Traveling in the United States is extremely easy; in a country where everyone seems to be forever on the move, there's rarely any problem finding a room for the night, and you can almost invariably depend on being able to eat well and inexpensively. The development of transportation has played a major role in the growth of the nation; the railroad opened the way for transcontinental migrations, while most of the great cities have been shaped by the automobile. Your experience of the country will be very much flavored by how you choose to get around.
By far the best way to explore the country is to drive your own vehicle : it takes a long time before the sheer pleasure of cruising down the highway, with the radio blaring blues or country music, the signs to Chicago, Memphis or Monument Valley flashing past, begins to pall. Car rental is a bargain, every main road is lined with budget motels charging around $40 per night for a good room, and the price of gasoline remains relatively low.
We have also detailed public transportation options throughout; you can pretty much get to wherever you choose by a nationwide network of air, bus and rail. However, if you do travel this way, there's a real temptation to see America as a succession of big cities . True enough, New York and Los Angeles have an exhilarating dynamism and excitement, and among their worthy rivals are New Orleans , the wonderfully decadent home of jazz, Chicago , a showcase of modern architecture, and San Francisco , on its beautiful Pacific bay. Few other cities - with the possible, and idiosyncratic, exception of Las Vegas , shimmering in the desert - can quite match this level of interest, however, and following a heavily urban itinerary will cut you off from the astonishing landscapes that make the USA truly distinctive. Especially in the vast open spaces of the West, the scenery is often breathtaking. The glacial splendor of Yosemite , the thermal wonderland of Yellowstone , the awesome red-rock canyons of Arizona and Utah, and the spectacular Rocky Mountains are among many of the treasures preserved and protected in the splendid national park system. Once you reach such wilderness, the potential for hiking and camping is magnificent - but it's usually essential to have a car to get near these spots.
Above all, travelers can enjoy the sheer thrill of experiencing American popular culture in the places where it began. Rock'n'roll place names spring to life; panoramas etched on our consciousness from a century of movies spread across the horizon; road trips taken by your favorite literary characters are still there to be traveled. For music fans, the chance to hear country music in Nashville or rhythm and blues in New Orleans, to dance in a Mississippi jook-joint or to visit Elvis's shrine in Memphis, verges on a religious experience; readers brought up on the books of Mark Twain can ride a paddle wheeler on the Mississippi; moviegoers can live out their Wild West fantasies in the rugged Utah deserts.
The United States is all too often dismissed, even by its own inhabitants, as a land almost devoid of history . Though mainstream America tends to trace its roots back to the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England, the rest of the continent has a longer history, stretching back way beyond the French culture of Louisiana and the Spanish presence in California to the majestic cliff palaces built by the Ancestral Puebloans in the Southwest a thousand years ago. There are also any number of fascinating strands to America's post-revolutionary history: relics of the Gold Rush in California, of the Civil Rights years in the South, or of the Civil War anywhere east of the Mississippi.
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Top Destination Cities
- Although the metropolitan area of Boston has long since expanded to fill the shoreline of Massachusetts Bay , and stretches for miles inland as well, the seventeenth-century port at its heart is still discernible. Forget the neat grids of modern urban America; the twisting streets clustered around Boston Common are a reminder of how the nation started out, and the city is enjoyably human in scale. Hotel Accommodation Boston Massachusetts
- Chicago is in many ways the nation's last great city. Sarah Bernhardt called it "the pulse of America" and, though long eclipsed by Los Angeles as the nation's second most populous city after New York, Chicago really does have it all, with less of the hassle and infrastructural problems of its coastal rivals. Founded in the early 1800s, Chicago grew up with the country, serving as the main connection between the established east coast cities and the wide open Wild West frontier. This position on the sharp edge between civilization and wilderness made the city into a crucible of innovation. Many aspects of modern life, from skyscrapers to suburbia, had their start, and perhaps their finest expression, here on the shores of Lake Michigan.
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- Until the Europeans came, Honolulu was insignificant; soon so many foreign ships were frequenting its waters that it had become Kamehameha's capital, and it remains the economic center of the island. The city covers a long (if narrow) strip of southern Oahu, but downtown is a manageable size, and a lot quieter than its glamorous image might suggest. The tourist hotels, and most of Honolulu's hustle, are concentrated among the skyscrapers of very distinct WAIKIKI , a couple of miles east. Hotel Accommodation Honolulu Hawaii
- Las Vegas never dares to rest on its laurels, so the basic concept of the Strip casino has been endlessly refined since the Western-themed resorts and ranches of the 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s, when most visitors arrived by car , the casinos presented themselves as lush tropical oases at the end of the long desert drive. Once air travel took over, Las Vegas opted for Disneyesque fantasy, a process that started in the late 1960s with Caesars Palace and culminated with Excalibur and Luxor in the early 1990s. Hotel Accommodation Las Vegas Nevada
- The rambling metropolis of Los Angeles sprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world. Hotel Accommodation Los Angeles California
- Far and away the most exciting city in Florida, Miami is a stunning and often intoxicatingly beautiful place. Awash with sunlight-intensified natural colors, there are moments - when the neon-flashed South Beach skyline glows in the warm night and the palm trees sway in the breeze - when a better-looking city is hard to imagine. Even so, people, not climate or landscape, are what make Miami unique. Half of the two million population is Hispanic, the vast majority Cubans. Spanish is the predominant language almost everywhere - in many places it's the only language you'll hear, and you'll be expected to speak at least a few words - and news from Havana, Caracas or Managua frequently gets more attention than the latest word from Washington, DC.
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- New York City comprises the central island of Manhattan along with four outer boroughs - Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx , and Staten Island . Manhattan, to many, is New York - whatever your interests, it's here that you'll spend the most time and are likely to stay. New York is very much a city of neighborhoods and is best explored on foot. Hotel Accommodation New York City New York
- San Francisco proper occupies just 48 hilly square miles at the tip of a slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California coast. Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the US, it remains true to itself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small city whose people pride themselves on being the cultured counterparts to their cousins in LA the last bastion of civilization on the lunatic fringe of America. It's a compact and approachable place, where downtown streets rise on impossible gradients to reveal stunning views of the city, the bay and beyond, and blanket fogs roll in unexpectedly to envelop the city in mist. This is not the California of mono-tonous blue skies and slothful warmth the temperatures rarely exceed the seventies, and even during summer can drop much lower. Hotel Accommodation San Francisco California
- Seattle's beginnings were inauspiciously muddy. Flooded out of its first location on the flat little peninsula of Alki Point, in the 1850s the town shifted to what's now Pioneer Square, renaming itself after the Native American Chief Sealth (hence Seattle). This was soggy ground, and the small logging community built its houses on stilts. As the surrounding forest was gradually felled and the wood shipped out, Seattle grew slowly until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 put it firmly on the national map. World War I boosted shipbuilding, and the city was soon a large industrial center. Trade unions, based around the shipworkers, grew strong, and the Industrial Workers of the World, or "Wobblies," coordinated the US's first general strike here on February 6, 1919. Hotel Accommodation Seattle Washington
- That the marshy swamp where Washington DC now stands was chosen as the site of the capital of the newly independent United States of America says a lot about then-prevalent attitudes toward government. Washington, District of Columbia (the boundaries of the two are identical) - also known as " DC " and " The District " - can be unbearably hot and humid in summer, and bitterly cold in winter. Such an unpleasant climate, it was hoped, would discourage elected leaders from making government a full-time job. This disdain for politics is still apparent: DC is run as a virtual colony of Congress, where residents have just one, nonvoting representative and couldn't vote in presidential elections until the 23rd Amendment was passed in 1961.
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