Washington to Albany drive: 24 ranked stops, break in Monroe Township

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 1732 courthouse is the literal center of a 12-mile-radius arc that still defines the Delaware-Pennsylvania border today -- stand in the building and you're standing at the geometric origin of a state boundary. Outside, the cobblestone Green (laid out by Peter Stuyvesant in 1655) and colonial streetscape make this one of the best-preserved small historic

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 blacktip reef shark tank and an indoor Australian rainforest sit inside a glass pyramid on Baltimore's Inner Harbor pier -- one of the largest aquariums on the East Coast, built to anchor the harbor's 1980s redevelopment.

The last all-sail warship built by the U.S. Navy (1854), and the flagship of the Union's Africa Squadron intercepting slave ships before the Civil War. Now permanently moored at Pier 1 in Baltimore's Inner Harbor as the centerpiece of Historic Ships in Baltimore.

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.

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