Say I want to take a tour and not quite plan out the route. Say LA to New York, what would be a good estimate of distance travelled? Find the distance if you take the highway and multiply by 1.5? Get a paper map and use a compass? Obviously, the mountain ranges, climate, and terrian will be researched. Is it a good strategy to pick cities 100, 200, 300 miles apart, and say, I'm going to these cities, but I don't know how to get between them?

Basically, how do you figure out how much time it is going to take to get from A to B?