Discover USA

Every Sat morning I'm joined by local Travel Journalist & Author Dr Jill Nash.

From 10am - 12pm we focus on a different holiday destination and why it's worth visiting, best places to stay, where's great to eat out, how easy it is to get there and how cost effective it can be for your budget.

This week, it's USA......

Discover USA

Explore

You could spend all of your life travelling through the USA and you would still probably never be able to see it all. It’s a big country - a very big country- and its home to several of the world's most exciting cities, long white beaches, truly mind-blowing landscapes, diverse geography, and some of the most approachable natives in the world. Folks, welcome to America.

The USA is sometimes called "The Land of Opportunity," and in no area is that truer than when it comes to travel.  Crossing several different time zones, with 50 unique states with different laws, people and accents, the USA is like several countries in one. It is a country that offers an abundance of geographic diversity and where the climate ranges from tropical to arctic.

Travellers can spend time wandering the streets and partying till dawn, horse riding through the desolate Grand Canyon, lazing on beaches in the West or going starry-eyed watching movies being filmed. All over the country you can find excellent National Parks, great places to go for hiking, biking and other activities. Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon are particularly well known.

Americans love sport.  Sports developed rapidly and separately from the rest of the world and, consequently, homegrown games such as baseball, American football (not the British kind) and basketball dominate the sports scene. Soccer (the British kind) and ice hockey are developing rapidly. Urban America also invented the great indoors: aerobics and the gym, indoor skiing and indoor rock climbing. So wherever you are and whatever time it is, you will be able to observe or play a sport of some kind.

Some of the world’s best (and most famous) beaches can be found in the USA. Long, white stretches of sand line the sunny Californian coastline, from Venice beach to Santa Monica and beyond, where swimmers are watched by scantily clad lifeguards. Nightclubs and swish hotels line the coast of South Beach in Miami, Florida, where the locals party from night to dawn and plastic surgery is an epidemic.

Whether you are taking a road trip expedition, gambling to your hearts content, or spending until your cards are maxed-out, the USA offers it all.

Our Top 5

• Shopping in New York: From 5th Avenue to SoHo, shopping has never been this good, with unique boutiques and enormous department stores.
• Living the dream in LA: Los Angeles is a micro-universe. You can find everything from rags to riches, from Tinseltown to East LA.
• Cowboy adventures in Grand Canyon: Herding up the horses, riding alone in the desert and sleeping under the stars.
• Welcome to Miami: is one of the most popular international tourist destinations in the world. Known for its Latino culture and never-ending nightlife.
• Skiing in Aspen: Colorado offers world class skiing until March, it also offers plenty of glitz and glam!

Best Time to Go

Being the fourth largest country in the world, America’s weather is certain to be diverse. Compared with countries of Western Europe in the same latitude, the United States has greater extremes of temperature, and daily or weekly changes are more noticeable. Much of the Midwest has a more extreme or continental climate than Central or Eastern Europe. Only Canada or Russia are more extreme in terms of their annual range of temperature.

On occasion parts of the USA experience extremes of heat and cold characteristic of hot tropical deserts or cold Arctic continental regions. Another feature of the weather and climate is the variation of weather over quite short periods at all seasons of the year.

Some parts of the USA are liable to experience two particularly violent and destructive weather phenomena: hurricanes and tornadoes. Hurricanes affect the South-eastern states bordering the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic once or twice in most years. These tropical storms, which bring very strong winds and torrential rainfall, move North-eastwards from the Caribbean region before dying out in mid-Atlantic.

The climate is temperate in most of the US. Generally, it gets hotter the further South you go, and seasonally more extreme the further you go North and inland from the coasts. Winters in the Northeast and upper Midwest can bring long periods below freezing, even though it's still warm enough to swim at the beaches in Florida and southern California.

Stay

Budget Option:

MGM Grande Hotel & Casino, Vas Vegas

Right in the middle of the ‘strip’, so a great location for those wanting to be at the heart of all the casino action. Like everything in Las Vegas, it’s a large, and the rooms here are very generous, so it’s ideal for groups. Evenings come alive at MGM Grand with bars to suit every taste - including über-cool Tabu where all the waiters are models. MGM is also famous for its shows. Cirque du Soleil's creation, Ka, combines acrobatic performances, martial arts, puppetry, multimedia and pyrotechnics

Price from £65 per room per night, visit www.mgmgrand.com for more information

Mid-Range:

Sanctuary South Beach, Miami

A cool little ‘hip hotel’ a stones throw away from all the action on South Beach. The rooms are generously kitted out with espresso coffee machines, plasmas and even steam baths! It’s a great place for groups of friends and couples. It also has a fabulous small spa offering manicures and massages, and a gorgeous small rooftop plunge pool, where you can sunbathe during the day, and it doubles up as a bar at night. Great for sundown cocktails.

Prices from £159 per room per night, visit www.sanctuarysobe.com for more information

Top End:

The Little Nell, Aspen, Colorado

The Little Nell combines the characteristics of an intimate country inn with the indulgences of a luxury 5* hotel resulting in a contemporary yet comfortable and warm feel. Each of the 78 rooms have huge beds, soft linens, great views over Aspen or the surrounding mountains and a gas burning fireplace, great to thaw out after a long days skiing. Plus not to mention a fantastic wine cellar of 20,000 bottles. Great for families, or that once in a lifetime honeymoon!

Prices from £486 per room per night, visit www.thelittlenell.com for more information.

Getting There

Reaching the US direct from the North West is fairly limiting, as many flights go via London. However, the only scheduled direct flights from Manchester airport are:  New York (American Airlines, United Airlines and Continental Airlines), Philadelphia (US Airways), Orlando (Virgin Atlantic), Chicago (American Airlines), Atlanta (Delta Airlines), and Las Vegas (Virgin Atlantic).

Chartered flights direct from Manchester to Orlando with Thomson, Monarch Charter and Fly Thomas Cook. Las Vegas can be reached with Fly Thomas Cook.

Tip for the Trip

Don’t lock your case. When travelling to the USA or even through it, the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) has full authority to invade your luggage. If it is padlocked, they will simply cut open your luggage to see what’s inside. Either don’t bother locking your case or purchase one of the specialised locks recommended by the TSA, which they can access easily.

For all the best holiday advice and tips, be listening every Sat morning 10am -12pm to my show when I'll be joined by local travel journalist & author Dr. Jill Nash!

Dr. Jill Nash is a Cheshire based travel journalist and owner of independent guidebook publishing company ‘Luxury Backpackers’. Visit www.luxurybackpackers.com for more details on her best-selling guidebooks and travel advice.