USA

The United States is extraordinarily diverse in its array of attractions. You will never run out of things to see; even if you think you’ve exhausted what one place has to offer, the next destination is only a road trip away.

The Great American Road Trip (see above) is the most traditional way to see a variety of sights; just hop in the car and cruise down the Interstates, stopping at the convenient roadside hotels and restaurants as necessary, and stopping at every interesting tourist trap along the way, until you reach your destination.

Heartbreakingly beautiful scenery, history that reads like a screenplay, entertainment options that can last you for days, and some of the world’s greatest architecture—no matter what your pleasure, you can find it almost anywhere you look in the United States.

Because the country is so big, it is impossible to truly see it all in one trip. Even the longest available coast-to-coast escorted tour packages (approximately 20 to 45 days in length) only cover about half of the Lower 48 states and do not include Alaska, Hawaii, or the inhabited territories (i.e., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam), all of which are also fine tourist destinations in their own right. Thus, as with any large country, you need to do extensive research and prioritize regions and destinations.

Natural scenery

From the spectacular glaciers of Alaska to the steamy and lush, weathered peaks of Appalachia; from the otherworldly desertscapes of the Southwest to the vast waters of the Great Lakes and the perpetually warm jungles of the south; few other countries have as wide a variety of natural scenery as the United States does. Note though, that place names that include the word “falls” don’t always have a waterfall. Sometimes, “falls” refers to “rapids” instead.

America’s National Parks are a great place to start. Yellowstone National Park was the first true National Park in the world, and it remains one of the most famous, but there are 57 others. The Grand Canyon is possibly the world’s most spectacular gorge; Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park are both home to the world’s largest living organisms, the Giant Sequoia; Redwood National park has the tallest, the Coast Redwood; Glacier National Park is home to majestic glacier-carved mountains; Canyonlands National Park could easily be mistaken for Mars; and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park features abundant wildlife among beautiful, verdant waterfalls and mountains. And the national parks aren’t just for sightseeing, either; each has plenty of outdoors activities as well.

Still, the National Parks are just the beginning. The National Park Service also operates National Monuments, National Memorials, National Historic Sites, National Seashores, National Heritage Areas… the list goes on (and on). And each state has its own state parks that can be just as good as the federal versions. Most all of these destinations, federal or state, have an admission fee, but it all goes toward maintenance and operations of the parks, and the rewards are well worth it.

Those aren’t your only options, though. Many of America’s natural treasures can be seen without passing through admission gates. The world-famous Niagara Falls straddle the border between Canada and the U.S.; the American side lets you get right up next to the onrush and feel the power that has shaped the Niagara gorge. The “purple majesty” of the Rocky Mountains can be seen for hundreds of miles in any direction, while the placid coastal areas of the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic have relaxed Americans for generations. The lush, humid forests of the east, the white sand beaches, the limestone mountains of the south, the red extraterrestrial landscapes of the west…it’s a country that has something for everyone.

Historical attractions

Americans often have a misconception of their country as having little history. The US does indeed have a tremendous wealth of historical attractions—more than enough to fill months of history-centric touring.

The prehistory of the continent can be a little hard to uncover, as many pre-contact sites in the Eastern and Midwestern parts of the country have been covered by other structures or farmland. But particularly in the West, you will find magnificent cliff dwellings at sites such as Mesa Verde, as well as near-ubiquitous rock paintings. In the Midwest, the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is worth a visit. The Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. is another great place to start learning about America’s culture before the arrival of European colonists.

As the first part of the country to be colonized by Europeans, the eastern states of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South have more than their fair share of sites from early American history. The first successful British colony on the continent was at Jamestown, Virginia, although the settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts, may loom larger in the nation’s mind.

In the eighteenth century, major centers of commerce developed in Philadelphia and Boston, and as the colonies grew in size, wealth, and self-confidence, relations with Great Britain became strained, culminating in the Boston Tea Party and the ensuing Revolutionary War…

Monuments and architecture

Americans have never shied away from heroic feats of engineering, and many of them are among the country’s biggest tourist attractions.

Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital, has more monuments and statuary than you could see in a day, but do be sure to visit the Washington Monument (the world’s tallest obelisk), the stately Lincoln Memorial, and the incredibly moving Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The city’s architecture is also an attraction—the Capitol Building and the White House are two of the most iconic buildings in the country and often serve to represent the whole nation to the world.

Actually, a number of American cities have world-renowned skylines, perhaps none more so than the concrete canyons of Manhattan, part of New York City. The site of the destroyed World Trade Center towers remains a gaping wound in Manhattan’s vista, however America’s tallest building, the new 1 World Trade Center, now stands adjacent to the site of the former towers. Also, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building stand tall, as they have for almost a century. Chicago, where the skyscraper was invented, is home to the country’s single tallest building, the (former) Sears Tower, and an awful lot of other really tall buildings. Other skylines worth seeing include San Francisco (with the Golden Gate Bridge), Seattle (including the Space Needle), Miami, and Pittsburgh.

