United States

Joshua Tree is where two deserts meet, which is why it looks like nowhere else. The higher, cooler Mojave in the west grows the Joshua trees; the lower, hotter Colorado desert in the east grows creosote and cholla. You drive across the boundary and the vegetation visibly changes. It’s also two and a half hours […]

Mount Rushmore takes about an hour. That’s the honest answer and it disappoints people who’ve driven a long way. The trick is to stop thinking of it as the destination and start thinking of it as one stop in the Black Hills, which is one of the more underrated corners of America. Two hours east

New Mexico is the state Americans forget exists and Europeans have never heard of. It has a 400-year-old capital city where building codes require adobe, a national park made of white gypsum dunes, and pueblos that have been continuously inhabited for a thousand years. It’s also cheap, empty and about four hours’ drive from top

Most people bolt Grand Teton onto a Yellowstone trip and give it a day. That’s backwards. Yellowstone has the geysers and the crowds; Grand Teton has mountains that come straight up out of a flat valley with no foothills in the way, which is why every photograph of it looks slightly unreal. They’re 50km apart

Death Valley holds the highest air temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth: 56.7°C, in July 1913. It regularly clears 50°C in summer. It is also, for about five months of the year, one of the most comfortable and least crowded national parks in America. Which is the whole article, really. Everything here depends on when

Yosemite Valley is about 11 square kilometres. The park is 3,000. Roughly 90% of visitors go to that 11, which tells you both what’s worth seeing and why it feels the way it does in July. There’s a lot of advice out there about beating the crowds. Most of it boils down to two things:

Vegas is designed from the ground up to separate you from your money, and it’s extremely good at it. Which is exactly why doing it cheaply is so satisfying — you’re beating a system built by people much smarter than a $200 nightly rate. You can genuinely have a great few days here on $100

You’ve seen Monument Valley whether you know it or not. John Ford shot nine westerns here, Forrest Gump stopped running here, and roughly every car advert involving a desert has been filmed on that road. What most people don’t realise until they arrive: it isn’t a national park. It’s Navajo Nation land, run by the

The Road to Hana is 103 kilometres, has 620 curves and 59 bridges, and takes about two and a half hours to drive if you don’t stop. Nobody doesn’t stop. Realistically you’re looking at 10 to 12 hours. It’s also the trip most likely to be ruined by bad planning on the whole island. Here’s

Here’s the thing about the DC cherry blossoms that nobody tells you until you’re standing there in a crowd of 40,000 people at 7am: peak bloom lasts about four days, the date moves every year, and you have to book flights months before anyone knows when it is. It’s a gamble. It’s also genuinely one