Los Angeles to New Orleans: Planning the Full Cross-Country Drive

The Los Angeles to New Orleans Road Trip, Mapped Out

A Los Angeles New Orleans road trip is one of the longest, most varied drives in the country. You start on the Pacific coast and end on the banks of the Mississippi, crossing deserts, mountains, Texas Hill Country, and bayou along the way. It’s not a weekend trip, but it’s one of the most rewarding stretches of road in the U.S. if you plan it right.

How Many Miles and How Many Days

The most direct route, mostly along Interstate 10, runs roughly 1,900 miles. Driven straight through with no stops, that’s about 28 to 30 hours behind the wheel. Most travelers spread it over 5 to 8 days, which gives you room to actually see the places you’re driving past instead of just passing through them.

The Route Options

I-10 is the backbone of this trip, running almost coast to coast through the southern U.S. You can follow it closely for the fastest route, or swing north through Austin and the Hill Country for a slightly longer but more scenic alternative. Either way, the drive naturally breaks into a few big chunks: Southern California to Arizona, Arizona through New Mexico into West Texas, across Texas, and then the final push through Louisiana into New Orleans.

When to Go

Timing matters more on this route than most. Summer brings brutal heat through the Arizona and West Texas desert stretches, while Gulf Coast humidity and hurricane season (June through November) can complicate the Louisiana end of the trip. Spring and fall tend to offer the best balance of manageable temperatures and lower storm risk.

If your route takes you through the final leg between Texas and Louisiana, it’s worth looking at The Best Time to Drive from Austin to New Orleans, since that stretch shares the same seasonal considerations many travelers run into on the back half of this trip.

Stops Worth the Detour

Arizona and New Mexico

Phoenix and Tucson are the obvious anchors in Arizona, with easy access to desert scenery and good food stops. Crossing into New Mexico, Las Cruces and White Sands make a worthwhile detour if you have an extra few hours to spare before pushing into West Texas.

Texas Hill Country to the Gulf

Texas is the longest single state crossing on this trip, and it’s where a lot of travelers choose to slow down. El Paso, San Antonio, and Houston all sit along or near the route, and many people route through Austin for the Hill Country before heading toward the coast. The final stretch from there into Louisiana has its own rhythm of small towns and swamp scenery, and we’ve covered it in more detail in Things to See Between Austin and New Orleans.

Where the Trip Begins and Ends

Los Angeles, California

Starting in LA means starting with options: coastal routes, desert routes, or a straight shot east on I-10. For a sense of what the city itself has to offer before you hit the road, see our Los Angeles destination guide.

New Orleans, Louisiana

New Orleans is a fitting finish line for a trip this long, with food, music, and history dense enough to justify a few extra days at the end. Our New Orleans destination guide covers what to do once you’ve parked the car.

Planning Logistics That Make or Break the Trip

Fuel, Pace and Daylight

A drive this long means thinking seriously about daily driving limits, fuel stops in sparsely populated desert stretches, and daylight hours, especially if you’re crossing time zones along the way (you’ll pass through Pacific, Mountain, and Central time). Pace matters too. A trip this size can be a relaxed cross-country cruise or a packed sightseeing marathon depending on how you build your days.

Learning from Other Routes

Even on a long cross-country trip, the same planning principles that apply to shorter drives still hold true: know your stops, know your drive times, and build in buffer for things that go sideways. Our guide on How to Plan a Road Trip from Los Angeles to San Diego walks through those basics on a smaller scale, and the same logic scales up well to a trip like this one.

How Journey Builder Fits In

A trip this long has a lot of moving parts: route choices, stop research, daily pacing, fuel costs, and timing across multiple states and time zones. Journey Builder plans road trips anywhere in the United States and Canada, from 1 to 90 days, which covers a drive like Los Angeles to New Orleans comfortably. It builds the route for you automatically, with distance and drive time for every leg plus alternative routes, so you can compare the straight I-10 shot against the Hill Country detour side by side.

It also ranks the towns along your route and suggests stops, showing whether each one is right on your path or how far off it sits and how much of a detour it adds. Once you’ve picked your stops, the auto-scheduler turns them into a day-by-day plan around wake-up and bedtime, drive times, meals, and any fixed plans you’ve locked in, usually in one to three minutes. For a trip that spans this many states and this many days, that kind of logistics support turns a sprawling idea into a trip you can actually take.

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