Richmond to Philadelphia road trip: 24 stops worth the detour

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.

DC's largest wooded park east of the river hides a Civil War fort that never fired a shot in anger — and today its 10 miles of unpaved trail (the Fort Circle Hiker-Biker Trail) is the wildest, least-crowded hiking in the city, linking six Civil War forts along a forgotten green ring around the capital.

The one ticketed pick worth the money: a Cold War-era Aston Martin, a lipstick pistol, and interactive tradecraft missions in a purpose-built L'Enfant Plaza building — the rare paid attraction that earns its price tag as a road-trip centerpiece rather than a tourist trap.

rolling Piedmont woods near Newark

A national museum devoted entirely to self-taught 'outsider' artists -- whirligigs, a giant whirligig sculpture garden, and a mirrored mosaic facade that makes it the single quirkiest museum stop in the state.

a wooded gorge and old blue-rock quarry near Wilmington

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.

King emerges from a split boulder called the 'Mountain of Despair' — the stone that was quarried out is symbolically left behind, and the sculptor pulled King's likeness forward out of the rock so he appears to be walking straight at the Jefferson Memorial across the basin, staring down the man who wrote 'all men are created equal' while owning people.

Alfred I. du Pont's 1910 gift to his second wife: a 77-room French neoclassical chateau modeled on Versailles and the Petit Trianon, fronted by the longest formal allee of fountains in North America -- the 'American Versailles' story is an easy, vivid hook for road-trippers.

This is the largest Catholic church in North America and the tallest habitable structure in DC — taller than the Capitol dome — yet it sits in a residential Northeast neighborhood most Mall-bound travelers never drive through. Inside, more than 80 chapels and mosaic domes represent immigrant Catholic communities from Lithuania to the Philippines, each one a

an easy forest loop to a pretty fall near Baltimore