The 10 best U.S. destinations for 2025 include this Sonoma gem

Conde Nast Traveler, the upscale magazine and travel website, just rolled out its picks for the 10 best places to go in the United States in 2025 — and it’s a very fun list indeed.

It’s topped by Alaska, which is celebrating several centennials this year, including Glacier Bay National Park’s big 1-0-0 and the anniversary of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a tradition with a fascinating backstory. It commemorates the Serum Run, a lifesaving 674-mile sled dog relay a century ago, when 20 mushers and 150 sled dogs raced to get diptheria antitoxin to the then-tiny town of Nome, where an epidemic was breaking out.

Sonoma’s Alexander Valley — home to Geyserville’s Cyrus restaurant and the Francis Ford Coppola Winery — comes in at the No. 2 spot. Ever-popular New Orleans hits No. 7 with a nod to its 2024 James Beard Awards for Dakar NOLA and its upscale Senegalese fare and Jewel of the South, which won the outstanding bar award.

And if you’re a fan of Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” — or anything NASA, for that matter — note that Florida’s Space Coast made the list, too, with shout-outs to its “soaring rockets and dazzling bioluminescence.” The rockets hail from the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, as you might have guessed, where spacecraft launched at a rate of nearly twice a week in 2024.

Read about all of it — the rockets, the bioluminescence, new restaurants, swanky hotels and more — at www.cntraveler.com