UNITED STATES · COAST TO COAST
Red rock, big cities, and a very long drive between them.
Observation decks over Manhattan, slot canyons on Navajo land, manatees in the Florida springs and the reef road around Oahu. The days out worth booking, city by city and coast to coast.
Only in America
Three days the rest of the world can’t sell you.
Skylines, beaches and food tours are on offer in every country on earth. A canyon you can only enter with a Navajo guide is not. Neither is the one river where swimming with wild manatees is legal, or a town still answering for 1692. Build the trip around these and fill in the rest.
On Navajo land
Antelope Canyon
Flash floods cut these corridors down through the sandstone, and for a couple of hours either side of midday the sun drops through the cracks overhead in solid beams you can put a hand into. The canyons sit on Navajo Nation land, which means you walk them with a Navajo guide or you do not walk them at all. Nothing else on the planet is shaped like this.
- 1 Page: Lower Antelope Canyon Entry and Navajo Guided Tour
- 2 Page: Antelope Canyon X Guided Tour
- 3 Page: Lower Antelope Canyon Tour with Trained Navajo Guide
In the springs
Swimming With Manatees
Crystal River is the one place in the country where you are legally allowed in the water with wild manatees. When the Gulf turns cold, hundreds of them move up into a spring that holds 72 degrees all winter. The rule is that you float still and let them decide whether to come to you, and most winter mornings they do.
- 1 Most Popular 3hr Manatee Swim Tour + In-Water Guide!
- 2 The ‘OG’ Manatee Snorkel Tour with In-Water Guide/Photographer
- 3 Manatee Swim Tour with In Water Photographer
Since 1692
Salem After Dark
Nineteen people were hanged here in 1692 on the word of their neighbours, and the town has never once tried to bury it. The meeting house, the courtroom sites and the old burying point still stand within a few walkable blocks, and the guides who work those streets after sunset quote the trial records from memory.
- 1 History and Hauntings of Salem Guided Walking Tour
- 2 Salem’s Best Ghost Tour
- 3 Salem Voodoo, Vampires, and Ghosts Guided Walking Tour
Two thousand miles out
The country doesn’t stop at the coast.
Hawaii is a five hour flight past California and still the same country. Oahu has the reef, Pearl Harbor and a road that loops the whole island in a day. The Big Island is still being built by a volcano that has not finished. Maui and Kauai are what people add when a week quietly turns into two.
The Hawaii days →America’s most booked
Start with the one everybody already booked.
If there is only room for one thing in the whole itinerary, this is the one travellers keep picking. Build the rest of the trip out from it.
The classics
America’s Most Popular Tours
Manhattan from the top, the Grand Canyon rim, the Chicago river and the loop road around Oahu. The days most trips end up getting built around.
By city
Pick where you’re landing.
New York for the skyline. New Orleans for the music. Las Vegas for the Strip and the canyon flights out of it. Miami for the beach and the Everglades behind it. Oahu for the reef. San Francisco for the bay.
Keep going
Or keep driving.
Chicago for the river and the architecture. Nashville for the honky tonks. Boston and Washington for the history. Charleston and Savannah for the live oaks. Maui and Kauai for the second island.
First decision
Which coast are you starting on?
The country is six hours wide by plane and the two edges have almost nothing in common. Trips that try to do both usually see airports. Pick a side, go deep, leave the middle for next time.
New York City
The city is best seen from above it.
Manhattan now sells its own skyline back to you from four different towers, and the newest one is the ticket that outsells everything else in the country. Underneath all that: the ferry out to Liberty Island, the memorial pools where the towers stood, and a natural history museum you can lose an entire wet afternoon inside. None of it is a secret. All of it still works.
- 1 New York City: American Museum of Natural History Ticket
- 2 Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Tour: All Options
- 3 New York in One Day Guided Sightseeing Tour
The Strip, and everything past it
Vegas is a basecamp.
The Strip runs itself and needs no help from anyone. The reason to keep the room a third night is what leaves from it every morning: the Hoover Dam, the west rim of the Grand Canyon, and the helicopters that drop below the rim and land on the canyon floor. If we had to book three of them, it would be these.
Where the music comes from
Jazz, country and the blues, in the towns that made them.
New Orleans invented jazz and has not stopped playing it since. Nashville turned country into an industry you can walk in off the street and hear for free. Memphis has Beale Street and the blues underneath all of it. These three are our favourites across the whole run.
Sun, swamp and the road south
Florida, from the sand to the sawgrass.
Miami for the beach and the art deco. The Everglades an hour inland, where the airboats run and the alligators are not a marketing device. Then the overseas highway down to Key West, which ends up closer to Havana than to Orlando. Start with these three.
Plan it
Three routes that actually show you the country.
Nobody sees America in one trip, and the ones who try spend the fortnight in airports. Pick a thread and pull it all the way through.
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