Monteagle and Sewanee

Monteagle and Sewanee sit at the top of the I-24 grade on the Cumberland Plateau: Monteagle is the highway town and the Assembly grounds, and Sewanee is the thirteen-thousand-acre Domain of the University of the South, a Gothic campus on the bluff. Between them they are the gateway to most of the plateau’s best hiking.

111 miles · about 1 hour 50 minutes

Huntsville and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center

Huntsville built the Saturn V, and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center is the official visitor center for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center as well as the home of Space Camp. The Saturn V hanging in the Davidson Center is worth the drive by itself.

128 miles · about 2 hours

Raccoon Mountain Caverns

Raccoon Mountain Caverns is a privately operated cave system west of Chattanooga offering both a lit walking tour and genuine wild caving where you crawl and climb. It sits at a constant fifty-eight degrees year round, which makes it the best August plan in this guide.

132 miles · about 2 hours

Chattanooga

Chattanooga is a riverfront city two hours down I-24 that spent thirty years turning a dead industrial downtown into one of the best outdoor cities in the country. There are really two Chattanoogas to plan around: the riverfront and downtown, and Lookout Mountain above it, and trying to do both properly in one day is the mistake almost everyone makes.

132 miles · about 2 hours

Tennessee Aquarium

The Tennessee Aquarium is two connected buildings on the Chattanooga riverfront, one following a river from the mountains to the Gulf and one covering the ocean. It is the anchor of the whole downtown riverfront district and the reason most families make the drive.

133 miles · about 2 hours

Lookout Mountain Incline Railway

The Incline Railway has been carrying passengers up the side of Lookout Mountain since 1895 on a grade that reaches nearly seventy-three percent near the top, which makes it one of the steepest passenger railways anywhere. The upper station opens onto the brow a short walk from Point Park.

136 miles · about 2 hours 10 minutes

Lookout Mountain

Lookout Mountain rises two thousand feet above Chattanooga and holds more paid attractions per square mile than anywhere else in the region, along with a Civil War battlefield, a hang gliding school and some of the best trad climbing in the South. It sits in two states, which matters more than it sounds like it should.

136 miles · about 2 hours 10 minutes

Rock City Gardens

Rock City is a garden trail threaded through enormous sandstone formations on the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain, ending at Lover’s Leap with the long-advertised claim that you can see seven states from it. It is the attraction those barn roofs across the South have been telling you to see since the 1930s.

140 miles · about 2 hours 30 minutes

Historic Rugby

Rugby was founded in 1880 by the English author Thomas Hughes as a cooperative colony for the younger sons of British gentry, and roughly twenty of the original buildings survive. It is a genuinely strange and beautiful piece of Victorian England on the Cumberland Plateau.

175 miles · about 2 hours 45 minutes

Long day or overnight

Louisville

Louisville is Kentucky’s largest city and has run the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs every year since 1875. Its downtown Whiskey Row on West Main Street now holds working distilleries alongside the Louisville Slugger factory and the Muhammad Ali Center.

180 miles · about 2 hours 45 minutes

Long day or overnight

Knoxville

Knoxville is Tennessee’s third-largest city, home to the University of Tennessee and the gold-globed Sunsphere left over from the 1982 World’s Fair. It is the shortest of the long drives on this list and the easiest of them to do in a single day.

192 miles · about 3 hours

Long day or overnight

Birmingham

Birmingham is Alabama’s largest city, founded in 1871 as an iron and steel town, and the site of the 1963 civil rights campaign, the Children’s Crusade and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Those sites are now a National Monument administered by the Park Service.

210 miles · about 3 hours

Long day or overnight

Graceland

Graceland is the house Elvis Presley bought in 1957 and lived in until he died, three hours west of Nashville on I-40, and it has been open to the public since 1982. It is a National Historic Landmark and it draws roughly 600,000 people a year, which means the difference between a good visit and a frustrating one is almost entirely about which ticket you buy and what time you arrive.

210 miles · about 3 hours

Long day or overnight

Memphis

Memphis sits on the Mississippi bluffs three hours west on I-40, and it is the birthplace of commercially recorded rock and roll and Stax-era soul. It is also where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, at the Lorraine Motel, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

214 miles · about 3 hours 15 minutes

Long day or overnight

Pigeon Forge and Dollywood

Pigeon Forge is a five-mile commercial strip built almost entirely around Dollywood, dinner theaters and family attractions. Dollywood itself covers more than 160 acres, is co-owned by Dolly Parton, and has an adjacent water park.

