As our once-confined cousins seek to escape the surly bonds of gloomy Britishland, and are welcomed back (in a fashion) by President Braindead, they are advised as to where best to spend their sterling in these here United States:
All set for America! Holidays to the U.S. are back — and there’s something for everyone. Take your pick from these top trips across the pond
And the #1 recommendation?
New York City. In the very same edition, mind you, there appeared the following article with the headline:
Some recommendation.
Other stupid recommendations are San Francisco (!), Chicago (!), New Orleans and Las Vegas. (For my Brit Readers, a quick summary: San Francisco is worse than NYC, Chicago is Murder City, New Orleans is trying to catch up to Chicago, and Las Vegas… oy. The only reason to go to Vegas would be to do some excellent shooting on Vegas’s many fine ranges, but you can do that pretty much anywhere.)
Other Daily Mail recommendations are scenic tours (e.g. Grand Canyon and the Pacific Coast Highway), and those are indeed okay, if you’re into that kind of thing. (If doing the PCH, however, avoid San Francisco and Los Angeles like the plague spots they are.)
So, to all my Brit Readers: if you do want to escape Britishland over the dreary late autumn and early winter this year, let my Murkin Readers give you their recommendations in Comments.
Better still, wait until April / May next year, when you could enjoy an actual spring and attend things like Boomershoot. But that can wait for another time.
Seems like New York City would make those Londoners feel right at home.
Everyone deserves at least one visit to the adult Disneyland known as “Lost Wages”. The best way to visit used to be by attending some “must do Conference” at Corporate expense, but those chances may be gone for the foreseeable future. Pro tip — Go during the ” LV work-week” ( Sunday to Thursday ) when the rates are lower.
You’re too late for Down East Maine. Mid October they roll up the sidewalks until late spring.
Stay away from the southeast coast of Florida, but the west coast of Florida highly recommended. and Orlando for both kids and adults — but be prepared for the worlds largest suburb. and make reservations early.
…. and then If you really want to experience some actual Winter ( not the pretend British version ) I would recommend Vail and Aspen ( just bring lots and lots of $ — Think Monte Carlo levels )
I live in the Tampa area and we see lots of Brits, but mostly in the summer when the weather’s ridiculously hot. At least here, on the Gulf Coast, we’ve got the beach and, generally, a nice breeze. Orlando, on the other hand, is even hotter and covered with asphalt. Folks from UK will buy holiday packages that include airfare, hotel and tickets to multiple parks so they can spend a week of their August vacation getting extremely sunburned.
That being said, they tend to be super nice and a surprising number seem to retire here. For instance, Brian Johnson of AC/DC lives just down the coast in Sarasota.
Oregon has ‘scenic by-ways’ just about everyplace you look.
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My Favorites:
* Highway 126 — the Mackenzie Highway — follows the Mackenzie River on the climb into the Cascade Range from the old-school hippie town of Eugene to cowboy-central Bend.
Mid-week, the burg of Sisters is a nice way-point.
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Open during warmer weather (closed for snow) is Highway122, a scenic route off the Mackenzie.
It wanders through ancient lava fields, a poignant reminder of our human frailty and short time on this particular planet.
We camp in the forest on the edge of the lava; some days, we might hear two vehicles in twenty-four hours.
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Bend is a staging-point for motorcycle tours.
Motorcycle shops carry maps of twisty roads, with designated camp spots, scenic over-looks, and picnic spots.
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Famous for the farmers taking control of the information shack, Malheur canyon offers silent isolation.
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My neighbors Donald and Lucie show rural Oregon on their SoftRoadingTheWest YouTube channel.
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Highway 58 east from Eugene is another trip into quiet isolation.
58 crosses the rural road Highway 395 along the top of the Cascades and going south into California along the top of the Sahara Nevada mountains.
Much of 395 is silent isolated desert.
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Oh, yes … my b-i-l is American and we did a three-week motorcycle tour of the Pacific North-west. It will live with me forever! Such wonderful places; such wonderful people! I’d do it all again in a heartbeat!
YOU!
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My 1996 BMW R1100RT has 136,000 miles… many of them testing the limits of adhesion.
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Thank you for the lovely tribute to this place I call ‘home’, I enjoy every minute, every scene each time I watch (and listen!):
https://youtu.be/1yPbHkWHP2I
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Who performs your soundtrack?
Recommendations? Any of the “Big Five” in Utah. Zion, Arches, Canyonlands, Grand Staircase and Escalante parks. Hell, rent an RV and spend a month doing them all.
