I realise this is more to reinforce your self concept of contempt towards flyover country than out of any familiarity with either place but did you do five minutes research?

I’d happily spend a week in Denver. Looks pretty nice.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g33388-Activities-De...

Yep, I've visited both Phoenix and Denver before to see friends. I would not recommend someone coming to the US visit them.

There's a nice cities that are forgotten by international tourists. New Orleans, Nashville, Chicago to name a few. But imo you can skip pretty much anything west of the Mississippi without missing out on much until you get to the coast. I'm not saying all those places suck, just that they're not tourism friendly.

Thing is, I've spent a lot of time in Colorado and there's a lot of beautiful places in the front range of the Rockies that are a short drive from Denver. So yeah, maybe not Denver the city but you're not far from Estes Park or Golden.

Oh for sure, but I don't think most people travel for nature (with a couple exceptions like the grand canyon, Mt Fuji, etc). There's amazing natural beauty all throughout north America.

Experience what the US actually is?

Traveling should be about experience the local reality, not cherry picking.

The coast is what the US actually is. There's more people on the coasts than not. I truly don't understand where the idea that the coasts aren't the "real" US comes from. They're more real than some city nobody moves to in a state barely anyone lives in.

The real US is the mix of both coasts and in-between. If you see the coasts only, then you don't experience real US. Only few cherry picked bits.

It's like going to London and Paris and claiming you have seen „real“ Europe. No, it was just few cherry picked non-representative bits.

No it isn't. 40% of the US lives on the coast, which means well over 50% are within 100 miles of a coast.

It would be like going to most of Europe, and then someone complaining you didn't see the "real" Europe because you skipped Portugal and Croatia.

There's a big difference between going to NYC and LA vs visiting small towns close to coast.

And visiting a one-sided 50% is still missing a big portion. That's like saying that if you visit Germany/France/UK, you've seen all the europe. Nordics and East be damned because it's less than 50% of population so who cares. But then you end up with very skewed view of what europe is.

It's not 50%, it's well over 50%. there's no hard numbers on this, but I would guess it's 70-80%.It's more than most people who live in the US have seen of it.

The ones with a skewed view of the US are the ones that think small towns are representative of the country in any major way.

Small towns as in the rest of US but NYC and LA?

Sorry, but I hate this when people claim they „travelled europe“ but turns out they've seen the usual Paris/Rome/London/etc central areas. No, that means you visited those cities. Getting to know a region requires visiting diverse places.

We're not talking about cities here.

Most people aren't traveling for nature