Louisiana

New Orleans is located in the state of Louisiana on the Mississippi River, approximately 170 kilometers upstream from the Gulf of Mexico. You go there for the live music, the Creole cuisine, and the buildings from French and Spanish colonial times.The city was founded in 1718 under Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. Its historic core is the French Quarter with Jackson Square. There you'll find the St. Louis Cathedral and the Cabildo, where the Louisiana Purchase was finally signed. Live music clubs are primarily found on Frenchmen Street in the neighboring Faubourg Marigny. The St. Charles Streetcar has been running since 1835 and is considered the world's oldest continuously operating streetcar line. It connects Canal Street via the Garden District to Carrollton.You land at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Summers are hot, humid, and rainy; the driest month is October.

Illinois stretches from Lake Michigan in the northeast to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the south and west, bordering Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and Iowa. Beyond Chicago, your travels lead you to Abraham Lincoln’s sites, traces of Mississippian culture, and sandstone canyons along the Illinois River.The capital is Springfield, where Lincoln lived and is buried. Hence, the state bears the nickname “Land of Lincoln,” and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is located in Springfield. Near Collinsville, opposite St. Louis, lies Cahokia. This city of the Mississippian culture had an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants around 1100, and its approximately 30 m high Monks Mound is considered the largest man-made earthen mound north of Mexico. Since 1982, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage site.In Starved Rock State Park along the Illinois River, 18 canyons cut into the sandstone. In Galena, once the center of the USA's first major mining boom, around 85 percent of the buildings in the historic district, including the home of Ulysses S. Grant, are preserved. The hilly south is characterized by the Shawnee National Forest.

Florida is the peninsula in the southeastern USA, between the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, bordered north by Georgia and Alabama. Visitors come for its approximately 2,170 km of coastline, subtropical to tropical nature, and space and colonial history.To the south, the Everglades National Park preserves over 6,100 km² of the largest tropical wilderness in the USA, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979. Southwest of Miami, the Florida Keys string together across 42 bridges to Key West, located about 150 km from Cuba. Roughly 110 km further west lies Dry Tortugas National Park with Fort Jefferson; Biscayne is the state's third national park.On the Atlantic coast, the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island showcases the Space Shuttle Atlantis and a Saturn V rocket. In the northeast, St. Augustine, founded in 1565, is recognized as the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement on the North American mainland. Inland, around Orlando, you'll find major theme parks such as Walt Disney World and Universal Studios.

Mérida, capital of the state of Yucatán in the northwest of the peninsula, was founded in 1542 on the ruins of the Maya city T'hó. You come here for the colonial center with churches, plazas, and colorful townhouses, for the Yucatecan cuisine, and for a rich, often free cultural program in the plazas. The city is also a good base for excursions to Maya sites like Uxmal, to cenotes and haciendas.

The Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico comprises the states of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Campeche. It is flat, covered by scrubland, and has few rivers; water flows underground through limestone and emerges in thousands of cenotes. Here lie the great Maya sites, the colonial cities of Mérida and Campeche, and the Caribbean coast from Cancún to Tulum.