This Is the Best State to Visit This Fall

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 22, 9:30AM EDT

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This Is the Best State to Visit This Fall — © franckreporter / E+ via Getty Images

The COVID-19 pandemic has reached the fourth wave. After several months during which people believed it was relatively safe to travel, anxiety about infection has returned, even among those who are vaccinated. However, some people want to have the equivalent of a brief vacation over the next few months. Fall is not a traditionally heavy travel time, but for those who do want to travel outside their states, new research may help people make decisions about their destinations.

LawnStarter has created a guide for fall travel. It takes into account 15 factors that range from the number of scenic drives to the number of forests and forest trails to the number of apple orchards. Data were taken from the National Park Service, USDA Forest Service, Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, National Center for Disaster Preparedness, TerraGalleria, PlaygroundEquipment.com, Funtober, PumpkinPatchesAndMore.org and LawnStarter.

States were ranked on a scale of 1 to 100. The top three states were in New England (see list below). Each, particularly Vermont and New Hampshire, received high scores for entertainment and fall scenery. California was fourth, leading off a string of states in the west, some of them sparsely populated.

There is no clear explanation, but all of the states are in the northern tier of the country.
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At the bottom of the full list were two states in the deep south. Louisiana did the worst with a score of 6.65, followed by Mississippi with a score of 10.85.

These are the 10 best states to visit this fall and their scores:

Vermont (60.34)
New Hampshire (52.86)
Maine (49.34)
California (43.66)
Wyoming (43.09)
Alaska (42.10)
Oregon (39.05)
Montana (38.30)
Washington (35.52)
Connecticut (35.01)

Click here to see the best place to buy a vacation home.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.