We bring you information on all states, from Alabama to Wyoming, here you will find: travel information, history, the best places to visit, the places you may not want to visit, the type of terrain, about mountains, valleys, plains and ocean beaches.

America has most everything to offer the American Tourist or the Visitor from another country. Beautiful Mountains such as Mt. Whitney or vast Deserts like Death Valley the sunny Climates of California and Florida with their magnificent ocean beaches, The City size casinos of Las Vegas and Atlantic City, The cold North as in Alaska or the Dakotas, The historical sites as all states can offer. the old west and its gunfighters or see Hollywood where the stars are born. Disneyland to Sea World. See Grace Land where Elvis lived or the Grand ol opry. You can find it all in America, Camping in Yellow Stone national park to the Jazz Music of the south. Browse our Guides in each state to find it all.

For five centuries, travelers have brought their hopes and dreams to America. For the earliest pioneers, it was a virgin wilderness ready to be shaped into a "New World," a potential paradise wasted on its native peoples. Millions of immigrants followed, to share in the building of the new nation and to better their lives, far from the hidebound societies of Europe and Asia. Eventually, slaves, who had been shipped over from Africa and the Caribbean, joined them as free citizens. As the United States expanded to fill the continent, something genuinely new was created: a vast country that took pride in defining itself in the eyes of the world.

Every traveler in the United States - be they foreigners on a coast-to-coast road trip or locals exploring their extraordinarily diverse land - has some idea of what to expect. American culture has become so thoroughly shared throughout the globe that one of the principal joys of getting to know the country is the repeated, delicious shock of the familiar. Yellow taxis on busy city streets; roadside mailboxes straight out of Peanuts cartoons; wooden porches overlooking the cottonfields; tumbleweed skittering across the desert; endless highways dotted with pick-up trucks and chrome-plated diners; the first sight of the Grand Canyon, or the Manhattan skyline - now more than ever an indelibly iconic image.

In this guide, we've picked out the highlights across the entire USA, from Maine to Hawaii, and Alaska to Florida. We've divided the country region by region and state by state, and covered every area of every state. As well as the big cities and national parks, we've explored the highways and byways, singling out detours worth making, and places to avoid. For every area covered, we've done more than simply provide up-to-date practicalities: we've delved into the history and provided background on the people who have made America what it is. Our hope is to inform and entertain travelers, and to point in unexpected directions as well as to the obvious landmarks, no matter whether you've lived here all your life or are seeing it all for the first time

Where to go
Traveling in the United States is extremely easy; in a country where everyone seems to be forever on the move, there's rarely any problem finding a room for the night, and you can almost invariably depend on being able to eat well and inexpensively

WASHINGTON DC and the four states of VIRGINIA, WEST VIRGINIA, MARYLAND and DELAWARE constitute a cross-section of the nation. Since the days of the first American colonies, US history has been shaped here, from agitation towards independence to the battles of the Revolutionary and Civil wars. Now, the contrasts and incongruities of contemporary America are shown in high relief: the corridors of power in Washington are literally a stone's throw away from dire inner-city poverty while, nearby, dozens of time-worn farming and fishing towns seem straight out of some Norman Rockwell idyll.

Early in the seventeenth century, the first British settlements began to take root along the rich estuary of the Chesapeake Bay ; the colonists hoped for gold, but found their fortunes growing tobacco. Virginia , the first settlement, was the largest and most populous; it originally included most of what are now Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, and as late as the 1790s had double the population of any other state. Fully half of these people were slaves , brought from Africa to do the backbreaking work of harvesting the tobacco. Despite its central position on the east coast, the whole region lies below the Mason-Dixon Line - the symbolic border between North and South, drawn up in 1763 as the boundary between slave and free states - and until the Civil War one of the country's busiest slave markets was just two blocks from the White House.

Besides generating the bulk of colonial wealth, the region also produced many of early America's great leaders, from firebrand politicians like Patrick Henry ("Give me Liberty or Give me Death") to patrician intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson . Another Virginian, George Washington , led the Continental Army against the British in the Revolutionary War and served as the first president, while James Madison was the primary author of the Constitution.

For all its colonial importance, by the mid-nineteenth century the region had lost power and status to the industrial and mercantile centers of Philadelphia and New York. Tensions between North and South finally erupted into the Civil War , of which traces are still visible everywhere. The hundred miles between the capital of the Union - Washington DC - and that of the Confederacy - Richmond, Virginia - were a constant and bloody battleground for four long years. This sense of a nation divided against itself is especially acute at the grand manor of Robert E. Lee , the Confederacy's military leader: high on a hill overlooking the heart of Washington DC, its grounds are now filled with the war dead of the Arlington National Cemetery.

Washington DC itself, with its magnificent monumental architecture, is an essential stop on any tour of the region. Virginia , to the south, holds literally hundreds of historic sites, from the homes of early politicians to the colonial capital of Williamsburg , as well as the narrow forested heights of Shenandoah National Park , along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Much greater expanses of wilderness, crashing white-water rivers and innumerable backwoods villages await you in less-visited West Virginia .

