Home of the brave.
The images that TV, film, and music convey of the USA are true. You just have to get out into it to see the straw-chewing Texan cowboys, the purple mountains, the winds sweeping down the plains, the steamboats rolling down the rivers, and even the bleach-blonde starlets whisking past the velvet-rope clubs. New York City and Los Angeles are star-studded giants, but week-long trips can be enjoyed in historic hubs like Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, or Boston in the east or in active daytrips out of San Francisco or Seattle out west. The best is getting your kicks out on the two-lane highways connecting the coasts. In the Deep South, pull into colonial coast towns like Charleston in South Carolina, Mississippi blues bars, Louisiana’s gumbo joints, or Elvis’s Graceland. In the Midwest, you can go up the famous arch in St Louis and cross the Mississippi to Chicago. Out in the southwest, crisscross the broad "national park land" from Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park or Montana’s Glacier National Park to Utah’s desert arches that look like red fudge to hikes down the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Budget flights in the states are way behind Europe’s. They don’t call this car country for nothing.
