Things to do in United States

The American offer here is unevenly spread, and it helps to know the shape before you search. There is a thin, wide layer that reaches almost everywhere — New York and Brooklyn, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, Austin, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Las Vegas, Hollywood — and a thick, narrow one concentrated in two places: South Florida, around Miami, the Everglades and the Keys, and the capital, with its monuments and the estates across the Potomac.

The wide layer is self-guided walking. You get a route on your phone, a story attached to it and a set of puzzles, and you walk Central Park or the Freedom Trail or Haight-Ashbury at your own pace, starting whenever you like. It costs a few dollars and it works in any weather, which is why it has spread to more than twenty cities while conventional guiding has not. The thick layer is the traditional kind. Out of Miami: airboats into the Everglades, the long run down the Overseas Highway to Key West, boat trips across Biscayne Bay past the mansions, jet skis, catamarans, and a nightlife scene that sells itself by the evening. Out of Washington: the Mall and the memorials, Arlington, Mount Vernon, and drivers who do the whole thing in an afternoon. Orlando and the Space Coast add the parks and the launch pads.

Practical. Two things surprise European visitors more than anything else. The first is that the price on the label is not the price you pay: sales tax is added at the till and varies by state and city. The second is tipping, which is not a gratuity here but most of a server's income — eighteen to twenty per cent in a restaurant, a dollar or two per drink at a bar, roughly the same for a taxi or a rideshare, and five to ten dollars a head for a guide who did the job well. Beyond that, the two layers of tours behave nothing alike: a self-guided route cannot sell out and needs only a charged phone, while the guided Florida programmes have fixed departures and do fill, and the Key West day runs twelve to sixteen hours door to door. Weather is regional and extreme in both directions — South Florida is dry and warm from November to April and hot, wet and inside the storm season from June to November, while the northeast is cold from December into March and at its best in October. Most European visitors travel on an ESTA rather than a visa, applied for online and best done at least seventy-two hours before the flight. And distances are what visitors underestimate most: assume anything on a different map is a different trip, not a day out.