Planning a vacation in 2023? Fodor’s, the travel guide site, offers up its expertise each holiday season with a list of top destinations — the GO List — for the coming year. The pandemic prompted a bit of a hiatus, but this year’s GO List includes a globe-spanning array of 40 jaw-dropping places, from Chile’s Torres del Paine to Madhya Pradesh, the tiger state of India.
“Well,” Fodor’s editors say in their introduction to the first GO List since 2019, “it seems the pandemic is sort of (maybe, possibly) over – or, at the very least, we’ve incorporated its permanence into our everyday… There’s a collective feeling of forfeited time and an urgency to make plans.”
The big list is divided into seven regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa and Mexico and Central America. And it’s accompanied by a separate “NO List” of destinations — not so much as places to avoid, as ones where we need to be cognizant of the impact of tourist throngs on the environment and culture. Think Venice and the overcrowded Amalfi Coast, the clarity of Lake Tahoe and the depth of the drought-impacted Rhine and Danube Rivers. (You can read more about that here.)
Meanwhile here’s a peek at the Go List, where the U.S. and Canadian destinations include Yosemite’s mighty giant sequoias, Louisiana’s bayous and Iowa City, which is one of two UNESCO Cities of Literature in the U.S. (Seattle is the second one, in case you wondered.) Nova Scotia’s Halifax, a city known for its museums and Victorian architecture, is one of two Canadian entries.
Here are the six U.S. and Canada entries. Find the full Go List, including travel tips for all 40 destinations at www.fodors.com/go-list/2023.
1 Atchafalaya National Heritage Area, Louisiana
2 Halifax, Nova Scotia
3 Iowa City, Iowa
4 Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park, California
5 Saskatchewan, Canada
6 Wilmington, North Carolina