Luxury Vacations in North America

No country on earth offers quite this range. The American Southwest alone — Zion’s towering sandstone walls, Antelope Canyon guided by Navajo storytellers at first light, a champagne toast at the Grand Canyon rim — could fill a trip several times over. Then there’s New Orleans, where jazz spills out of every doorway and the French Quarter has been doing things its own way since 1718. The national parks of the Pacific Northwest. The volcanic lava fields of Hawaii. New England in fall. The USA doesn’t ask you to choose. It just asks how long you have.

There is a particular quality to Canadian wilderness that is hard to find anywhere else — enormous, unhurried, and largely unbothered by the modern world. In the Rockies, a helicopter sets you down in an alpine meadow above Banff where the only sounds are wind and distant meltwater. Moraine Lake’s turquoise surface reflects ten peaks at once, a view so remarkable it graced the country’s $20 bill. British Columbia’s old-growth forests stretch for miles above Whistler, bear country and ancient cedar in equal measure. Canada rewards the patient and the curious in ways that stay with you.

Mexico City’s historic center holds 700 years of stories in its streets, and its food — from Aztec market stalls to the cantinas of the old town — is some of the most thrillingly alive on earth. South in Oaxaca, tlayudas and mezcal arrive with live music in the evenings, and master artisans in the surrounding villages still weave rugs and throw black pottery using the same techniques their ancestors used centuries ago. The cenotes of the Yucatán wait underground, their cool subterranean chambers sacred to the ancient Maya. Mexico is vast, layered, and endlessly generous to those who go beyond the obvious.