United States

San Antonio is the second largest city in Texas and it feels nothing like the first. It’s older, slower, more Mexican, and built around a river rather than a freeway. It’s also the most walkable major city in the state, which in Texas is close to a miracle. Three days covers it properly. Here’s how. […]

Most people’s idea of Texas is flat, brown and enormous. The Hill Country is none of those things. It’s a limestone plateau west of Austin and north of San Antonio, all rolling hills, spring-fed rivers, oak groves and small towns founded by German settlers in the 1840s. There are vineyards. There are peach orchards. You

Big Sur is 90 miles of Highway 1 between Carmel and San Simeon, cut into a mountainside that falls straight into the Pacific. It has no towns to speak of, one traffic light in the entire stretch, and almost no phone signal. Most people drive it in three hours as part of getting somewhere else,

Washington DC has some of the best museums in the world and they’re free, which is a genuinely remarkable thing. It’s also why most visitors spend three days indoors, come out blinking, and go home having seen a city entirely through its exhibition halls. There’s a real place here with neighbourhoods, parks, markets and a

San Diego has a reputation as an expensive California city, and the headline attractions do their best to earn it. SeaWorld, the zoo and Legoland will take a couple of hundred dollars off a family before lunch. But the actual character of the place is beaches, canyons, tacos and 70 miles of coastline, and almost

Vegas is very good at separating people from money in exchange for a slightly worse version of something they could get cheaper elsewhere. That’s not a criticism, it’s the business model. But there’s a real city here, and a desert around it that’s genuinely spectacular, and most visitors never see either. So: the things that

Palm Springs is two hours east of Los Angeles in the middle of a desert, and for about forty years it was where Hollywood went to disappear for the weekend. Then it got old and unfashionable, and then in the 2000s everyone rediscovered the architecture and it got extremely fashionable again. What’s left is a

The Pacific Coast Highway is the drive everyone means when they say California road trip. Roughly 650 miles from San Francisco to San Diego, most of it with the ocean out of the passenger window. The mistake people make is treating it as a transit route and doing it in two days. You can. You’ll

Here’s a fact that makes the Oregon coast different from California’s: every inch of the beach is public. All 363 miles of it, by law, since 1967. No private beaches, no gated resorts, no paying to see the sea. That single decision shaped the whole coastline and it’s why this drive feels less developed than

Olympic is three parks in one and that’s not marketing, it’s the actual problem you have to plan around. There’s a glaciated mountain range in the middle, a temperate rainforest on the west side, and 70 miles of wild Pacific coast. They’re hours apart and there is no road through the middle of the park.