We used to link cities, towns, national parks to Wikivoyage (same content as Wikitravel, but without ads). All POIs within populated places linked to Wikipedia.
You are right about visuals. Totally. I don't know where to get them from... The idea was to plug smbd's knowledge graph, with structured POIs, with curated text, pics and videos. We could easily land you by coordinates to Google Street View instead of Wikipedia. But we don't know yet what people want.
Themes is another big feature. Family or adventure or culture. Known how to do that, just not doing it right now. Thank you again for very consistent and useful feedback. This is going to impact our planning.
I would add something like timeline for activities/scenery like morning afternoon evening. Not too bloat I think.
Plugging in a few family-fav trips and it seems to hit most the major points I would personally recommend.
I like that each place links to Wikipedia, but I don't think that was obvious at first. I actually only noticed on my re-visit of the site to see if the places had a "more info" link or something, and completely missed that they were links on my first look through.
I would probably add links to Wikitravel over Wikipedia, but maybe that's just me. I like how it summarises the key tourist attractions and eateries and stuff.
On the final version of the site, I would definitely consider pulling in some photos of the places when you expand the breakdown. People who travel/roadtrip generally like visuals, which is exactly why so many of the roadtrip guides look more like photography magazines. I'm not sure how you'd do that and keep it looking so clean/minimal (which I quite like), but I do think it's important.