Colonial Parkway Drive Guide

The Colonial Parkway runs 23 miles connecting the three points of the Historic Triangle — Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown — and it is the rare American road built to hide the modern world instead of showing it off. Constructed in pieces between 1930 and 1957 and run by the National Park Service, it has no billboards, no commercial strips, no semi-trucks, and it ducks under Colonial Williamsburg in the only tunnel on the route so the 18th-century town stays unbroken overhead. It’s paved in an exposed-aggregate surface that hums under the tires, and it crosses marshes at Halfway Creek and King Creek where herons stalk the reeds. It’s a designated All-American Road, one of only a few dozen in the country.