ACA maps will pay for themselves by telling you of lots of free places to stay (churches, armories, individuals) as well as hostels you'd never know about otherwise. They keep you off high traffic roads without shoulders that you have no way of knowing about by looking at regular maps. Also roads so remote that almost everyone lets their dogs run loose as a form of home protection with no worries of hit-by-car. We just finished going coast to coast using ACA maps from Oregon to Kansas, then picking our own path to South Carolina. I've never drawn my dog spray in my life until twice in one day when we were chased by 20-30 dogs on a ten mile stretch of a *cute* country road in Alabama. Oops. For future trips, I'll stick to ACA maps as much as possible.

Have also used ACA maps on the Northern Tier. On the North Star (Alaska), the ACA route went out of its way to keep us on low traffic roads, using gravel ones instead of the perfectly good (paved) Alcan. We ended up detouring to Whitehorse, Yukon, just to get a taste of it. As already mentioned, ACA maps are made out of a wonderful, waterproof material.