The Best Places to Stay and Do in the United States

Tucked into the Black Hills a few minutes from Mount Rushmore, K Bar S Lodge is a 96-room lodge-style hotel where a good number of rooms come with private patios or balconies looking out at the trees. A coffee bar handles mornings, a pub handles evenings, and two outdoor hot tubs plus a fire pit handle everything in between. The natural setting draws a steady stream of wedding parties, so weekends here have a certain celebratory hum.

Tall pines crowd the parking spots right outside your door, which is either charming or just the Pacific Northwest experience delivered to Montana, depending on your mood. This small, family-run motel keeps things modest: compact rooms, tidy bathrooms, comfortable beds. The owners are genuinely invested in the place, which you notice. Worth calling ahead in winter, when only a handful of rooms stay open.

A few blocks from the Yellowstone entrance, this mid-range motel puts you close enough that leaving early for the park doesn't feel like a production. Rooms are spacious by roadside standards, and the breakfast patio with its fire pit softens the drive-in energy considerably. Note that upper floors are stairs-only, the pool is seasonal, and the parking lot crowd is largely in fleece and hiking boots by seven.

A two-story stone fireplace anchors the lobby of this West Yellowstone lodge, a few blocks from the park gate. Rebuilt after a fire using reclaimed wood for handrails, trim, and headboards, the place carries its history without making a fuss about it. Main building rooms run cozier and more polished; motel-side rooms are plainer and pet-friendly. Snowmobiles can ride straight in and out, which tells you everything about the clientele in winter.

The acoustically treated walls mean the sound hits you right no matter where you sit, which matters when the names on stage have included Esperanza Spalding and Bill Frisell. Dazzle is Denver's long-running jazz club, the kind that draws serious talent week after week and keeps the bar busy with martinis and a four-cheese mac that regulars order without looking up. DownBeat placed it among the top 100 jazz clubs in the world.

The building was a brothel, a flophouse, and a peep-show parlor before it became this. Now it's a bar and live-music venue dressed in 70s swank, vintage soft-core art, and low-slung lounges surrounding a sunken stage. The team calls it a "gastro-brothel," which is not a word you forget. Small plates and cocktails run alongside whatever's on stage, and the whole thing is loud, garish, and extremely committed to the bit.

A small Tempe shop packed floor to ceiling with single issues, trade paperbacks, manga, graphic novels, and enough indie and small-press titles to make a distributor nervous. Staff carry the kind of encyclopedic knowledge that can match a superfan or gently redirect someone who just wandered in. The wall of collectibles, including some genuinely odd merch, rewards browsing. Recent shelf finds included "Sir Charles Barkley and the Referee Murders," so the range is real.

A geodesic dome built to look like a beehive sits inside this late-night dance bar and immersive art venue in RiNo. The team behind it took Tulum and Burning Man as their starting points, then handed the space to a crew of local artists, so you get vine-covered bars and a garden courtyard that somehow make sense together. It draws the kind of crowd that dresses for the art as much as the dancing.

The shelves at this beloved Phoenix used bookstore run from paperback thrillers to vintage board games to vinyl, and somewhere in between you'll find a ukulele someone gave up on. Bookmans is a used-everything exchange, the kind of place where you drop off a box of stuff you're done with and walk out with an armful of things you absolutely didn't need. Plan for an afternoon; nobody browses Bookmans quickly.

An antique mall so large that people routinely miscalculate how long they'll be inside. Individual booths mean each seller curates their own little world, so a stretch of vintage film cameras can give way to a wall of Arizona kitsch or a case of rare Pokémon cards without any warning. Cowboy boots, obscure collectibles, mid-century furniture, and things you didn't know you needed are all here, somewhere. Clear the afternoon.

You sign a waiver, pull on safety gear, and then someone hands you a crate of breakable things and walks away. Breakthrough is a smash room, which means the activity is exactly what it sounds like: hurling bottles and retired appliances at walls until your arms give out. A splatter room handles the paint-throwing crowd. It's a surprisingly efficient way to reset, and considerably cheaper than the destruction of property charge waiting just outside.

Bruce Springsteen swung by on his last Phoenix tour, which tells you roughly what kind of store Cave & Post Trading Co. is. It's a men's clothing shop in central Phoenix that leans into classic American workwear with a Western edge, carrying selvedge denim, pearl-snap shirts, and the sort of sunglasses that feel like they belong in a different decade. The owners are music people, so touring bands stop in regularly, though most regulars are just well-dressed guys who know what they like.

Duke Ellington played this Five Points room when it was still the Casino Cabaret, which tells you something about the bones. It's a live music venue now running a wide-open booking policy: dubstep, hip-hop, bluegrass, and jam bands share the calendar without obvious contradiction. The main floor was rebuilt and the stage expanded, so the sound holds up. Crowds skew toward people who track setlists, but the room pulls in anyone chasing a late night.

Tucked below Larimer Square, this standup club has the kind of acoustics that make a room feel like it's laughing with one throat. Dave Attell recorded a live album here, and Dave Chappelle has a habit of showing up unannounced. New Talent Nights have been launching local comics toward television for years, which keeps the room feeling like something might actually happen on any given night.

The name came from an old boot shop whose sign was too expensive to replace, which tells you everything about how Cowtown operates. It's a skate shop with a lived-in feel, stocking boards, trucks, and apparel for everyone from serious park rats to people whose knees have filed a formal complaint. Staff who actually skate work the counter, and the shop runs a nonprofit keeping younger riders in the scene.

