WHY CONSIDER GOING TO THE USA?

The appeal of the United States is as varied as the country is vast. Millions have traditionally gone there to settle down. Nowadays more and more people visit the USA whether on holiday, to visit family or friends, on business or to study, as the jumbo jets ply backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. For many people a particular visit has been greatly enhanced by combining a business trip with a holiday, a family reunion with travelling around, or using an initial holiday as the way to sample American life before making a commitment to stay longer. The country is so large and varied that a lifetime of visits would hardly exhaust its potentials; the USA is more a continent than the kind of country found in Europe.

British associations

The British have a long association with the United States. The eastern (Atlantic) coast states were once British colonies, though they broke away from the empire in the late eighteenth century.

English is still the main language, long since adopted as America's own. The initial settlers of the north-eastern States were English Puritans (and the states they founded are still together called New England). English and Welsh Quakers founded Pennsylvania further down the coast. Inland the mountains were first settled by Ulster folk tired of defending Ireland for the Crown. In the south the English landowners and Scots soldiers, pioneers and convicts laid the foundation of a distinctively Anglo-Saxon, almost pro-British society, but one quite unlike that back in Europe, for here a plantation economy was directly based upon the labour of African slaves.

European immigrants

The Founding Fathers of the American Republic were essentially English gentlemen in rebellion, paradoxically, to protect their English rights against a despotic government far away in Britain. To the west their descendants carved out an empire dedicated to individual freedom, corporate growth and the Protestant work ethic, sweeping aside the native societies (and most other European settlers). When millions of Europeans then arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, not at first speaking English, a nation based firmly upon American experience was already in place, echoing only faintly its British origins. These immigrants created an urban and industrial society almost obliterating the rural British landscape and so recasting the language and the political system that the links with Britain became even more obscured. Even as immigrants learned in school that their new country spoke English and used the common law, their numbers and the needs of their new surroundings brought about a continual reworking of vocabulary and syntax, whilst their strident demands for action and protection recast both the legal and government systems. The British link became ever more submerged: the United States becomes ever more foreign.

A shared language

The British and the Irish, alone amongst Europeans, are uniquely able to ignore the foreignness of America if they choose to do so. Though America remains a very distant foreign country whose ethnic variety is today more firmly rooted in Africa or eastern Europe than in Britain or Ireland, the shared language opens up the USA to English-speaking Europeans as for no others from the Old World. Add the considerable number of such people with friends already in America and the British and Irish can retain their links with the USA even while the USA at large looks elsewhere, particularly today across the Pacific.

A familiar place

Even as the USA nowadays looks far beyond Britain and Ireland the British and Irish look ever more avidly at the USA. Hollywood movies first brought the rich variety of US life across the Atlantic. Today television continues that tradition. The very quantity of TV movies, documentaries and situation comedies brings both fantasy and daily life into everyone's homes. The USA is a country we visit passively every day, year in, year out. No wonder it often seems more familiar than even unvisited parts of our country, and beckons with the promise of exotic parts where the locals reassuringly speak English.

The educated and skilled middle classes already speaking English can consider settling down in the USA, melting into the background as quickly or as slowly as they want, like East German refugees did in West Germany; no language barriers to put off all but the most stouthearted as happens when the French and German middle classes look across the Atlantic. No wonder it is to the USA that so many British people turn for holidays, business, or to start a new life.

THERE'S SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE IN AMERICA

This may sound like little more than an ad man's copy, like a Texan boast, or just a piece of wishful thinking. The size, the physical contrast, the ethnic variety, the particular rural-urban mix, the wealth and poverty and 400 years of European history (resting upon thousands of years of earlier people's!) means that whatever your interest, from landscape painting to railway trains, from ornithology to folk music, there is indeed something for everyone. And millions of British people have families over there, sisters and aunts who went over as GI brides in the 1940s, or brain drain scientists from the days of the space race.

It's amazing how many people have never visited their families in the USA but have always thought they'd like to, always able to find a ‘reason’ for not going.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT...?

• I haven't the time
• I couldn't afford the money
• They've never asked me over
• I don't like all that violence we see on TV
• I couldn't stand all the junk food
• I wouldn't like the heat
• I hate motorway travel

NO RELATIVES IN THE USA?

• Well find some!
• Old school friends?
• Ask around...
• Ask at your school, college, rotary or town twinning meeting...

Most of us can get to visit the USA one way or another if we are employed (or students with job prospects). It may take a year or so of overtime saving up the money or a couple of long vacations pulling pints in a holiday resort, and if you want to give up smoking or drinking a trip to the USA would be a worthwhile target to save for, and something to get you through the cravings. Some people have even taken to entering competitions as a hobby, and once into the swing of things, they start to recognise what's required of entries and tie-breaking slogans, winning prizes that can include holiday trips abroad. It's a long shot, but someone's going to win that trip by Concorde for two to Disneyland. It could just be you!

LISTING YOUR INTERESTS IN THE USA

Make your own list, for example:

• touring the sights
• going on a resort-based family holiday
• visiting friends or relatives
• going on a speciality trip (battlefields, bird watching, old cars)
• making a business trip
• having a look around prior to emigrating.

