United States

Acadia National Park (Bar Harbor)

New England's only national park, where granite mountains drop straight into the North Atlantic above forty-five miles of car-free carriage roads.

✓ best May-Jun, Sep

Adirondacks (Lake Placid)

The largest protected area in the contiguous United States, with no gate, no entry booth and towns living inside the line.

✓ best May, Sep-Oct

Anaheim

The town Disneyland built, with a citrus-warehouse downtown and Orange County's beaches half an hour away.

Anchorage

Alaska's front door - a plain-spoken city with a mountain range at the end of the bus line and moose on the bike path.

Asheville

A Gilded Age mountain resort that went broke, kept its Art Deco downtown, and reopened as the craft capital of the southern Appalachians.

✓ best Mar, Oct-Nov

Aspen

A silver-boom grid with four ski mountains around it and a wall of 14,000-ft peaks at the end of the road.

✓ best Jun-Sep

Atlanta

The home ground of Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement, and where the South eats best.

✓ best Apr-May, Sep-Oct

Austin

The self-declared live music capital of the world, with swimming holes and brisket to match.

✓ best Sep-Apr

Bend

A high-desert brewery town at the foot of a volcano, where lava tubes, singletrack, a river float and a ski lift are all inside an hour.

Big Sur (Monterey)

Ninety miles of two-lane highway where the mountains fall into the Pacific, and half a century of planning rules has kept almost nothing built beside it.

Boston

The walkable birthplace of a revolution, where four centuries of history, world-class museums and a student city share a peninsula you can cross on foot.

✓ best Apr-Sep

Cape Cod (Hyannis)

The definitive New England summer: forty miles of protected Atlantic dune and a warm-water bay coast, on a sandbar you can cross by bike.

Catskills (Phoenicia)

Two hours from Manhattan: the range where American landscape painting was invented, and where the city's water still comes from.

✓ best May-Jun, Oct

Charleston

The most intact colonial city in America, preserved by the poverty that followed its fortune, and no museum piece at the dinner table.

✓ best Nov-May

Chicago

The birthplace of the skyscraper, with a public lakefront, a serious eating city and the blues, all at a fraction of the coastal cities' swagger.

✓ best Apr, Jul, Sep-Oct

Dallas

No port, no harbour, no reason to be here: Dallas willed itself into existence at a railroad crossing.

✓ best Jun, Sep, Nov-Apr

Death Valley (Furnace Creek)

The hottest air temperature ever measured on Earth, and in winter one of the emptiest and most extraordinary desert drives anywhere.

Denali National Park (Healy)

One road into six million acres of trail-less tundra, under a mountain that rises further from its own base than any other on earth.

✓ best Jul

Denver

A mile-high plains city that works as a proper city break and as the front door to the Rockies.

✓ best Mar-Oct

Everglades National Park (Homestead)

The largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, and the only place on earth where alligators and crocodiles live side by side.

✓ best Nov-Apr

Fairbanks

The town under the auroral oval - a gold-rush outpost where winter is the attraction and midsummer never gets dark.

✓ best May-Aug

Galveston

The richest city in Texas until the deadliest hurricane in American history, rebuilt behind a seawall and now the Gulf Coast's beach weekend.

✓ best Feb-May, Jul

Glacier National Park (Whitefish)

The last intact wilderness of the northern Rockies, crossed by one of the most spectacular mountain roads ever built.

Grand Canyon (Tusayan)

The landmark no photograph prepares you for, with a rim path at the door and a mile of rock below it.

✓ best Mar-Jun, Aug-Oct

Great Smoky Mountains (Gatlinburg)

Ridge after ridge of blue-hazed old-growth forest, with the busiest park in America at one gate and coves an hour away where the loudest thing is the river.

✓ best Aug-Oct

Hilo

Hawaii with the resorts stripped out - a rainforest port town within an hour of Kilauea, under Mauna Kea and the world's greatest concentration of telescopes.

✓ best May-Jun, Sep, Jan

Honolulu

The birthplace of modern surfing, the only royal palace on American soil and a rainforest waterfall all sit within half an hour of the same stretch of beach.

Houston

The most diverse big city in America, with no zoning, no scenery and some of the best eating in the country.

✓ best Feb-Mar, Nov

Juneau

The only US state capital with no road in - a rainforest town with the Mendenhall Glacier at the edge of its suburbs.

✓ best May-Jun

Kauai

The oldest and greenest Hawaiian island, where the ring road quits at a wall of fluted sea cliffs you can only reach on foot, by boat or from the air.

✓ best Apr-Oct, Jan-Feb

Kona

Hawaii's sunniest, most sheltered coast - royal history on the shoreline, coffee on the slopes above, and manta rays in the dark water offshore.

✓ best Apr, Jun-Feb

Lake Tahoe (South Lake Tahoe)

An alpine lake deep enough to hold its own colour, with a state line down its main street and ski mountains all the way around the rim.

Las Vegas

The densest run of spectacle anywhere, with red-rock desert half an hour out of town.

Los Angeles

The company town of the movies, wrapped around beaches, canyon trails and the most varied eating in the United States.

Martha's Vineyard

The New England summer island in full: a whaling port, a gingerbread Victorian resort and a farming, fishing back country, all on one island you can cross by bus and bike.

