America's Favorite Vacation Spot

This is a book that couldn't have been written seven or eight years ago. Before the days of the jet plane and the booming popularity of the fly-and-drive vacation, a guide to resorts all over America written for all Americans would have been impractical, because what was a weekend jaunt for a New Yorker would be a month's vacation travel for a Cali­fornian, and vice versa. Most American vacations are still based on the auto­mobile, but more and more of us are covering the long distances by jet and using rental cars for local transportation. Cost is still a factor, obviously, but as far as travel time is concerned, Cape Cod is just about as convenient for a Clevelander or Chicagoan as it is for a New Yorker; and Las Vegas is almost as close to St. Louis as it is to Los Angeles.

The result has been to open whole new areas of vacation pleasure to motorists from other parts of the country. In such places as Michigan's Upper Peninsula, northern Maine and the Florida Keys, for instance, you mightn't see many more "foreign" license plates than you used to, but cars with local plates may very well be carrying out-of-state drivers who picked up their rental vehicles at the airports.

For this reason, it's useful for the pleasure traveler to study the United States by areas, each of which can be covered on a separate vacation, and to spot a gateway city for each—a point to which he can fly, and from which he can set out on trips to the holiday high spots. Geographers use any number of arbitrary divisions, but the vacationist's United States might very well be separated into New England, the Middle Atlantic States, Southeast, Florida, the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain States, the Southwest, Southern California, Northern California, the Northwest, Alaska and Hawaii. Gateway cities, respectively, are Boston, New York and Washing-ton, Atlanta and New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, and Honolulu.

Let's take a look now at our country's vacation and recreational riches, extending—as the orators say—from the rockbound coast of Maine to the sun-kissed shores of California.