2025 Year in Travel

As 2025 comes to a close, it’s time for my annual travel retrospective. This year, I’ve decided to reorganize the post a bit, with my narrative, photos, and maps up front. The detailed statistics are now at the end of the post, for readers who like charts as much as I do.

Compared to recent years, my time spent away from home this year was down slightly. Unusually, it skewed more toward road trips: I had about half as many flights in 2025 as I did in 2024, but I had more driving than any prior year.

My 2025 Travel Narrative

I spent 69 nights away from home this year. My most visited city this year was Las Vegas, with four separate trips and a total of 24 nights between them.

Las Vegas and Antelope Canyon

Although most of my trips are a week or less, my Las Vegas trip in May was two weeks long. With a free weekend in the middle, I personally rented a car and drove out to visit Antelope Canyon in northern Arizona.

On the way there, I took the northern route, taking I-15 to St. George, then largely following the Arizona/Utah border via state routes and US-89. This was a gorgeous drive, but in particular I love the part of I-15 that cuts through the Virgin River Gorge in northwestern Arizona, which is one of the most scenic stretches of the Interstate system I’ve been on. I crossed the Colorado River (the river that runs through the Grand Canyon) near Lake Powell, and shortly thereafter arrived at Antelope Canyon.

I’d wanted to visit Antelope Canyon for a while, based on recommendations and pictures from friends who’d visited before. It’s a narrow sandstone canyon that’s absolutely beautiful, and it was well worth the drive.

After I finished at Antelope Canyon, I went back to the Colorado River to see Horseshoe Bend, which was only a few miles away.

I also wasn’t too far from the Navajo Bridge–a pair of arch bridges across the Colorado River. The older bridge was converted to pedestrian use after the newer bridge was built next to it.

For variety’s sake (and to allow me to circumnavigate the Grand Canyon on a single trip), I took the southern route back to Las Vegas via Flagstaff and Kingman. I crossed the Colorado River again over the O’Callaghan–Tillman bridge, which bypasses the Hoover Dam. At 900 feet (274 m) above the Colorado River, it’s the second-highest bridge in the United States.

Royal Gorge

Of course, I had to take the opportunity to visit the highest bridge in the United States a couple months later.

The Royal Gorge Bridge, near Cañon City, Colorado, is a pedestrian suspension bridge 955 feet (291 m) above the Arkansas River. I had a trip to Colorado Springs in July and landed at COS just before lunch, so I made the quick drive to the Royal Gorge that afternoon to check that bridge off my list.

Little did I realize that I’d already been before. Later in the year, my parents gave me some old photos they’d found, and I discovered that I’d been to the Royal Gorge Bridge in May of 1985—40 years (and two months) prior!

More Road Trips

Although the Colorado Springs and Las Vegas trips were on my own, my wife Amy and I took a few road trips together as well.

Toronto

In early April, we took a drive to visit Toronto (stopping overnight in Port Huron, Michigan, to visit a friend). Although I’ve had some layovers at Toronto–Pearson (YYZ), I’d never actually been to Toronto before.

I cashed in some Hilton points for a three-night stay at the Revery Toronto Downtown. The hotel room was great, although it came equipped with a smart toilet that was a little too smart for us – all interaction was through a touchscreen, and it had a bad habit of incorrectly guessing when the lid needed to be opened and closed.

The location was excellent for anything we wanted to do downtown. We spent a good amount of time exploring the Toronto PATH, a basement network of walkways connecting much of downtown. Amy wanted to see Toronto’s first post office (now also a museum). Although it was touristy, we did really enjoy Little Canada, a large collection of scale models of many different parts of Canada.

Since we had my car anyway, we also spent some time outside of Toronto’s core. Amy wanted to see some Schitt’s Creek filming locations, so we drove out to Goodwood, Ontario, and a few other sites. I was able to check out a few of Toronto’s suburban malls.

We drove back home to Dayton via Niagara Falls. Although I’d been to the Falls before, I’d only been to the American side. Before crossing the border back into the U.S., we took the tour of the historic Niagara Parks Power Station, a decommissioned hydroelectric power plant that formerly drew water from above the falls, ran it through turbines, and then drained the water through a long tunnel that exited just downstream of the Horseshoe (Canadian) Falls. With the plant no longer active, the tunnel was converted to pedestrian use, leading to a small viewing platform with a great (though very wet) falls view.

