The United States of America looms large in our cultural consciousness. It’s where many of our favourite movies and TV shows are set and more importantly it has a rich musical history just waiting to be discovered. 

As a reformed musician and lover of pop culture, a trip to the US was always at the top of my bucket list, so in April my wife and I spent a month driving from coast to coast. 

I wanted to immerse myself in a culture that is at once so familiar and so alien and while it would have been easier to fly from place to place, that kind of travel skips the best bits. 

On the road you get to see a great, wide land straight out of the movies. There are neon signs and diners, gas stations and tourist traps, from the deserts of Nevada to the irrigated farmland of Texas and the urban sprawl of California’s coast.

Along the way, you get to interact with regular people who are generally friendly and polite, a far cry from the brash, rude Americans we so often encounter when they’re on “vacation”.

What I didn’t expect was to find a true collection of unique ‘states’, each with its own culture and identity, even in ‘The South’. 

In Australia, the cities feel like cities and the country towns feel like country towns, regardless of whether you’re in Queensland, New South Wales or Victoria. Sure, there are the little differences, but mostly we’re quite a uniform people.

Over in the States though, you’d never confuse Texas for Tennessee or Maryland for Massachusetts. The food changes, the accents change and the music changes too. 

New Mexico is in touch with its native and Spanish roots, while New Jersey is green and suburban. At the Grand Canyon the air is clear and thin, but down in Las Vegas the city smells of cigarettes and waste. 

It’s worth noting the Grand Canyon is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever laid eyes on, millions of years old and different every time you look at it. 

Standing on the South Rim at dawn, I was filled with a sense of how ancient the Grand Canyon truly is, hewn from the earth by the Colorado River over millions of years.

One of my all-time favourite places, though, was Tennessee. The landscape is beautiful and there’s something comforting about southern food.

It’s the home of Jack Daniel’s and Elvis Presley, but in the city of Memphis there’s far more to see than Graceland.

Not far from the house of the king is Sun Studio, where an ambitious producer named Sam Phillips recorded the first rock and roll song in 1951. A few years later a young Elvis Presley spent months trying to get into that very studio. 

Today, you can tour the studio and not only see the birthplace of rock and roll up close, but stand on the very spot where Elvis sang That’s All Right in 1954.

After dark, Beale Street is the place to be. A few blocks of bars, restaurants and clubs, it’s a music lover’s paradise. 

Walking past the doorway of each venue you hear every kind of blues, happy and upbeat, sad and slow, electric and acoustic.

In BB King’s Blues Club, the late legend’s treasured guitar Lucille hangs on the wall.

If blues and rock aren’t your thing, a couple of hours up the road is Nashville, home of the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame. 

Many an aspiring musician has made their way to Nashville seeking fame and fortune and the city has rightly become known as the home of country. 

If you like history and museums more than whiskey and blues, Washington DC has a wealth of monuments just waiting to be explored. 

The Smithsonian Institution is actually a group of 19 museums containing treasures like the Apollo 11 command module and the only Da Vinci painting in the Americas.

However, it’s the accidental brushes with history that make the city a great place to visit. 

Standing at the top of the stairs at the Lincoln Memorial, I happened to look down and see a little plaque that read “I have a dream”. I was standing right where Martin Luther King Jr stood when he gave that speech. 

At the end of our 5600km drive was New York City and after driving there I’ll never complain about Sydney traffic again. 

Manhattan is exactly the way it appears on the screen, except there’s way more people and the streets smell like garbage. 

The island at the heart of the city is representative of the entire country, distinct areas with their own identity. 

Hell’s Kitchen is trying desperately to shake off its rough reputation while Greenwich village is quaint and progressive all at once.

We flew from New York back to Los Angeles for a few days before coming home and it was like going to a different country.

It was warmer and far more laid back. You can get late night tacos from street vendors or spend your days at the beach. 

The Pacific Coast Highway is one of the world’s best driving roads and Disneyland truly is the happiest place on earth.

30 days of holiday behind me, watching the sun go down over the Santa Monica pier with a beer in hand was the perfect way to say goodnight to an amazing country.

It turns out visiting the USA was like scratching an itch I never knew I had.

NEW YORK CITY: Hire a bike and cycle your way through Central Park, stopping to grab a photo at the Dakota Building and a hot dog from Nathan’s.

WASHINGTON, DC: Uncover Cold War skulduggery and key sites from the United States capital's action-packed espionage history on the Spy Museum's bus tour.

NASHVILLE: Avoid the tourists and head straight to Robert’s Western World for authentic honky tonk.

DALLAS: A visit to the iconic Fort Worth Stockyards will make you feel like you’re back in the wild west.

ROUTE 66: Stop in at one of the ghost towns along the iconic “mother road”.

LAS VEGAS: Out of town, the Hoover Dam is an amazing feat of human achievement.

LOS ANGELES: Visit the original Disneyland and find out why it’s world-famous as the happiest place on Earth. Then hire a car and cruise up the coast to San Francisco, or head south to San Diego and the Mexican border.