Some human constructions transcend skyline, though, and become iconic symbols in their own right. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the Statue of Liberty in Manhattan, the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles, and even the fountains of the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas all draw visitors to their respective cities. Even the incredible Mount Rushmore, located far from any major city, still attracts two million visitors each year.

Museums and galleries

In the US, there’s a museum for practically everything. From toys to priceless artifacts, from entertainment legends to dinosaur bones—nearly every city in the country has a museum worth visiting.

The highest concentrations of these museums are found in the largest cities, of course, but none compare to Washington, D.C., home to the Smithsonian Institution. With almost twenty independent museums, most of them located on the National Mall, the Smithsonian is the foremost curator of American history and achievement. The most popular of the Smithsonian museums are the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the National Museum of Natural History, but any of the Smithsonian museums would be a great way to spend an afternoon—and they’re all 100% free.

New York City also has an outstanding array of world-class museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History,the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, and the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.

You could spend weeks exploring the cultural institutions just in D.C. and the Big Apple, but here’s a small fraction of the other great museums you’d be missing:

• American Visionary Art Museum — Baltimore, Maryland
• Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Children’s Museum of Indianapolis — Indianapolis, Indiana
• Exploratorium — San Francisco, California
• Hollywood Walk of Fame — Los Angeles, California
• Monterey Bay Aquarium — Monterey, California
• Museum of Science & Industry — Chicago
• Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame — Springfield, Massachusetts
• National Aquarium in Baltimore — Baltimore, Maryland
• National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum — Cooperstown, New York
• Pro Football Hall of Fame — Canton, Ohio
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum — Cleveland, Ohio
• San Diego Zoo — San Diego, California
• Strong National Museum of Play — Rochester, New York

Itineraries

Here is a handful of itineraries spanning regions across the United States:

• Appalachian Trail — a foot trail along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine
• Braddock Expedition — traces the French-Indian War route of British General Edward Braddock (and a younger George Washington) from Alexandria, Virginia through Cumberland, Maryland to the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh.
• Empire Builder Riding by the Empire Builder Train from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest
• Lewis and Clark Trail — retrace the northwest route of the great American explorers along the Missouri River
• Route 66 — tour the iconic historic highway running from Chicago to Los Angeles
• Santa Fe Trail — a historic southwest settler route from Missouri to Santa Fe
• The Jazz Track — a nation-wide tour of the most important clubs in jazz history and in jazz performance today
• Touring Shaker country — takes you to one current and eight former Shaker religious communities in the Mid-Atlantic, New England and Midwest regions of the United States.
• U.S. Highway 1 — traveling along the east coast from Maine to Florida.

