Raleigh to Philadelphia road trip: 24 stops worth the detour

Routinely ranked Maryland's best public course, Bulle Rock hosted the LPGA Championship from 2005 to 2009. Dye stretched it across rolling farmland with dramatic elevation and his trademark hazards.

The last city-owned public market standing in DC, rebuilt board-by-board after a 2007 fire — Saturday mornings mean blue-corn pancakes inside and a flea market of five continents' worth of dealers spilling onto the sidewalk outside.

The bombardment Francis Scott Key watched from a ship in the harbor on the night of September 13-14, 1814, produced the poem that became 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' Check in at the star-shaped fort where the flag flew 'by dawn's early light.'

The only National Park Service site grown from a water lily hobby: a Civil War veteran's daughter kept expanding her father's lily ponds until the government bought the marsh to save it from becoming a dump. Come July, water lilies and giant lotus blossoms cover acres of ponds a mile from the Anacostia — the most surprising 'garden' in the federal park syste

Dorothy's ruby slippers, the original Star-Spangled Banner, and the actual lunch counter from the Greensboro sit-ins — this is where the story of the country you're driving across gets laid out in objects, not textbooks.

Built around illustrator Howard Pyle and his student N.C. Wyeth (godfather of the Brandywine School of American illustration), plus the largest Pre-Raphaelite art collection outside the UK -- a surprising, story-rich stop that most road-trippers wouldn't expect to find in Wilmington.

Tucked in a quiet grove behind the National Academy of Sciences, this 12-foot bronze Einstein holds a tablet inscribed with three of his own equations — and at his feet is a star map of the sky on the exact night the memorial was dedicated in 1979, accurate down to the planets. Almost nobody detours the 200 feet off the Mall to find it.

A classic city municipal course.

The du Pont family's original 1802 gunpowder works on the Brandywine -- walk between reconstructed powder yards, a working 19th-century machine shop, and the family's first American home, all on 235 riverside acres. The origin story of the entire du Pont/Brandywine Valley dynasty that also built Winterthur and Nemours, so it anchors the corridor rather than

A well-regarded daily-fee track near Fredericksburg.

Housed in the 1884 Mount Clare roundhouse -- birthplace of American railroading, where the B&O's first stone was laid in 1828 -- with the country's oldest and most comprehensive collection of historic locomotives under one roof.