Welcome to the Road Trips Forum, Susan.

Roadside America tends to accent the quirky attractions. https://www.roadsideamerica.com/ I use their website, know nothing about their iPhone/iPad app.

I check out TripAdvisor's top rated attractions for states I am visiting to see if anything appeals (sometimes nothing does). Here is the list for Missouri, for example: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g28946-Activities-a_allAttractions.true-Missouri.html

This tool helps you find attractions within so many miles or hours north, south, east or west of any location:

https://withinhours.com/

I am a member of AAA. They had tour guides for each state that lists attractions. In the front were the "GEM" attractions for each state, their idea of the handful of top things to visit which i found pretty on-point. Now AAA no longer publishes the tour guides in print form, it's all online. I assume the same info is all there, tho I've not had occasion to use it yet and don't know how user-friendly it is.

Add Google Earth Pro(free) after looking at the Google "maps" on their Chrome browser to the websites above. Its all I use for planning.

Each state has a tourism website which will also help locate local attractions, but a paper road map from a state usually shows more sites to visit in small red letters on the map itself - email some requests for the paper map to the tourism office or BMV of the states you need.

Emjoy.

You can search for attractions along a Google maps route. The map display on smart phones an laptops has buttons to search the route for restaurants, gas, etc. Use the 'more' button to find what you are looking for.

there is no easy/single app for doing that - i keep looking )-: web browsers are usually better or have more info then you will find in the apps including the TA app which I never use.

I use the tourism web page for each state or province

from there I learn the regional names then look of a regional/county tourism webpage if they exist, if not I look at the local cities and towns for more detail.

then once I have found a few things and I need to connect the local dots I use TA local forums as the locals often have the "non marketing" info unlike the tourism sites where they are all about marketing a region.

for google maps using xxxx near xxxlocation will show some stuff but not all, then there are tiny dots on the map you can see when you zoom in for stuff that google does not get add money for.

I second the AAA thing. Like the previous poster, I haven't had the opportunity to use the online version, but the old-school books were very helpful. I just picked one up for whatever area(s) we were visiting. The books used to comment on how much time to allow at an attraction, too. I still enjoy the great hotel discounts I get with them. No, I don't work for AAA. :)

I live in a smallish town, but our local library has similar books in the travel section for various areas of the country. I've checked them out, taken notes and returned them. Again, old-school, but free.

AAA Triptk is helpful for roadtrips.

https://triptik.aaa.com/home/

I tried Triptik again to see if it had improved. It is still not worth switching from google maps as you still have to do some of the homework

It is just an overlay using google maps for data - telltale sign is the yellowstickman for streetview.

It can have more then 10 destinations - a good thing

you can not click on a location to make add it to the list

I check a few campgrounds - it did not list the one in a National Park that I have been to so will not give you a full list of what is around where you might want to go.

So better then last time I looked but still needs work if you know how to use all the tricks in google maps

and it asks for a aaa.com account to save your trips when I logged in with my CAA account.