USA Pacific Northwest Self-Drive Tour

Fourteen nights across the Pacific Northwest, self-drive with the flights included, from Seattle round to Mount Rainier.

Seattle takes the first three nights, with the Space Needle, Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square and the Chihuly glass garden. The car is collected on day four for Olympic National Park, where two nights at Lake Crescent put the temperate rainforest, the driftwood beaches and the Roosevelt elk within reach: it is a world heritage site and about as wet as anywhere in the country.

Cannon Beach follows for two nights down the Oregon coast, with Haystack Rock offshore and a naval cannon from an 1846 wreck that gave the town its name. Portland comes next for two, with the old town, the International Rose Test Garden and a Japanese garden among the largest outside Japan, then Hood River for two with Multnomah Falls and a guided vineyard tour, and Mount Rainier at the end, an active volcano with glaciers on it and wildflower meadows below them.

Flights, fully insured car hire, all the accommodation and round-the-clock support while travelling are included, and the price is quoted per person. Fifteen days with two or three nights everywhere is the right pace for this corner of the country, where the weather decides a good deal and a second night gives a mountain another chance to appear. Summer is the season: the rainforest is wet year round and the Rainier meadows flower in July and August. The Oregon coast is worth a day longer than the schedule gives it if the dates can stretch.