Boutique Hotels in the United States

On the east coast, New York is three stays in one: Manhattan, the Hamptons on the South Fork of Long Island, where New Yorkers have been arriving by train since the nineteenth century, and the quieter North Fork beside it. Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, is a short ride down the same railway. Stowe, in Vermont, sits under Mount Mansfield and calls itself the ski capital of the East. Members book all three at rates we hold for the Club. Detroit is the surprise of the list, a city putting its 1920s buildings back to work.

In the South, Charleston, founded in 1670, is the city to walk; Charlotte keeps its best addresses in the district it calls Uptown; and Chattanooga lies along the Tennessee River below Lookout Mountain.

California is several trips under one name: the Napa Valley and its 450 wineries, the desert modernism of Palm Springs, and Venice, laid out with canals in 1905 as the Venice of America. San Francisco is where the coast road begins or ends, and Rancho Santa Fe, in the south of the state, is a 1920s planned community by the architect Lilian Rice. Further north and inland, Portland is the City of Roses, and McCammon, in Idaho, is a railway junction of 1892 for anyone who wants the West without an audience.

Choose a coast and stay on it. In the north-east the train does the work. The fast service links New York with Washington in under three hours and with Boston in under three and a half, and three in four people travelling between New York and Washington by air or rail now go by rail. Philadelphia is on the same line, and the Hamptons have their own trains and coaches from the city.

California is the opposite case, and the car is the point. Route 1 holds to the cliffs of Big Sur for about 72 miles, with almost no road across the mountains behind it, and it was the state's first scenic highway. Give it two days, drive it north to south so that the sea is on your side of the road, and book the nights at either end before leaving home.

American food is regional, and most of it comes with an inventor and a date. The cheesesteak is credited to Pat and Harry Olivieri of Philadelphia, who put chopped steak on an Italian roll in the early 1930s. Detroit's square pizza was first baked in 1946 at Buddy's Rendezvous, in steel trays made as drip pans for the car plants, which is the most Detroit sentence it is possible to write. The Lowcountry around Charleston cooks what its estuaries and marshes supply, which means shrimp, crab, oysters and rice. Vermont makes more maple syrup than any other state. Portland has around a thousand food carts. And in Paris in 1976, French judges tasting blind preferred the wines of California to their own, which the Napa Valley has not let anyone forget.