Self-Guided Tours in United States

Self-guided city routes spread across the US far beyond the few places with their own page here: a highlights walk covers downtown New Orleans, Denver, Honolulu, Savannah, Dallas, Charleston, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Los Angeles, the same loop-and-puzzle format city to city. On top of that sit one-off stories built for a single place: a Frank Underwood plot through the National Mall in DC, a stolen-painting chase from Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop through New Orleans' French Quarter, a time traveller hunted from Seattle's sculpture park to the Space Needle, and San Diego alone gets three, at Liberty Station, through Balboa Park's 1922 carousel and rose garden, and in the Gaslamp Quarter.

A separate audio-guide app covers the road-trip side of the country: Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, the West Coast corridor and an annual pass across several parks, narrating a drive rather than a walk since the sights sit miles apart. City routes run through the World City Trail app for the highlights walks or Questo for the story quests, an hour to three on foot, ghost hunts in Las Vegas, Orlando and Houston alongside romance trails in Austin and Sacramento. Either costs about the price of a movie ticket; the park app is different money, sometimes sold as an annual pass.

Practical. Weather sets the two formats apart. City walks work in nearly any weather since none run past three hours; the park routes do not, because Yosemite's high country and Yellowstone's interior roads close under snow from around November into May, and the Grand Canyon's South Rim swings from near freezing on spring and autumn mornings to around 28C on a summer afternoon. Sales tax is added at the till, not shown on the price beforehand, and varies by state and city. A charged phone with the route downloaded matters more here than in most countries, since signal drops for long stretches between park pullouts.