• Music — Mid-size to large cities often draw big ticket concerts, especially in large outdoor amphitheaters. Small towns sometimes host concerts in parks with local or older bands. Other options include music festivals such has San Diego’s Street Scene or South by Southwest in Austin. Classical music concerts are held year round and performed by semi-professional and professional symphonies. Boston, for instance, occasionally puts on free concerts in the Public Park. Many cities and regions have unique sounds. Nashville is known as Music City because of the large number of country artists that live in the city. It’s home to the Grand Ole Opry, one of the most famous music venues in the country. Country music is popular nationwide but is particularly concentrated in the South and rural West. Seattle is the home of grunge rock. Many of the most popular bands are based out of Los Angeles due to the large entertainment presence and concentration of record companies.
• Marching Band — In addition to traditional music concerts, a quintessential American experience is the marching band festival. One can find these events almost every weekend between September and Thanksgiving throughout the country and again from March to June in California. Check local event listings and papers to find specifics. Also notable is the Bands of America Grand National Championship held every autumn in Indianapolis. Those looking to see the best of the best should acquire tickets to the “finals” performance, where the twelve best bands of the festival compete for the championship. This event is now held at the Lucas Oil Stadium. Both “street” or parade marching bands as well as “field” or show bands are found at almost every high school and university in America.
• Professional sports — The United States has a professional league for virtually every sport, including pillow fighting. However, perhaps because at the national level the only major world team sport that the USA regularly wins at is basketball, many of the most popular leagues are:
  • MLB — Major League Baseball is very popular and the sport of baseball is often referred to as “America’s pastime” (due to the game having been invented in the U.S., and being one of the most widely played sports in the country). The league has 30 teams (29 in the U.S. and 1 in Canada). Season lasts from April to September with playoff games held in October. With 30 teams playing 162 games per team per season and the cheapest seats usually $10-20, this is possibly the best sporting event for international travelers to watch.
  • NBA  — The National Basketball Association is the world’s premier men’s basketball league and has 30 teams (29 in the U.S. and one in Canada). Season runs October to April, with playoffs in May-June.
  • NFL — The National Football League, with 32 teams, is the leading promoter of American football in the world, a sport which has almost nothing in common with the sports that most other countries call football (Americans know those sports as soccer and rugby). The day of the championship game, called the Super Bowl, is an unofficial national holiday, with many fans hosting or attending parties, or venturing out to bars to watch the game(and then even perhaps missing work the next day to recover!). Season lasts from September to December, with playoffs in January ending with the Super Bowl in February. TV advertisements leading to and on the day of the Super Bowl tend to be comical and creative.
  • NHL — The premier league for ice hockey in the world, featuring 30 teams (23 in the U.S. and 7 in Canada). A slight majority of players are Canadians, but the league has players from many other parts of the world, mainly the United States, the Nordic countries (primarily Sweden and Finland), Russia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Originally in Northern markets, recent expansions have each major region covered with a NHL team. The season runs from October to April, followed by playoffs that culminate in the Stanley Cup Finals in June.
  • INDYCAR  — Beginning as the original form of American motorsport in 1911 with the first Indianapolis 500. INDYCAR has since come to be the premier open-wheel racing series in North America. The competition in INDYCAR is known to be closer, faster, and far more dangerous than that of NASCAR. Unlike NASCAR which almost races exclusively on “oval” tracks, INDYCAR competes on a wide variety of tracks ranging from city streets, road courses, to ovals like the world famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana which plays host to the most famous and prestigious race in the world, the Indianapolis 500, where speeds can reach up to a thrilling 240 miles per hour! INDYCAR holds races all across the United States, as well as Brazil and Canada, from March to October.
  • NASCAR — Viewed by many as a “regional sport” confined to the more rural areas of the South, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) has seemingly broken away from those misconceptions over recent years to become a major spectator sport across the country. While a majority of the tracks still reside in the Mid-Atlantic and South, NASCAR holds races all across the country, beginning with their marquee event, the Daytona 500, in mid-February and ending in late November.
  • MLS — Major League Soccer, currently with 19 teams (16 in the U.S. and three in Canada), is the latest attempt to kick start American interest in soccer. While it may not be as popular with the media, MLS is still widely viewed and enjoyed, and is indeed gaining a greater degree of popularity int he U.S. Foreign travelers can find particularly vibrant and familiar fan experiences in several cities, notably Washington, Chicago, Houston, Kansas City, Columbus and especially Portland and Seattle.
• College sports — One rare feature of the United States sports landscape, as compared to that of other nations, is the extent to which sports are associated with educational institutions. In many regions of the country, local college or university teams, especially in football and men’s basketball, enjoy followings that rival or surpass those of major professional teams. The main governing body for U.S. college sports is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which has over 1,000 member schools, including essentially all of the country’s best-known colleges and universities. The college football season runs from roughly September 1 through mid-December, with postseason bowl games running into early January. The basketball regular season begins in mid-November and ends in late February or early March, followed by conference tournaments and then national postseason tournaments that run through early April. The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, popularly known as “March Madness” (an NCAA trademark), is especially widely followed even by casual sports fans.

• High school sports — Many communities take great pride in their local high school teams, and especially in smaller communities, games are a large part of local culture. If your trip is during the school year (generally late August to late May), a high school game can be a great (and cheap) opportunity to get a major dose of the local culture. The most widely followed sports at this level are generally football and boys’ basketball, with ice hockey also having a major presence in certain regions, mainly New England and the upper Midwest. Other sports, such as baseball, girls’ basketball, volleyball (almost exclusively a girls’ sport in most parts of the U.S.), and wrestling have significant pockets of popularity. In some states, a particular high school sport enjoys a special cultural place. Examples include football in Texas, basketball in Indiana, hockey in Minnesota, and wrestling in Iowa. Admissions fees vary, but usually range from free to not more than $10 (football games sometimes allow free admission past half-time).

• Festivals and Fairs — A few days prompt nation-wide celebrations. They include Memorial Day, Independence Day (a.k.a. Fourth of July), and Labor Day. Other major holidays like Thanksgiving Day are marked by private festivities. Many towns and/or counties throw fairs, to commemorate the establishment of a town or the county with rides, games, and other attractions.
  • Memorial Day — commemorates the ultimate sacrifice made by America’s war dead. It is not to be confused with Veterans Day (11th November) which commemorates the service of America’s military veterans, both living and deceased. It is the also the unofficial start of summer — expect heavy traffic in popular destinations, especially National Parks and amusement parks.
  • Independence Day — Celebrates America’s independence from Britain. The day is usually marked by parades, festivals, concerts, outdoor cooking and grilling and firework displays. Almost every town puts on some sort of festivity to celebrate the day. Large cities often have multiple events. Washington, D.C. celebrates the day on the Mall with a parade and a fireworks display against the Washington Monument.
  • Labor Day — The US celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September, rather than May 1st. Labor Day marks the end of the summer social season. Some places, such as Cincinnati, throw parties to celebrate the day.
• National Parks. There are numerous national parks throughout the United States, especially the vast interior, which offer plenty of opportunities to enjoy your favorite outdoor activities, including Recreational shooting, ATV riding, hiking, bird watching, prospecting, and horseback riding. In more urban areas, some national parks are centered around historic landmarks.
  • National Trails System is a group of twenty-one ‘National Scenic Trails’ and ‘National Historic Trails’ as well as over 1,000 shorter ‘National Recreation Trails’ for a total length of over 50,000 miles. While all are open to hiking, most are also open to mountain biking, horseback riding, and camping and some are even open for ATVs and cars.