All are excellent reasons for going to the USA. But if you can make it clear in your own mind why you are interested in the USA then it'll be easier to answer the essential question:

What do I/we want from our trip to the USA?

You may well be able to combine several concerns:

• visiting family then touring
• family holiday after a business visit
• family resort plus personal speciality
• touring between business visits.

Beware!

Mixing your trips together could ruin the whole thing:

• What would happen if the children got sick while you are all hurrying to the next business appointment?
• Will the children be able to enjoy anything on a rapid, long distance chase between business appointments?
• What will you do if friends not seen for years now chain-smoke, wife swap, play bridge all the time, are workaholics or can't stand children?

However, some considerations can work out just fine:

• If you are geared up to tour you can make your excuses and leave any disastrous reunion.
• If militant chain-smoking friends have now mellowed with children and exercise you can always stay a night longer than planned, or even visit again on your way back to the airport.

WHAT KIND OF VISIT DO YOU WANT?

For some people holidays are action-packed, for others relaxed and gentle. Where you go depends upon how you feel about holidays:

Using a different coloured pen, go over and make the choices again, this time thinking how your children might respond. Then ask your children to fill in their choices: did you get their choices right? Did they like the choices you'd already made for them?

Would you gain relaxation from visiting the following:

If you've built up a column of no answers, then for a relaxing holiday you may need to go elsewhere, or perhaps concentrate upon some US version of what you've done successfully before:

• If you like walking in the Lake District...
• If you like the Costa del Sol...
• If you like Blackpool and Alton Towers...
• If you like the British Museum...
• If you like the Normandy battlefields...
• If you like European Spa towns...
• If you like salmon jumping in Scotland...

To know what kind of visit you want you must sort out your priorities in your own mind. Remember, people who like the Lake District often like Blackpool too. But such a person might find one day at a resort quite enough, a week in the hills not enough. If you want mountains with a day off in a resort then don't go to Florida, for unlike Britain the drive from resort to mountains isn't an hour up the motorway, but two whole days! If you make a mistake in the USA you may well be stuck with it, through no more perhaps than if you'd flown off to the Mediterranean.

GETTING MARRIED

The USA has long cornered the market in speedy weddings (and 6-week divorces). In Nevada a wedding licence is easier to acquire than a rented car. If you are on the Web try typing ‘Weddings in Las Vegas’ (without the speech marks) into your favourite search engine and you'll find a page of Web sites to choose from.

Start with general city guides (www.vegasguide.com or www.lvol.com/lvoleg/).

The Las Vegas Wedding Association sponsors a site (www.i-thee-wed.com) providing an index of chapels, lodgings, services, travel and accessories. There is also an index of chapels, formal wear retailers, hotels, restaurants, reception sites and Vegas shows (www.lasvegas-weddingchapels.com). For specific details of how to get hitched try the Clark County Recorder's Office (www.co.clark.nv.us/recorder/marcet.htm).

The Elvis Experience in Las Vegas is open 24 hours a day for the ceremony. In Florida ceremonies can be arranged at Disneyworld (licences $88.50 require passport and birth certificate).

Nuptial packages exist for a wide range of resorts, ranging from Hawaii to Key Largo. Kuoni do Hawaii and Florida (01306 742222), Airtours do California and Florida (01706 830130).

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON STAYING WITH FRIENDS OR RELATIVES

It's worth thinking how well you relax with friends and relatives back home before you visit overseas.

• Do you dread visiting your wife/husband's school friends?
• Do you now find your old college friends boring?
• Do you leave Aunty Flo's as soon as possible?
• Do you leave your in-laws vowing never to return?

If family visits are fraught with suppressed anger at home perhaps you ought to reconsider such an option overseas?

You also need to consider:

• How well do you know your old friends and relatives?
• Have your holiday demands changed since you all last met?
• What options do you have if their welcome sours?
• Can you afford to risk your family holiday or business trip?

A leisurely week on a canal boat on North Staffordshire's Cauldon Canal with a couple of days at the Alton Towers leisure park plus canalside real ale and cream teas would be a more relaxing way to spend your hard-earned holiday if family and one-time friends simply get you het up rather than help you relax. Epcot with relatives you cannot stand is a nightmare to be avoided at all costs.

But you can always keep your options open. If there's any doubt about staying with family or friends in the USA make them just one part of a tour abroad. Knowing that you'll be off and away in a couple of days can help you relax and may make all the difference between a successful and a disastrous trip.

FAMILY REUNIONS

Family reunions can be short or long. A short stay with friends or relatives in Britain can turn out to be little short of disaster. Imagine how awful it would be to leave Britain to spend the rest of your days with your family already long settled in the USA only to find out after a few weeks that you can't stand each other. If you intend to live with, or even nearby, younger family it's essential that:

• it's been thought through carefully by all concerned
• you've visited and seen what accommodation is available
• everyone knows what the financial implications will be (will grandparents' pensions from Britain be sufficient to keep them, or will a family subsidy be necessary?)
• you have talked over and experienced each other's lifestyles in case the clash is too loud
• each side should know and understand their responsibilities (from paying rent to babysitting).

