10 dream trips to take in North America in 2025

03.01.2025 - 15:29 / lonelyplanet.com

Jan 2, 2025 • 9 min read

Let’s talk about trips that are just downright deliciously indulgent. North America is a great place to start. Will this be the year you witness Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser shoot 180ft up into the air? Or will you see impressive carvings of the ancient world on the Yucatan Peninsula? 

We’ve compiled 10 of the dreamiest adventures in North America from our new book, Dream Trips of the World, to inspire your next adventure.

There’s no American trip like a road trip. The mother of them all is Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, cutting through the heart of the US on its way to the 'promised land' of California. While the original route has been mostly subsumed by modern highways, many sights remain – vintage gas stations and drive-in restaurants, blinking neon signs and kitsch roadside attractions. Endless prairie gives way to rolling hills, which lead to silvery high plains and scorched red desert.

The drive can feel surreal, miles of empty road punctuated by improbable sights. Outside Tulsa is an 80ft (24m) plaster whale beached in a pond. In Amarillo, there’s a field of Cadillacs buried nose-down in the earth. The natural splendor can feel equally surreal – the rainbow-colored fossilized trees of the Petrified Forest, the towering cacti of the Mojave Desert. By the time the Pacific appears, 2448 miles (3940km) into the drive, a simple road trip has become an epic journey.

Country singers know they’ve made it when they see their name in lights on venues in Nashville. 'Music City' draws both wannabe songwriters and music lovers from across the globe, eager to hear that unique Nashville sound at celebrated concert halls like the Ryman Auditorium and Grand Ole Opry, and famed recording studios. By night, visitors fill the well-worn dance floors of honky tonks as the next big thing takes to the stage.

A few hours west, music is the lifeblood of another venerable Tennessee town, Memphis – although here, that signature sound is the blues. There’s more music to be heard along US Rte 61, too. This is the so-called ‘Blues Highway,’ a 620-mile (1000km) route sprinkled with places that shaped America’s musical heritage.

New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, is home to brassy clubs where the stages are packed with horn players weaving intoxicating tunes around the swaying crowds. Bayous and wetlands flank the towns west of the Crescent City – the heart of Cajun Country, where accordions and washboards replace trumpets and saxophones.

Nature has long had the upper hand in southern Utah’s Red Rock Country. The rippled gulches and wrinkled tablelands in this Martian wilderness are like a pop-up geological textbook. The place is a tumble – a chaos – of weird sedimentary slabs on top of way-out