America is certainly a wonderful place for a journey.

This land is hard to pin down. Filled with so many different worlds and subcultures and belief systems, it's no wonder so many Americans experience an identity crisis at some point in their lives. Heading off into the sunset to drive these open roads, diving headlong into a thrumming big city or hiking into the gorgeous countryside for weeks at a time are the classic ways of figuring out what this American life is all about. That searching is an old, romantic notion, chronicled on the page by writers from Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac, and lived out, daily, among locals and visitors alike.

Weather

America's size plays to the traveler's advantage when it comes to weather: it's always perfect somewhere in the US and just shy of Hades somewhere else.

The main holiday season is, naturally, summer, which typically begins on Memorial Day (the last Monday in May) and ends on Labor Day (the first Monday in September). But Americans take their holidays mainly in summer because schools are closed, not because the weather's uniformly ideal: yes, hit the beaches in August, because Manhattan is a shimmering sweat bath and the deserts are frying pans.