I am considering joining a friend for a few hundred miles of his cross country tour. He's not dead set on a route, so we have some flexibility as to where we can go. Let's arbitrarily say I wanted to ride from Chattanooga TN to Meridian MS. How should I go about selecting a route? Interstates are obviously out of the question. It's very difficult to look at a map and know what the road will be like. For example HWY 67 and HWY 49 in south MS would both show up as divided 4 lane highways and appear essentially similar on a map. Most of 49 would be a two wheeled version of Russian Roulette, whereas 67 has bike lanes and shoulders for most of its duration. It's a wonderful riding road. How the heck do you manage to avoid death trap roads when you are going through an area that is completely unfamiliar? Beyond that, how do you select roads that afford nice scenery and relatively low traffic? If I toured coastal MS, I could do it exclusively on low traffic lower speed county roads that I know too be safe. I'd do this based on my knowledge. Without having that intimate knowledge of a different area, how should I go about route selection? If this is like almost every other topic on the board and has been discussed ad nauseum, I apologize, my search fu may be off a little.