Photo: The Image Bank RF
Picture this.
You're driving down a road, and all you see is your car swallowing yellow line after yellow line painted on the cracking pavement in front of you. You are surrounded by a sprawling landscape outlined with trees, hills, and green as far as the eye can see. There are no cars in front of you and no cars behind you. No one is frantically beeping at you to push the speed limit. No one is passing you. It's simply you, the open road, and your thoughts. As you continue to drive in peace, you are not disturbed by rattling engines and the sound of big trucks on either side of your vehicle. A destination in mind and all the time in the world to get there; that's what it feels like to drive the loneliest road in California. After all, Robert Frost wrote an entire poem about taking the road less traveled... and you know what? It made all the difference.
According to a list compiled by Atlas Obscura, the loneliest road in all of California is State Route 139.
Here's what Atlas Obscura had to say about compiling the data to discover the loneliest road in the entire state:
"Telematics specialists at Geotab gathered 2015 data from the U.S. federal government’s Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) to find, for each state, the route with the lowest annual average daily traffic (AADT). HPMS data covers interstates, U.S. routes, and state routes over 10 miles long."
For a continued list of the loneliest roads across the country visit atlasobscura.com.