Start in Portland Maine and explore the coast for a couple of days working your way to Boston. See a baseball game at Fenway, explore this wonderful city for three nights, take the amtrak train into NYC and explore NYC. Jump back on the train and head for Union station and visit Washington DC. Every museum except a few are FREE. The zoo is free. I thank my parent's for taking us there so much as kids. Great bar scene and places to eat and good baseball as well. Annapolis is close by and worth a day also. Driving is easy from DC so rent a car and explore Chaleston, Savannah, Tybee Island. Florida has Fernadina Beach, Jax beach but St. Augustine is a treasure. New Smyrna Beach is my favorite little beach town. Titusville has the space center but Playalina beach on the Canaveral Seashore National park. It is by far my favorite beach in the world.

I would head to Key West via Miami and stay there at least four nights. You won't want to leave though. I would then get a flight out of KW and head to Montana, http://www.visitmt.com/listings/gene...-sun-road.html

I would then see Washington state and maybe do Napa Valley and one day in SF but head to Monterey and Carmel. San Diego is nice if you had time. I am an east coast girl and though I have lived on both coast I always come back east.

I'd do 4-5 days NYC, 3-4 days driving through New England, then 2-3 days Boston. That's a week and a half or so.

Fly to Las Vegas - drive to Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Sequoia, Yosemite. Then over to the coast. Up Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco. That would easily take 3+ weeks.

With that much time I would get a feel for how big and diverse the country is. I would not go in the winter, and probably not in the dead of summer. I would start in Boston and spend a couple of days there and then drive around New England. Maybe Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, or if you prefer the beach, spend a few days on Cape Cod. Then I would spend a few days in New York (ditch the car).

Then I would rent a car and drive west. One plan my husband and I have is to drive across the country on the Lincoln Highway, which more or less follows US 30. We drove parts of this through Pennsylvania and enjoyed the back roads. If you google Lincoln Highway you will find routes and information. It is much more interesting than taking the interstate highway across the country.

I would go to Colorado. I have a soft spot for Crested Butte. But there are lots of places to go for gorgeous scenery and hiking if that interests you. Go to one or more of the National Parks in the West.

Drive to San Francisco and finish up there.

There is much more to see and do in California, but I think we are out of time now.

It would be really dumb to even answer an open-ended statement like the OP's

<I>"I'm planning a trip to America and I would love to know how you would spend 5 weeks.

Never mind our interests, ages and Budget I'd just love to hear how different people would spend 5 weeks in the USA if they had never been there before."</i>

... with no regard for interests and ages... <b>and more specifically, the ORIGIN of the poster</b>.


Somebody from a place where ferryboats and large bodies of water are common would probably gain a lot more from going to Death Valley than they would from taking a ferry across Puget Sound or the Bay of Fundy, etc.

Call me dumb then. Oh wait, you just did.

I frequently ask questions such as "what plays have you enjoyed?" I don't want the people responding to tell me what I would enjoy, I want to know what they have enjoyed. I can use that as a base to find out about the play and see if it sounds interesting to me.

But somebody always answers by saying, "Tell us what kinds of plays you like". Usually I am planning for a group, so a blanket statement that covers everybody would be pretty hard, not to mention inaccurate.

I completely understand the question here. It is not about what we think the OP would like. It is about what we would like.

It is similar to reading trip reports. I love to read about the things that got travelers excited; this inspires me to look into things I may not have considered before. Things that make other people enthusiastic can be sources of new ideas.

I would go to New York, Boston , drive from Boston through New England, Washington DC in spring, key West , Yellowstone , Seattle, New Orleans, San Francisco and LA