The Florida Keys are 113 miles of islands strung out into the Gulf on a single road with 42 bridges. You start in the Everglades and finish 90 miles from Cuba. The drive is the thing. But a lot of people treat the Keys as a corridor to Key West and blow past everything in

You’ve got one trip, probably a week, and three islands people keep recommending. Everyone you ask gives a different answer and says it with total confidence. So let’s cut through it. These islands are genuinely different, they suit different trips, and picking wrong is the difference between a great holiday and a slightly frustrated one.

Seattle has an image problem. People arrive expecting rain, coffee and grunge, which is roughly like going to Paris for the berets. What’s actually here: a city wedged between a sound and a lake with two volcanoes visible on a clear day, some of the best seafood in the country, and neighbourhoods that feel like

Five national parks, roughly 1,000 miles of driving, and some of the strangest rock on the planet. Utah’s Mighty 5 is the best road trip in America and it’s very easy to do it badly. The classic mistake is trying to fit it into five days because there are five parks. That maths does not

Everyone goes to Vermont in October to photograph trees. Fair enough, the trees are extraordinary. But you can only take so many pictures of a hillside before you want something to actually do, and this is where most foliage trips fall apart. Three days of driving and stopping at pull-offs gets old faster than people

Boston is the rare American city where walking actually works. It’s small, it’s old by American standards, and the good bits are stacked on top of each other rather than spread across forty miles of freeway. Three days is genuinely the right amount. You can do the history, eat well, get across the river to

Acadia is small for a national park. About 49,000 acres, most of it on an island you can drive around in ninety minutes, and yet somehow it packs in granite cliffs, a fjord, twenty-six mountains and a working fishing town. Two days is genuinely enough here, which you cannot say about most parks. You can

Here’s a fact that surprises people. The Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited national park in America, by miles. Around 13 million people a year, roughly double the Grand Canyon. Partly that’s because it’s free, which almost no other big park is. Partly it’s because two thirds of the American population lives within a

Asheville is a small mountain city of about 95,000 people with more breweries per head than almost anywhere in America, a 250-room mansion on its edge, and a downtown full of art deco buildings that survived because the city was too broke to knock them down. It’s also very easy to spend three days there