A cactus-shaped shot glass and a roadrunner onesie in the same basket is a good sign that a shop resists easy categorization. Frances is a gift and lifestyle boutique tucked into a Camelback Road shopping center, stocking menswear, kids' clothes, home goods, jewelry, and Arizona-made finds alongside greeting cards and complimentary gift wrap, so you can walk in scrambling and walk out sorted.

The art-deco interior survived a near-demolition, and it still sets the tone: ornate details, good acoustics, and a room that makes mid-sized shows feel like an occasion. The Gothic is a standing concert venue in Englewood that books the kind of acts you'll wish you'd caught before they got bigger, alongside local projects that wouldn't otherwise find a stage this good. Take the light rail; parking on Broadway is its own opening act.

Each location of this local adult shop chain gets its own decor scheme, so the Arcadia spot leans street art while the West Valley one goes full Alice in Wonderland. Groove stocks lingerie, dancewear, toys, and bachelorette supplies, and the staff are the kind of helpful that doesn't make anyone squirm. There's a rewards program for regulars, which the store describes, with admirable restraint, as benefiting frequent customers.

The low-slung stage here puts you close enough to the band that you'll question whether you're supposed to be back there. Larimer Lounge is a dive-ish live music venue in RiNo that has hosted acts like Arcade Fire and Bat for Lashes before they stopped fitting in rooms this size. The bar up front runs on beer, shots, and what appears to be structural duct tape. Westword named it Denver's top venue for both rock bands and DJs in 2024.

A boutique bodega stocked with natural wines, Arizona-made snacks, and objects no reasonable person needs but everyone leaves carrying. The purple psychedelic oven mitt, the artichoke candle, the butterfly dice: the inventory reads like a fever dream curated by someone with genuinely good taste. Cold drinks, eclectic merch, Baggu bags, and a hot sauce section round it out. It also hosts yoga sometimes, which tracks completely.

More than 400 Indigenous-owned small businesses share a permanent indoor market in Old Town Scottsdale, selling handmade goods that range from beaded jewelry and hand-carved pottery to soaps and sand art. The nonprofit vending program requires all participants to be of Native American descent, so purchases go straight to the makers. A seasonal outdoor market runs on weekends in cooler months for anyone who prefers browsing under the sky.

The wraparound balcony alone explains why national touring acts keep coming back to this mid-size concert venue on Colfax. The Ogden has been around forever, vaudeville and all, and a recent overhaul brought new floors and a proper sound system without scrubbing the old bones. It holds a sweet spot between arena anonymity and club intimacy, which makes the sightlines good pretty much wherever you end up.

An old movie house in the Berkeley neighborhood that survived decades of disrepair to become one of Denver's more reliably eclectic live venues. Music, comedy, circus, and things harder to categorize all share the same stage, which makes checking the calendar a worthwhile habit. The room still carries the bones of its original life, and the scale keeps it intimate enough that there isn't really a bad spot in the house.

A festival-wear shop on Mill Avenue stocked with shiny bodysuits, fuzzy sets, wild sunglasses, flow toys, and everything else you need to look properly unhinged under a light rig. Most of the merchandise comes from Arizona makers, so the sequins carry some local pride. The store has a posted zero-tolerance policy for bigotry, which shouldn't be a selling point but somehow still is. Go when your next event is two weeks out and you've convinced yourself you have something to wear.

Two 300-foot sandstone fins frame the stage at Red Rocks, an outdoor amphitheater carved by geology rather than any architect. U2 filmed "Under a Blood Red Sky" here, and the recording captures why: the acoustics are a geological accident that nobody has managed to replicate. The venue sits open most of the year for hiking and visiting even when nobody's performing, so you don't need a ticket to feel like you've stumbled onto something.

A 360-degree ocean tunnel sits at the center of this mall aquarium, and yes, it's inside Arizona Mills, which somehow makes the sharks feel more surreal. Over 5,000 species move through 161,000 gallons, including reef sharks, stingrays, jellyfish, and a tank where kids can locate both Nemo and Dory without a map. The tide pool lets you touch baby sharks, and a paid add-on gets you up close with rescued sea turtles. Cheaper than its Scottsdale rival by a wide margin.

Part antique mall, part haunted house, Terror Trader is a horror-themed marketplace where local vendors fill coffin-shaped cases with slasher memorabilia, VHS tapes, and ceramic human organs. A museum room of real skulls anchors the space, and life-size slasher villains lurk around corners for good measure. Phoenix New Times named it the best place for horror buffs two years running. The crowd, predictably, does not shop in beige.

A vast stage and a sound system loud enough to rattle the fillings out of your skull make The 44 in Glendale the go-to metal venue in the Valley, which feels cosmically correct given that Alice Cooper grew up nearby. National touring acts share the bill with tribute bands and local talent, and the bar food is cheap enough that you can eat and still afford a band tee. Bring earplugs unless you enjoy tinnitus as a souvenir.

Chandeliers and exposed rafters inside a 1930s building that now hosts 1,800 people for live music on a good night. The Van Buren is a midsize concert venue in downtown Phoenix where general admission keeps things relatively democratic and the sightlines are genuinely hard to complain about. Live Nation books the calendar, which means a steady rotation of artists big enough to matter but not yet filling arenas.