Washington to Philadelphia 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.'

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.

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 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.

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.

A classic city municipal course.

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.

A busy public course in the suburbs.

Henry Francis du Pont's 979-acre former estate along the Brandywine -- naturalistic gardens, an American decorative-arts collection, and one of the named cultural-institution stops that gives the Brandywine Valley National Scenic Byway its 'concentration of historic sites, magnificent estates, glorious gardens' character.

This is the newest piece of the national park system in Delaware -- 1,100+ acres donated by conservationists, capped by a 2021 254-acre expansion funded partly by Mt. Cuba Center, preserving Brandywine River scenery that a Quaker industrialist started protecting from development over a century ago.