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
Top 10 U.S. places to go in 2025
1 Alaska
2 Alexander Valley, California
3 Boise, Idaho
4 Denver, Colorado
Denver, Colorado, made Conde Nast Traveler’s list of the top U.S. destinations for 2025. (Getty Images)
5 Highlands, North Carolina
6 Litchfield County, Connecticut
7 New Orleans, Louisiana
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8 Puerto Rico
9 Space Coast, Florida
10 Washington, D.C.
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