Most tourists come to Maryland for the maritime traditions of Chesapeake Bay - though many of its quaint old villages have been gentrified by weekend pleasure-boaters. Baltimore is full of character and enjoyably unpretentious (and has a phenomenal concentration of bars), while Annapolis , the pleasant state capital, is linked by bridge and ferry to the eastern shore , where Assateague Island remains an Atlantic paradise. New Castle , across the border in Delaware , is a perfectly preserved colonial-era town; nearby are some of the east coast's best and least crowded beaches.

Great Lakes form the largest body of fresh water in the world; Lake Superior alone is more than three hundred miles from east to west. Left untouched, the shores of these inland seas can rival any coastline: Superior and the northern reaches of Lake Michigan offer stunning rocky peninsulas, craggy cliffs, tree-covered islands, mammoth dunes and deserted beaches. For lengthy stretches along Lake Erie, and the bottom lips of lakes Michigan and Huron, however, sluggish waters lap against large cities and the unused wharves of decaying ports.

To varying degrees, all the states that line the American side of the lakes - OHIO, MICHIGAN, INDIANA, ILLINOIS, WISCONSIN and MINNESOTA - share this mixture of natural beauty and aging industry. Cities such as Chicago and Detroit, with all their good and bad points - and Chicago in particular, with its magnificent architecture, museums, music and restaurants, is an unmissable destination - should not be seen as characterizing the entire region. Within the first hundred miles or so of the lakeshores, especially in Wisconsin and Minnesota, tens of thousands of smaller lakes and tumbling streams are scattered through a luxuriant rural wilderness; beyond that, you are soon in the heart of the Corn Belt, where you can drive for hours and encounter nothing more than a succession of crossroads communities, grain silos and giant barns. Garrison Keillor's wry stories about the fictional backwater town of Lake Wobegon (where "all the women are strong and all the men are beautiful"), set in Minnesota, carry more than a ring of truth.

The first foreigner to reach the Great Lakes, the French explorer Champlain in 1603, found the region inhabited mostly by tribes of Huron, Iroquois and Algonquin. France soon established a network of military forts, Jesuit missions and fur-trading posts - which entailed treating the native people as allies rather than subjects. Territorial disputes with their colonial rivals, however, culminated in the French and Indian War with Britain from 1754 to 1761. The victorious British felt under no constraints to deal equitably with the Native Americans, and things grew worse with large-scale American settlement after independence. The Black Hawk War of 1832 put a bloody end to traditional life.

Settlers from the east were followed to Wisconsin and Minnesota by waves of Scandinavians and Germans , while the lower halves of Illinois and Indiana attracted Southerners , who attempted to maintain slavery and resisted Union conscription during the Civil War. These areas often still have more in common with neighboring Kentucky and Tennessee than with the industrial cities of their own states.

The impetus given to industry by the Civil War was encouraged by abundant supplies of ores and fuel and efficient transportation by water and rail. As lakeshore cities like Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland grew, their populations swelled with hundreds of thousands of poor blacks who migrated from the Deep South in search of jobs. Many worked in munitions during the two world wars. But a lack of planning, inadequate housing and mass layoffs at times of low demand bred conditions that led to the riots of the late 1960s and current inner-city deprivation. Depression in the 1970s ravaged the economy - especially the automobile industry, on which so much else depended - and brought the unwanted title of " Rust Belt ". Since then, urban centers have battled back, with Cleveland , Ohio, perhaps the most dramatic example of a turnaround in fortunes.

During the summer, breezes coming off the Great Lakes keep the temperature down to a comfortable average of 70°F, though heat waves can push temperatures over 100°F. Even in spring and fall, freezing occurs in the northern reaches of the region, where winter readings of -50°F are not uncommon and parts of the lakes are frozen solid.

Public transportation serves all the major towns. Amtrak 's national hub is in Chicago and its routes spread across the entire region; Greyhound operates reasonably frequent services to nearly all urban centers. The best way to appreciate the sculptured shorelines of the lakes themselves, however, is to travel the lonely minor roads by car . In the northwest, cycling alongside Superior and the northern parts of Lake Michigan can be quite enjoyable.

Pacific Northwest states of WASHINGTON and OREGON , while similar in climate, topography and generally liberal politics, are quite different in their attitude toward expansion and progress. Since the 1990s, Washington has been home to high-tech businesses, sprawling growth, bustling military bases and notorious freeway gridlock, while Oregon remains lower-scaled in both design and temperament, thanks in no small measure to its stringent land-use laws and "urban-growth boundaries" surrounding its larger cities.

Significantly cooler than California to the south, both are split by the great north-south spine of the Cascade Mountains , with their western sides more appealing by far. Throughout these hilly western regions, the ocean rains have created a verdant landscape, thick with woodlands that on the Olympic Peninsula become localized rainforests. This fertile land is where the population is most heavily concentrated, although the principal cities are not along the exposed coast itself, which remains - in Oregon at least - remarkably pristine, scattered with remote, rugged beaches. Both Seattle and Portland lie roughly fifty miles from the Pacific Ocean along the I-5 Interstate, running from Canada to California. Seattle, the commercial and cultural capital of the Northwest, is a major national port perched on the edge of the beautiful, island-strewn Puget Sound , with a busy network of local and long-distance ferries among the container traffic. Portland lies adjacent to the rich farmlands of the Willamette Valley, long the historic heartland of Oregon.

