USA 2025

The route

Travel essentials

Three weeks in May, as a family of four: my parents, my brother and me. The timing was the best decision we made, because it’s before the American summer holidays and the national parks were nearly empty. Colorado, New Mexico and West Texas in May without crowds and without queueing at any gate is something I can recommend to everybody. The route was New York, Chicago and Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, then a long drive through Colorado, New Mexico and Texas down to the Gulf, and a flight to Miami at the end. Plan for continental distances, the road part alone is longer than driving across Europe.

Entry. As an Austrian you don’t need a visa, you need an ESTA under the Visa Waiver Program. It’s not a visa, but don’t treat it as a formality either. Do it well before you fly, it’s genuinely fiddly, and if the automatic check doesn’t clear you the fallback is a real visa appointment at the embassy, which takes weeks. Apply only at esta.cbp.dhs.gov, there’s a whole industry of lookalike sites charging a multiple of the real price. It also got noticeably more expensive: the fee went from $21 to $40 at the end of September 2025 and is now $40.27 per person, adjusted annually. One approval covers two years and multiple entries of up to 90 days.

Domestic flights. Both of ours, New York to Chicago and Houston to Miami, were remarkably cheap. Flying inside the US costs a fraction of what the same distance costs in Europe, so don’t assume driving is always the cheaper option.

Renting the car. This was the one part of the trip that really annoyed me. The price you book is not the price you pay and we nearly paid double. Two things do the damage. First the insurance upsell at the counter, which comes as a stack of abbreviations of which usually only one is worth anything. Second every extra driver is charged per day, around $12 to $13. Travelling as four that’s the trap, because adding two more drivers over three weeks costs more than several nights of accommodation, and you pay it whether those people ever drive or not. Decide before you get to the desk who actually needs to drive.

Bring a real credit card in the main driver’s name. If you pay the deposit with a debit card you’ll be told the damage waiver is now mandatory, which is exactly the charge you were trying to avoid, and some downtown locations don’t accept debit cards at all. Check what your credit card or travel insurance already covers before you leave, that’s the only leverage you have in that conversation.

Payments. My Austrian debit card worked everywhere without a single problem, so I wouldn’t overthink this. Contactless is normal. The one thing to remember is that the price on the label isn’t the price at the till, because sales tax is added at the register and tipping is expected on top in restaurants.

Mobile internet. An eSIM worked nicely, no drama at all. Coverage was fine in the cities and good enough along the interstates, but it gets thin in the emptier parts of West Texas and around the parks, so download offline maps for the driving days.

Accommodation. Booking.com worked very nicely, and in the cities Airbnb was the better option. Out on the road it’s motels, which are cheap, unremarkable and completely fine.

Park fees, and a warning if you’re reading this now. Since January 2026 the rules changed for foreigners. The America the Beautiful annual pass costs $250 for non-residents instead of the $80 residents pay, and eleven of the most popular parks charge an extra $100 per person on top of the normal entrance fee. None of the parks on this route are among those eleven: the surcharge list is Acadia, Bryce Canyon, Everglades, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Zion. So Mesa Verde, Great Sand Dunes, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns and Big Bend all still cost the ordinary fee, roughly $25 to $30 per vehicle. Added up, paying per park is cheaper than the $250 non-resident pass. That changes as soon as one of the eleven is on your route, so calculate it for your own trip instead of buying the pass by reflex.

Food. Not great, and the real risk is drift. On a road trip the default at every exit is fast food and it takes actual effort not to eat that way for three weeks. Shop in supermarkets, they’re enormous and have everything, and treat the roadside chains as the exception.

Safety. The US is not as safe as Europe and nowhere near as safe as China. Nothing happened to us and I never felt in danger, but the baseline is different and being aware of your surroundings in cities at night is worth more there than at home.

Personal thoughts, experiences and research

Three weeks and around 4,000 kilometres of driving give you a particular view of a country. You see the cities, but you also see everything in between, and in the US the in-between is most of it.