✓ best May-Aug

Maui

One island where you can watch the sun come up out of a volcanic crater above the clouds and be snorkelling a sunken reef by mid-morning.

Memphis

The river city where Delta blues turned into rock and roll and then soul, and where America's hardest civil rights reckoning is told on the spot it happened.

✓ best Aug-Sep

Mesa Verde National Park (Durango)

Cliff Palace and the greatest concentration of cliff dwellings anywhere, in the first national park created for what people built rather than for the view.

Miami

The hemisphere's crossroads: the country's densest Art Deco seafront, Cuban Miami inland, warehouse walls painted end to end, and warm water in January.

✓ best Nov-Apr

Minneapolis

Big-city art, music and theatre wrapped around a chain of lakes you can swim in.

✓ best Apr-May, Sep-Oct

Mount Rainier (Ashford)

The most glaciated peak in the contiguous United States, ringed by meadows that turn to wildflowers for a few short weeks each summer.

✓ best Jun-Sep

Nantucket

The whaling capital of the world went bust and never rebuilt, which is exactly why an entire 1840s town is still standing thirty miles out at sea.

Napa Valley

The valley that beat France in a blind tasting, and still eats better than any farmland its size.

✓ best Feb-Nov

Nashville

The town where country music actually gets made, not just performed.

✓ best Aug-Nov

New Orleans

The least American city in America: a below-sea-level Creole port that invented jazz, eats better than anywhere else in the country, and treats celebration as public infrastructure.

✓ best Oct-Nov

New York City

The densest concentration of art, theatre, food and sheer street life anywhere, stacked into a walkable grid and served by a subway that never closes.

Niagara Falls

The whole outflow of the upper Great Lakes goes over the lip here, and the American bank is the side that puts you at the brink and under the spray.

✓ best May-Aug

Orlando

The theme park capital of the world, with spring-fed rivers, wetlands and alligator country half an hour past the resort gates.

✓ best Oct-Apr

Outer Banks (Nags Head)

A hundred miles of shifting sandbar holding the first English colony in the New World, the first powered flight, and the wreck-strewn shore they call the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

✓ best Apr-Jun, Oct-Nov

Philadelphia

The city where both the Declaration and the Constitution were argued out, wrapped in a walkable rowhouse town with world-class art and the best value on the Northeast Corridor.

✓ best Apr-May, Oct-Nov

Phoenix

A big desert city with a flawless winter, mountain trails at the end of the suburbs, and the whole Southwest a morning's drive away.

✓ best Oct-Apr

Portland

A rain-fed, low-rise city of bookshops, food carts and rose gardens, with a volcano on the skyline and old-growth forest inside the city limits.

Redwood National Park (Eureka)

The tallest trees on earth, in a fog-soaked coastal forest that only just survived the saw.

Rocky Mountain National Park (Estes Park)

A third of the park lies above the treeline, and a paved road takes you straight into it.

Salt Lake City

The one big American city where you can land, take a train downtown and be on a chairlift the same morning.

✓ best Apr-Jun, Aug-Oct

San Antonio

A Spanish colonial river town wearing a big Texas city, carrying the only UNESCO World Heritage site in the state.

✓ best Jun, Sep-Apr

San Diego

A big city that behaves like a string of surf towns, under about the steadiest climate in the United States.

San Francisco

Seven square miles of hills, fog and Victorian streets, with the Golden Gate, Alcatraz and some of the best eating in the country.

Santa Barbara

A city that legislated its own good looks after an earthquake, sitting on a south-facing coast with a mountain range at its back and wine country over the pass.

Santa Fe

The oldest capital in the United States, and the only one where the adobe look is written into the building code.

Savannah

A colonial city built around twenty-two public squares, still walkable end to end under a canopy of moss-hung oaks.

Seattle

A port city wedged between salt water, a lake and two mountain ranges, where the ferries are commuter transport and the coffee is a civic institution.

Sitka

The capital of Russian America, on the one stretch of Southeast Alaska that looks straight out at the Pacific.

✓ best Jun

Sonoma

The valley where California wine started, still poured in a farmyard by whoever made it.

✓ best Feb, Apr-Oct

Tampa

The Gulf coast's real city - cigar-era history and a working port, with the best beaches half an hour west.

Taos

A thousand-year-old adobe village, a Spanish colonial plaza and a serious ski mountain, all inside twenty miles of high desert.

Traverse City

The cherry capital of the United States, wrapped around a turquoise bay, with vineyards on both peninsulas and the world's biggest freshwater dunes under an hour west.

Tucson

The Sonoran Desert's own city: saguaro forests on both edges of town, adobe barrios in the middle, and the best Mexican food in the United States.

Washington DC

The rare capital where the founding documents, the great national collections and the monumental core are all free to walk into, strung along one green spine you can cross on foot.

✓ best Mar-Apr, Aug-Nov

Yellowstone (West Yellowstone)

The first national park on earth, and still the one where half the world's geysers erupt through the middle of a working wilderness.

✓ best Jun-Sep

Yosemite (Yosemite Valley)

The valley where the whole idea of protected public land started, with a kilometre of granite overhead and the tallest waterfall in North America running past it.