Washington to Albany road trip: 24 stops worth the detour

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

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.

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 retro-park that started the whole movement — the B&O Warehouse beyond right field

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.

the cathedral rebuilt — Monument Park, the façade, and the weight of all that history

A busy public course in the suburbs.

the rowdiest crowd in baseball, the Liberty Bell, and a cheesesteak worth the line

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.

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