Drive Highway 2 from one coast to the other. You can even cross over into Canuck-land for a little bit.
Yellowstone.
If they do Yellowstone and can stand the crowds, Yosemite is excellent, but if someone is going to take a month in Utah, I recommend the Grand Tetons and (Memorial Day to Labor Day only) Glacier National Park and Waterton Lakes just across the border in Alberta are good. In between is Great Falls Montana and the Charles Russel Museum, which is worth a day. It’s not all Russell, but it’s all West.
Worthy of note, The vacc from Astra Zeneca is NOT recognized by the US PTB. Those from Canada where it is common or other lands where it is used will NOT be welcome here. I discover this from my shootin buddy in Ontario trying to make his annual winter trip to Florida.
How . . . How unneighborly.
I’ll throw in a plug for my own neck of the woods, the Pocono Mountains of NE PA. Truly beautiful country, and the beauty varies with the seasons. Winter is stark (and last winter we got absolutely SLAMMED with snow, we had two falls over 30″ and a bunch more over 6″), Spring hits suddenly and beautifully, summer is hot during the day but generally cool at night, and Fall is a riot of colors. If you’re into the outdoors there’s plenty of fishing (my passion), hunting (first day of deer season is an unofficial school holiday), hiking, water sports (Lake Wallenpaupack has fishing, boating, jet skis, water skiing, etc), golf, skiing in winter. There’s plenty of rental houses and cabins, and there’s good food if you know where to look. Not to mention shopping, quaint little towns like Jim Thorpe and Honesdale, there’s even a Mohegan Sun casino. You can even get a hotel with heart-shaped or champagne-glass tubs!
Mark D
Wait… I have FISHERMEN visiting this website?
Fishing is a way of life. Fly fishing is a religion. Ice fishing is a cult.
I actually had someone invite me to go ice fishing. No thanks, the idea of freezing my ass off doesn’t appeal.
Besides, unlike hunting, it’s safe and legal to drink beer while you’re fishing (especially if fishing from the bank, with no driving of boats involved).
Mark D
I have seen photos. Ice fishing is done from little buildings with as many comforts of home as the builder can afford or scrounge. It’s like fishing from a hole in your (ok, my) living room floor. Not much opportunity for ice of that strength in the Southwest, though.
Sometimes. I’ve also seen a guy sitting on a plastic bucket in front of a hole in the ice. Less than two miles from where I’m currently sitting. In February, with two-digit temperatures where the first digit is 1. Thanks but no thanks.
Fish are even more ruthless than the Cape Buffalo so beloved by Colonel Cooper.
In Oregon, Highway 38 leaves Interstate Five at Curtain, winding west to the working coast resorts of Reedsport, Florence, and Winchester Bay (aka ‘the Bay area’).
On the coast Highway One, Oregon has tours of light-houses… many used as back-drops for weddings.
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Oregon Dunes are a playground for the off-highway crowd.
High-speed paddle-tire buggies usually wave an aerial with an orange flag to notify other buggers of their position prior to flying — four in the air — over the peak of a dune.
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Along the coast highway, the horsey set maintain rustic campgrounds, complete with corrals and manicured trails.
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For an authentic back-country adventure, the nice folks with BackCountry Horsemen Of America organize tours deep into the forests and deserts.
BCHOA include a lot of gals and kids, and most everybody rides and packs mules instead of horses, but there you go.
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Speaking of equine, Oregon is home to a couple-three dozen ‘Long Riders’, folks with months — and occasionally, years — on extended trips atop a horse or mule.
Two of our neighbors rode from the tip of South America to Alaska!
This amount of experience and skills is rarely acquired in cities.
The Back Country Horsemen financed and built a parking area on the far end of a city park here. Access to trails both inside the park and outside up the hill, in the tree farm, were easy and close to town.
Ownership of the tree farm has changed hands several times. The new owners have signed a stewardship agreement with a bicycle club for maintenance on the trails. Now the place is overrun with mountain bikers and their ramps, berms, and ladders. Erosion is cutting the trails deeper and they need to be rerouted often. It’s just not safe to walk in places where the kids go airborne with a limited line of sight.
The Horsemen don’t come here anymore…
If spectating at rioters is your ‘thing’, the mega-tropolis of Portland, Oregon offers vivid opportunities to explore your ‘stick it to the man’ side.
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For the shootin’ set, Oregon is ‘open-carry’, so expect to see folks totin’ their shootin’ irons, hog-legs, gats, and generalized implements of noise-making.