Chicago and Omaha

At the end of May, we went up to the Chicago suburbs for the wedding of one of my cousins. We ended up staying at the Hyatt Lodge Oak Brook Chicago, a hotel on the campus that used to be the headquarters of McDonald’s, and still bore plenty of signs of that heritage.

Since we were already going to be in Chicago, we decided to use the opportunity to drive a bit further and visit Nebraska, one of the three remaining states I hadn’t yet been to.

We booked a three night stay at the Magnolia in downtown Omaha. We visited the zoo, found a cat café, and just generally explored the city and its suburbs. We also ended up taking a day trip out to Lincoln, which had a quilt museum that Amy had wanted to visit. All in all, I enjoyed my first trip to Omaha and would definitely go back again.

On the way back from Omaha, we stopped in the Quad Cities overnight, getting a hotel in Moline and grabbing dinner in Davenport.

Musical Tours

We also had three separate road trips to see our friends Emily and Danny, who are actors on the national tour of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast musical. We went back up to Chicago for one night in July to see the show. (We actually ended up staying at that same McDonald’s Hyatt out in the suburbs.)

In early September, we drove to Durham, North Carolina (stopping overnight in Charleston, West Virginia¹). The show was performing at the DPAC, and I have some friends in the Raleigh area that I wanted to visit.

Finally, in October, the tour visited East Lansing, Michigan. We drove up so that Amy could help them out with some childcare. I drove home two nights later; Amy rode with them to their next stop in Appleton, Wisconsin, and she flew home from there.²

Holmdel

Lansing wasn’t our only October road trip. Amy found out that there was a cat convention going on in the former Bell Labs Holmdel Complex in New Jersey, so we made a spur of the moment decision to drive out and spend two nights in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City.

The facility is a beautiful Saarinen-designed structure. (The same designer created the TWA Flight Center at New York–JFK, which was converted to the TWA Hotel that we stayed at in 2023.) The rectangular building is divided into four internal towers by a cross-shaped atrium, with common elevator banks rising out of the atrium. A basement level holds what is now a small convention center.

After the convention was done, Amy and I visited the American Dream mall, which is the second-largest shopping mall in the United States. It was nowhere near as beautiful as the Holmdel complex, but it was certainly big.

Raleigh/Durham, Again

On 31 December, Amy and I drove back down to The Research Triangle to visit my Raleigh friends again, who were hosting a New Year’s Eve party. (The drive down is included in this year’s stats, but the drive home and all of the hotel nights for this trip will show up in 2026 instead.³)

A Few Flights

Although I took a lot more road trips this year, I still did have some flights.

I took 38 flights this year, all domestic. Every flight was on on American Airlines, other than a United Airlines multi-city trip to Colorado Springs and southern Maryland.

That trip also had my shortest flight of the year: the diminutive 72 mile (115 km) Colorado Springs (COS) to Denver (DEN) route. I only had that flight because Denver was my layover between COS and Washington–Dulles (IAD), but as that flight was delayed, it would have been faster for me to just drive to Denver.

My longest flight was from Charlotte (CLT) to Las Vegas (LAS), at 1911 miles or 3075 km.

Speaking of Charlotte, on my last trip through CLT of the year, Phase II of the concourse A expansion (gates A30–A39) had opened. I had some free time on my layover and went to check it out. In the expansion, they’d installed the tail of an old American Airlines MD-82. Although the MD-80 series is largely retired now, I’ve flown on them a lot in the past; AA used to operate them between Dayton (DAY) and Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW), which is still my most flown route. I looked up the tail number (N481AA) on the installation, and sure enough, I’d flown that exact aircraft from DFW to DAY on 29 Aug 2011.

Conclusion

All in all, 2025 ended up being my Year of the Road Trip. My flying was pretty routine, but I had the opportunity to take some great drives–especially my desert drive to visit Antelope Canyon. It’s been interesting having so much of my travel have the flexibility of driving rather than the meticulousness of flying, but I do hope to get back into flying more next year. I’d like to visit at least one of my two remaining states if I get the opportunity; beyond that, I have no specific personal trips planned.

Detailed Travel Statistics

Hotel Nights

I spent 69 nights away from home in 2025.

My furthest trip from home was my first trip of the year, when I went to the Los Angeles metro area.

Flights

I flew 38 flights in 2025.

I flew 28 398 mi or 45 702 km in 2025.

Other than my home airport of Dayton (DAY), my most-visited airports were Las Vegas (LAS) and Washington–Reagan National (DCA).

Road Travel

I rented 13 cars in 2025.