How are they living?

The first thing I have to say isn’t flattering: the built environment isn’t beautiful. Cities and streets don’t have the quality European ones have and I noticed it constantly. Not the skylines, those are unmatched, but the ordinary parts: the strips of parking, the road you can’t cross on foot, the towns that are a gas station and nothing else. Europe is built for people who stay, America for people who are passing through.

Everything runs through the car and once you see it you can’t stop seeing it. It decides where people eat, which is why the default at every exit is fast food and why eating well takes deliberate effort. It also decides how far apart people live from each other.

The other thing you notice is the range. You see absolutely everything in how people dress, behave, believe and live, far more variation than you’d ever see in Austria. As a European that’s shocking at first, until you realise that nobody around them finds it remarkable at all.

Why are they richer?

The numbers say the US is far richer than Europe. On the ground it doesn’t look like that. The money is very concentrated and the average American place looks poorer than the average Austrian one, even in states with a high GDP per head.

Both is true and the explanation is distribution. The US has the highest disposable income in the OECD, but also an income Gini of around 0.39 against an EU average of 0.29, with Austria among the more equal countries. A high average with a wide spread doesn’t produce a country that feels rich, it produces a country with some very rich places in it. The hardest number is life expectancy, where the US is now roughly five years behind Western Europe. Whatever the GDP figure measures, it’s not that.

The more interesting part is that the extra output isn’t cleverness, it’s hours. Take the harmonised OECD figures for 2023: GDP per hour worked is about $97 in the US, about $95 in Austria and $94 in Germany. That’s a difference of roughly two percent, so an American produces almost exactly what an Austrian produces in an hour.

Now look at how many hours. The average American works around 1,810 a year, Austria sits under 1,500 and Germany is the lowest in the OECD at about 1,330. Multiplied out the American produces something like $176,000 a year against the Austrian’s $140,000. The gap is about 26 percent and roughly nine tenths of it is hours alone.

So the American economy isn’t more efficient than the Austrian one per hour, it’s the same efficiency run for longer. Worth keeping in mind, because the headline GDP comparison gets used constantly as evidence that Europe has fallen behind on capability, and at least against Austria it’s mostly evidence that Europeans go home earlier.

Why are they more innovative?

None of that explains the thing America genuinely does better. Starbase and the two space centres make that point better than any statistic, and so does the fact that a junior engineer at SpaceX gets interviewed by Elon himself.

My explanation after three weeks is cultural. In Europe there’s a correct way to do almost everything and if you deviate from it you get judged immediately, usually before you’ve finished explaining. In America nobody cares. That indifference is the same one behind all the variation you see on the street, and I think it’s the whole asset: a society that doesn’t punish you for being strange is a society where the occasionally useful strangeness survives long enough to turn into something.

A country that only has a present

The last thing struck me slowly. There is no deep culture or history to fall back on, not in the sense a European means it. What they have instead is a story about themselves: they worked hard, they ran capitalism harder than anyone else, and they flattened whatever was in the way. That’s the founding myth and it isn’t hidden.

What’s striking is that they still live it. It’s not a museum piece, it’s the operating instruction, and you feel it from the work hours to the way people talk about their jobs. Europe has a lot of past and spends a lot of energy protecting it, America has almost none and spends all of its energy on what’s next.

How would living there be?

My honest answer splits in two, and I think the split is the whole point.

For building something it looks better than here. The hours are longer, but you get judged less, the ceiling is higher and nobody blocks you for doing it in an unfamiliar way.

For living I’d still take Europe. The daily quality of the place, the streets, the food, being able to walk somewhere, and the fact that being ill or unlucky is less financially dangerous, all of that is simply better at home. Chicago was the one city on the route where I could genuinely imagine it, which is telling, because it’s also the one that felt closest to a European city.

So the trade-off is real. You get more upside and less friction and you pay for it with the quality of ordinary life. Which one is worth more depends on what you want to do with your years.