A Guide to Commercial Guides for North America
Commercial guides to North America vary according to the aims and purposes of its audience. Since the United States, Mexico, and Canada cover such a vast continent with so many diverse climates, peoples, cultures, and economies, it can be difficult to find a single guide that contains all the information you need to make the most of your travel or commercial endeavor. It’s more useful to consider what you’re looking for, and make your decision based on that. Let’s consider what you might be looking for in a guide.
Sacagawea was the most famous guide on the American continent, and she’s about as close as you could come to an all-purpose guide – for those who had no idea where they were headed. For the rest of us, it helps a good deal to know what we want before we get here. If you’re going to be traveling in the U. S., understand that it’s a big country with vast differences in almost every respect from location to location. You can get accustomed to looking up sushi restaurants in the Michelin guide in New York, and find that by the time you get to Atlanta, the Zagat guide is far more useful to you. Go further, and you may prefer asking the locals, or checking out advice from the Food Network’s hit show Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Again, it’s all about where you are, and what you’re looking for.
If you’d like to sleep between all the eating, a hotel guide can be helpful. But you run into that same problem/richness of diversity pretty quickly. Western Europeans, for example, have a rich tradition of luxury hotels, and many travelers come to expect it. Eastern Europeans, by contrast, are more likely to be comfortable with hostel stays. Between the two is the culture of German gasthouses, which tend to have more of a cozy tavern feel.
Choices in the U.S. are just as diverse, but tailored to the landscape: luxury hotels dot the skyline of the major cities, and there’s world-class accommodation to be found in New York, Chicago, or Las Vegas, for example. In fly-over country it tends to be oriented around car culture, and motels litter the landscape near the highways across the continent. The older, more established east coast communities tend to favor Bed-and-Breakfasts, a colonial-era rejoinder to the tavern culture of Germany or Britain.