220 miles · about 3 hours 30 minutes

Long day or overnight

Gatlinburg

Gatlinburg is a resort town of about 3,900 permanent residents pressed up against the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Its walkable Parkway strip concentrates aerial attractions, an aquarium and tourist retail into roughly eight blocks.

443 miles · about 7 to 8 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Navarre Beach

Navarre Beach is the closest Gulf sand to Nashville and the least developed of any beach on this page. It is county run rather than an incorporated town, there is no bar district, and the whole commercial footprint on the island is a handful of businesses, which is either exactly what you want or exactly what you do not.

450 miles · about 7 to 8 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Pensacola Beach

Pensacola Beach is not a city. It is a leasehold community on Santa Rosa Island run by the Santa Rosa Island Authority, and that structure produced the thing that makes it different: sixty percent of the island is public land and only forty percent is leased for houses and businesses. Development stops dead at both ends of town and turns into federal barrier island.

450 miles · about 8 to 8.5 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Destin

Destin is two places at once. The Gulf side is mid and high rise condominium frontage broken by a short list of named public accesses. The bay side is a working charter fishing harbor with the boardwalk on it, and that harbor is the reason people pick Destin over the towns on either side of it.

450 miles · about 7.5 to 8.5 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Blue Mountain Beach

Blue Mountain Beach is the first 30A town you reach coming down US-331 and the easiest one to park in, which is not a small thing on this road. It was homesteaded in 1910 by three families and never had a developer or a master plan, and at sixty five feet it is the highest ground in South Walton.

452 miles · about 8 to 8.5 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Miramar Beach and Sandestin

Miramar Beach is not a city. It is unincorporated Walton County, which matters more than it sounds: the beach rules, the lifeguards and the fines are completely different from Destin’s fifteen minutes away. Sandestin sits inside it, a 2,400 acre resort running from the Gulf all the way back to Choctawhatchee Bay.

452 miles · about 8 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Grayton Beach

Grayton Beach is the oldest town on 30A by a century, settled in the mid 1880s by an Army major named Charles Gray, and it has no master plan and no architectural code. Sand streets, no sidewalks, weathered cottages of wildly mixed vintage under live oaks. It is the visual opposite of everything built east of it.

455 miles · about 8 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Seaside

Seaside is the original. Robert Davis founded it in 1981 on eighty acres his grandfather bought in 1946, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk planned it, and it became the founding project of New Urbanism. Narrow brick streets, white sand footpaths, pastel cottages with deep porches and picket fences, and a different architect-designed pavilion at the end of every street.

456 miles · about 8 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

WaterColor and Seagrove Beach

These are two very different places next to each other. WaterColor is a 499 acre St. Joe development wrapped around Western Lake, planned and landscaped and low density. Seagrove is a 1949 subdivision of concrete block cottages under live oaks that grew without a developer or a code. Together they have the best public beach access on 30A.

457 miles · about 9 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Panama City Beach

Panama City Beach has the longest continuous beachfront of anywhere on this page, about nine miles, and the best public access system: numbered accesses running the length of Front Beach Road, two 1,500 foot piers and two state parks. It also has the most serious water safety record on the Gulf, and that is not a detail to skip.

458 miles · about 8 to 8.5 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Alys Beach

Alys Beach is the all-white one. Established in 2004 by EBSCO on land the company bought in 1978, with every building white stucco over reinforced masonry, Bermudian stepped roofs and walled private courtyards drawn from Bermuda, the Mediterranean and the courtyard houses of Antigua, Guatemala. Twenty years in it is roughly half built out.

460 miles · about 8 to 8.5 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Rosemary Beach

Rosemary Beach was founded in 1995 and planned by the same firm that planned Seaside, but it looks nothing like it. The references are the French Quarter and West Indies colonial building: deep second and third floor porches, shuttered openings, dark stained wood, brick and cobbled streets, and a dense grid of narrow pedestrian boardwalks running between the buildings.

466 miles · about 7 to 7.5 hours, longer with a family and stops

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Gulf Shores

Gulf Shores is the default Nashville beach and has been for two generations, because it is the closest saltwater you can reach on interstate almost the whole way. It is also the most built up of the Alabama beaches, with a city-owned public core at Gulf Place where the restaurants, the stage and the sand all sit within a block of each other.

471 miles · about 7 to 7.5 hours

Not a day trip. Plan to stay

Orange Beach

Orange Beach is the next town east of Gulf Shores and the Gulf frontage here is almost entirely condominium high rise, with the public beach land belonging to Gulf State Park rather than the city. The town’s real center of gravity is behind the beach, on Perdido Pass and Terry Cove and Wolf Bay, where the charter fleet and The Wharf are.