The best volcanoes to visit in USA run from a parking lot view to a 10-mile slog through loose ash. Kīlauea on the Island of Hawaii, inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, is the only one erupting right now, and you can’t schedule it. Everything else here is dormant, which makes it safer and easier to…
The best things to do in Key West cluster at the edges of the day. Catch the Dry Tortugas ferry at 8 a.m., swim at Fort Zachary Taylor before the cruise crowd lands, and save Old Town for after the heat breaks. Midday on Duval Street is hot, loud, and mostly T-shirt shops. Here’s how…
The best small towns in New England for the coast are Camden, Maine, Stonington, Ogunquit, Chatham, Massachusetts, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Block Island, Rhode Island. Skip Bar Harbor, Maine, as a base in August, and don’t book a stay in Hyannis, Massachusetts. Pick two towns, not six. The driving between them will eat your trip. The…
The best places to visit in June in the USA are mountains and northern coasts: Acadia National Park, Maine, Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska, Yosemite National Park, California, Glacier National Park, Montana, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, and Haleakalā National Park, Maui, Hawaii. I rank them in that order below. Skip the desert Southwest and…
The best USA bucket list travel destinations all ration access in some way, so your booking window matters more than your airfare. Miss a lottery or a lodge release date and the trip slides back a full year. I also flag which picks double as family destinations in the USA. Below, I rank the places…
The best things to do Kansas City, Missouri, come down to four stops: burnt ends, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the National WWI Museum and Memorial, and a night of live jazz. Two days covers all of it. Add a third if you want a ballgame or the zoo. And if you’re staying downtown, skip…
Halloween falls on a Saturday in 2026, which makes it the highest-demand Halloween night in years. Salem, Massachusetts drew more than a million visitors across October last year, with close to 96,000 on Halloween day alone. So the honest advice about Halloween towns America obsesses over is to go two or three weeks early, when…
California runs about 800 miles north to south, and four corridors carry almost everything worth stopping for: Highway 1 on the coast, US-101 inland from it, Interstate 5 down the middle, and US-395 along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada. Pick one. The beautiful places California is famous for cluster along these roads, and…
Because almost all of them have a window, and most visitors show up outside it. Yosemite’s Horsetail Fall glows for about ten minutes on a handful of February evenings, and roughly half those evenings get clouded out. That’s the extreme case, but the pattern holds across the most beautiful places USA travelers photograph: the picture…
Arizona’s drinking age is 21 with no exceptions, and that one line reorganizes an entire trip. The spots for young adults Arizona travelers get recommended online mostly assume everyone in the group is legal, which leaves 18 to 20 year olds standing outside venues at 9 p.m. wondering what to do next. Good news: the…