Across the Cascades, the east is far drier and less hospitable, peppered with desert and scrubland, much of which is prone to drought and periodic wildfires, which have become increasingly common in recent years. Of the towns, only Spokane is of any appreciable size, though the booming resort town of Bend is a far more appealing destination, as its Cascade-straddling location makes it a useful base for sampling the mountains, desert and, especially the beautiful Columbia River Gorge . Of outstanding interest also is the scarred territory between Seattle and Portland around Mount St Helens , which erupted with devastating effect in 1980.

NEW MEXICO, ARIZONA, UTAH and NEVADA are extraordinary, unforgettable and unique. They stretch from Texas to California across an elemental landscape ranging from towering monoliths of stark red sandstone to snowcapped mountains, on a high desert plateau that repeatedly splits open to reveal yawning canyons. The raw power of the scenery, uninterrupted from horizon to horizon, is overwhelming, and is complemented by the emphatic presence of numerous Native American cultures and the palpable legacy of America's Wild West frontier.

Among the earliest inhabitants were the Ancestral Puebloans (the former name for whom, " Anasazi ," has now fallen into disrepute). The remains of their cliff palaces and cities, abandoned around seven hundred years ago, are scattered throughout the region, but their direct descendants, the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and the Hopi in Arizona, still lead much the same lifestyle, in the same general vicinity.

Less sedentary tribes, such as the Navajo and the Apache , are thought to have migrated into the Southwest from the fourteenth century onwards. They adopted local agricultural and craft techniques and appropriated vast tracts of territory, which they in turn soon had to defend against bands of European immigrants. The first such, in 1540, was a party of Spanish explorers led by Coronado, who spent two years searching for mythical El Dorado-style cities of gold. Sixty years later, Hispanic colonists founded the province of New Mexico , an ill-defined region that covered not only all of the Southwest but much of modern California and Colorado; many of the Catholic missions they established remain intact. Not until 1848 - by which time New Mexico had spent thirty years as a neglected backwater of the newly independent nation of Mexico - was the region forcibly taken over by the United States . Almost immediately, large numbers of outsiders began to pass through on their way to Gold Rush California.

Thereafter, increasingly violent confrontations took place between the US government and the Native Americans. The entire Navajo population was rounded up and forcibly removed to the barren plains of eastern New Mexico in 1864 (though they were soon allowed to return to northeastern Arizona), and the Apache , under warrior chiefs Cochise and Geronimo, fought extended battles with the US cavalry. Though the nominal intention was to open up Indian lands to newly American settlers, few ever succeeded in extracting a living from this harsh terrain.

One exception were the Mormons (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints), whose flight from religious persecution brought them by the late 1840s to the alkaline basin of Utah's Great Salt Lake . Through sheer hard work, and the cooperative management of limited water resources, they established what amounted to an independent country, with outlying communities all over the Southwest. Even here they met with resistance, and until the Civil War intervened, there was a real possibility that the US might declare war on them. They still constitute seventy percent of Utah's population and maintain virtual control of the state's government.

Despite their common heritage, each of the four Southwestern states remains quite distinct. New Mexico bears the most obvious traces of long-term settlement, the Native American pueblos of the north coexisting alongside towns such as Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Taos, which clearly retain their Spanish colonial identity. In Arizona, the history of the Wild West is more conspicuous, in towns such as Tombstone , site of the legendary shoot-out at the OK Corral. Over a third of the state belongs to Native American tribes, such as the Apache, Hopi and Navajo, most of whom live in the red-rock lands of the northeast corner, notably amid the splendor typified by the Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley .

The canyon country of northern Arizona - even the immense Grand Canyon - won't prepare you for the uninhabited but compelling landscape of southern Utah, where Zion and Bryce canyons are just the best known of a string of national parks and monuments. Moab , poised in the east between majestic Canyonlands and the surreal Arches , has become a top destination for youthful outdoors enthusiasts. Nevada, on the other hand, is nothing short of desolate; gamblers are lured in the millions by the bright lights of Las Vegas , but away from the casinos there's little to see or do.

You can count on warm sunshine anywhere in the Southwest for nine months of the year, with incredible sunsets most evenings. Summer is the peak tourist season, for no good reason - air temperatures topping 100°F can make outdoor life unbearable, while in late summer awesome thunderstorms sweep in without warning, causing flash floods and forest fires. By October, perhaps the best time to come, the crowds are gone and in the mountains and canyons the leaves turn red and gold. Winter brings snow to higher elevations - there's excellent skiing in northern Utah and in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico - while spring sees wild flowers bloom in otherwise barren desert. Note that the climate varies sharply according to elevation, with mountains often 30°F cooler than the plains.

More than almost anywhere in the US, the backcountry wildernesses of the Southwest are ideal for (well-planned) camping and backpacking expeditions. It's vital to be prepared for the harshness of the desert, where even the most basic needs can be hard to fill: always carry water, and if you venture off the beaten track let someone know where you're going and when you'll return.

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