Initially the most crucial thing is for the Europeans to visit and stay with the Americans. And stay beyond the holiday couple of weeks. Anyone can put up with almost anyone for a few weeks. But how about after three months? What is it like in the middle of a midwestern winter? – a Florida summer? Parents do go overseas to be with their grown-up children, and it can be the start of a very successful new life. But it can also be a recipe for disaster. But then staying at home never seeing children and grandchildren isn't much fun either.

A word of warning

A family holiday in, say, Florida can be quite expensive, even though you may get value for money and a holiday to remember. But if you dwell too much on how much it's costing you may be driven to cram in too many people and places to get your money's worth.

• Just think of a generation of US visitors that have done precisely that. (‘If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium.’)
• Trying to see everything, even in one State, will mean an awful lot of time will be spent on the motorway (whether on the bus or in a hired car). Would you advise Americans to see as much of Britain as possible by way of keeping to the M4, M5, M6, M74, A1(M) and M1 circuit? And yet Britain is smaller than most US States!
• If you visit a Florida relative it doesn't mean you will be able to drive to visit others in New Orleans, Chicago and New York City, even though on a map that looks like a reasonable drive around. Would you spend a continental holiday driving from home to Moscow and back again by way of Athens? If this visit to the USA is indeed the trip of a lifetime and you really must see everyone then consider flying instead. Multiple destination tickets can be arranged before leaving home, often in conjunction with your transatlantic carrier, at very advantageous rates. If you must drive either take as long as possible so that you can leave the motorways, visiting as you go along, or better still, plan to come back again to visit the rest of the family.

TRIP OF A LIFETIME?

It is a great temptation to try to do too much on an initial visit to the USA. If for reasons of health you know this is a one-off visit focus your trip.

• What is the primary object of your visit:
  • to get away from it all?
  • to visit relatives?
  • to visit a specific site or resort?
• Maybe your relatives should visit you where you want to stay (such as Disneyworld or the Grand Canyon) rather than you rush around central Florida and then dash on to Chicago?
• Be firm in your own mind as to why you are in the USA.
• Be explicit with your relatives as to where and what you want to do.
• Be up front about who is paying:
  • if you are paying, relatives visit you;
  • if relatives are offering hospitality, careful negotiations may be necessary so you aren't at their beck and call and they don't feel you are taking advantage of their hospitality.

But remember: most visitors can return if they want to, even if not the following year:

• Focus on your main interest during an initial visit.
• Dare to leave other areas or people for next time.

During my first visit I planned to tour nationwide with a Greyhound Bus Pass I'd bought in Britain. Instead I cashed it in for a focused trip around the North East. I have never regretted that. I'm still returning to complete my original travel plans.

BEING IN THE USA FOR NEW YEAR

Though most Europeans probably prefer to celebrate Hogmanay at home or in a local hostelry, some will seek out a warmer destinations such as the islands of the Caribbean. But many who have already visited the USA may well look across the Atlantic for first footing, even though by being away from home US visitors will be postponing the big moment for at least five hours.

New York's Times Square is New Year's Eve for most Americans, even if they would usually rather die than actually visit downtown New York in the middle of the night. Times Square is not actually a square. Rather it is a strange intersection of 5th Avenue, part of that great North-South grid pattern of streets and avenues, with Broadway, the far older track that once crossed the island from Manhattan's southern tip to Harlem. The modern tradition began as recently as 1904 when The New York Times at One Times Square started sponsoring rooftop parties. In 1907 someone had the bright idea of lowering a reflective ball down the flagpole atop the building as a visible countdown to midnight. The rest, as they say, is history. With the coming of television, millions across the USA and even overseas now time their festivities with the goings on in Times Square just as people in Britain do with the party in Trafalgar Square.

Each year New York City likes to believe that its Times Square celebrations are bigger than before and better than its rivals. Times Square is increasingly promoted as being the Crossroads of the World, though of course most of those present will be Americans. Giant video screens broadcast footage of celebrations from around the world. Given that it will probably be below freezing in New York City at the time, Miami is trying to become the focus of American celebrations with its more lazy climes. Where would you rather be: in frigid Manhattan or on a warm Florida beach? Of course, that may not be the choice: fans of Get Shorty will no doubt recall the less than tropical winter with which the film opens. Christmas card snow in Manhattan can be much more fun than an unexpected Florida cold spell. Nevertheless Californian desert resorts such as Palm Springs are trying to capture the interest of those who insist upon warm weather.

For Miami ideas contact the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau: (020) 7734 1427. For Miami travel details try:

• American Airlines (020) 8572 5555
• Virgin Atlantic (01293) 747747
• Laker Airways (01293) 789000.

For Miami hotels with UK contact numbers there's:

• Island Outpost with 6 trendy hotels: 0800 614790
• Leading Hotels of the World: 0800 181123
• Sheraton: 0800 973106.

For New York City start with the Visitors Bureau: 00 1 212 484 1200, or try:

• Four Seasons Hotels: 0800 526648
• Sheraton: 0800 973106
• Westin Hotels: (020) 7408 0636
• Ritz-Carlton: 0800 234000.