Route: Boston → Lexington → Concord → Salem → Plymouth. Total mileage: 120. Nonstop driving time: roughly three hours.

This loop from Boston to Plymouth offers perhaps the densest concentration of Revolutionary sites anywhere in the USA. In Boston, the Freedom Trail links the Old State House (pictured here), Faneuil Hall, the Old North Church, and the site of the Boston Massacre, grounding visitors in the protests that ignited rebellion. A short drive west leads to Lexington and Concord, where the “shot heard ’round the world” marked the war’s first clash in April 1775. The surrounding countryside remains pastoral — stone walls, village greens, and gently rolling farmland much as it appeared back in the day of the Minutemen (members of the New England colonial militia). North in Salem, maritime wealth financed privateers and global trade (and of course there´s the additional witchcraft angle to explore while you´re there); south in Plymouth, at the Plimoth Patuxet Museums and Plymouth Rock itself, the Revolutionary story connects to the era of the Pilgrims who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1620. Rocky shorelines, clapboard houses, and salt marshes give flavor to the route, making it both compact and extraordinarily rich and atmospheric.

Read more in my post 5 Revolutionary Road Trips to Mark the USA´s 250th Anniversary.