Yellowstone is bigger than some countries. Nearly 3,500 square miles, one main road shaped like a figure of eight, and roughly 4 million people a year trying to drive it. Three days is enough to see the headline stuff properly. It is not enough to see everything, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling

Ask around and you’ll get two answers about the Grand Canyon. Either it’s the most staggering thing anyone has ever seen, or it’s “a big hole, we were done in an hour.” Both of those people went to the same place. The difference is almost entirely what they did when they got there. So let’s

Right, so. Zion is a canyon with 2,000 foot sandstone walls that go orange at sunset, and about five million people a year turn up to look at it. Which is the whole problem in one sentence. The park is small, the good bits are concentrated in one narrow canyon, and everyone wants the same

469 miles, no traffic lights, no lorries, no billboards, and a speed limit of 45mph that you will resent for about an hour and then stop noticing entirely. The Blue Ridge Parkway is the best road trip in the eastern United States and it is at its absolute peak for roughly three weeks in October.

Everyone wants to do the New England leaf trip. Almost nobody wants to admit that half of it is spent in traffic behind someone doing 30mph while filming a tree. So here’s a route that actually works. Seven days, roughly 700 miles, Massachusetts up through Vermont and New Hampshire and out to the Maine coast.

Savannah is small, flat and built on a grid of 22 squares, which means you can see most of it on foot and still feel like you’ve missed something. That’s the charm, honestly. Three days is the sweet spot. Two feels rushed, four and you’re inventing things to do. Here’s how I’d spend them. FYI

Charleston is very good at being photographed and slightly less good at telling you which bits are worth your actual time. Everything looks like a postcard, so everything gets recommended. Which is how people end up spending forty dollars on a carriage ride and eating a mediocre shrimp basket two blocks from a restaurant that

Sedona is two hours from Phoenix, surrounded by red sandstone that looks faintly unreal in photographs and considerably more unreal in person. It’s also small, extremely popular, and very easy to do badly. Two days is enough if you’re deliberate about it and a bit of a scramble if you’re not. A quick note on