The Eugene area is home to preacher and Branson, Missouri head-liner David ‘Hawaiian Elvis’ Lomond.
Take it from an avid fan, Pastor Lomond puts on a show equal to the best of Presley… and has a better voice to boot!
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The Eugene area is home to ‘Mountain Girl’, wife of Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia.
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Local hero and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey is honored in Ken Kesey Free Speech Square.
Rumor has it, the 1939 psychedelic ‘Further’ bus — famed for carrying The Merry Pranksters — is slowly returning to the elements behind some hobbit home on some organic farm someplace (but your humble tour-guide disclaims any knowledge of such…).
Another possibility for places to go.
Britishers, like other Europeans do not have a desert climate, so they might like the Desert Southwest. Ours has the particular advantage of having Muslims in shorter supply than North Africa, so alcohol is easier to source. Every time I’ve visited Death Valley, I have met people from France, Germany, Italy, and I was told later, Poland and Czechia.
The great thing about the desert is it’s actually pretty comfortable December – March, and it’s already October.
….but that desert can get pretty cold in Winter when the sun goes down.
America has so much to offer outside of its urban garbage heaps.
Unfortunately, though, Hollywood has implanted the USA = NYC/LA idea deep in the psyche of our foreign friends. My quasi-foster son (long story, we pseudo-adopted him from Hungary) & his fiancé spent a month with us once, and it wasn’t until viewing the Manhattan skyline from central park did she gush about how this was the “America feeling!”
My difficulty is coming up with a place to go that’s worth going, but doesn’t require renting a car. My main apprehension (pre-COVID madness — I wouldn’t touch Occupied Britain with a 10 foot pole today) is worrying about zoning out driving along some country highway on the wrong side of the road.
Maybe that’s easy to get over (Kim would know far better than me) and it’s not an impediment. If so, I would say to fly into San Antonio (for the effect of landing in Military Town, USA) and doing a driving tour of the Hill Country. Hit a few B&Bs in Fredricksburg, Brenham, Blanco, Llano, etc. Visit a cave or two, hit a brewery, catch a concert in Luckenbach, go on a hike, and then head home. If you insist, maybe have dinner on the Riverwalk in San Antonio and see the Alamo on your last day before your flight home.
(Reviewing the flights, it looks like you have to lay-over in either Houston or DFW. I can’t recommend making the drive from either city over San Antonio, so I would say to prefer a layover in DFW, because you can have a better meal in Terminal D.)
Texas. Have them come to Texas. It’s got almost everything you would like about America and it has those qualities in spades.
Fly into Dallas or Houston, rent a car, and spend a month or three just travelling that great State. Be sure to stop off at Palo Duro Canyon, hike the Caprock Canyons, spend a night in the utter darkness of Big Bend country, see one of Elon’s little flying machines blast off and then ride the coast road all the way to Galveston. The cities are really nice (Galveston is a gorgeous), there’s 500 years of European history to peruse and a thousand years of Native Tribes’ history, the weather in the winter is mostly ideal, and the Britishers will never recover from the endless horizons and blue-bird skies.
Oh, and for the cherry on top, swing over to Memphis for some real BBQ on the way home. 😉
Having had the AZ vaccine it seems I’m not welcome. But I had a great trip in 2017 for the eclipse travelling from Bozeman to Meteor Crater via Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and assorted other places. I went on to Washington but stayed in the Smithsonian apart from a walk up to and around Arlington.
I hope to revisit in 2024 for the next eclipse, but I’ll be staying out the danger cities; if America won’t let me in I’ll see it from Mexico.
I spent 18 miserable months in Vegas (a stay only marginally ameliorated by the paycheck at the end). Has there ever been anything more gaudy, plastic, & artificial than the Strip? A rhetorical question, OBVIOUSLY.
Little known fact: Las Vegas is a Latin term. Translation: “Sprawling Urban Shithole In The Middle Of Nowhere.”
You are only supposed to visit Vegas – not stay there. 3 or 4 days ( in a lifetime ) is more than enough. Based on what I saw, the permanent population seemed to consist of Hookers and Carney people. and people who make a living supporting Conventions and Hotels ( Some overlap ) . There might be others , and there is a whole big suburb north of the Strip, who know what goes on up there.
But it certainly is in the middle of nowhere. Your British friends can get their fill of ” T. E. Lawrence” fantasies by driving from Vegas to anywhere else. As well as an object lesson in American distances.