America is four cities pretending to be one country

Immigration at JFK is the first American queue you will stand in. It is real — allow ninety minutes, keep your documents together, and do not fill out the landing card in the taxi. The group transfer drops you in Midtown, where the hotel is within walking distance of Penn Station. The day is done.

Do nothing ambitious tonight. The jet lag is real — Mumbai to New York crosses ten and a half time zones — and the best medicine is a short walk to Times Square, which costs nothing and looks exactly the way it does in the films, except louder and more chaotic. Eat something, sleep early. Tomorrow starts at Battery Park.

The ferry from Battery Park to Liberty Island leaves early and the first boats are the best — the light on the harbour is soft and the crowd is thin. You get long time on the island and the skyline view back across the water is the photograph everyone's waiting for. After the ferry, the afternoon covers Wall Street's narrow canyon, the Charging Bull and the 9/11 Memorial pools — two sunken squares of falling water where the towers stood, quiet in a way nothing else in Manhattan is.

Walk one span of the Brooklyn Bridge in the afternoon — the pedestrian path runs above the traffic and the view of the lower Manhattan skyline from the midpoint is the one locals tell tourists about and then use themselves every summer. Skip the line for the charging bull selfie; it moves fast enough but the angle is bad.

Fifth Avenue, St Patrick's Cathedral and Grand Central Terminal in the morning — Grand Central's ceiling is painted with constellations, a detail nobody expects in a train station. After lunch, a proper walk inside Central Park rather than around its edges: the Bethesda Fountain, the Bow Bridge and the Sheep Meadow fill ninety minutes easily and cost nothing.

At dusk you go up Top of the Rock on the 70th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. This is the deliberate choice over the Empire State Building — because from Top of the Rock you can see the Empire State in your photograph, the full sweep of the park to the north, and the Hudson to the west. The Empire State view is fine; it just lacks the Empire State.

Nothing is on the schedule today, deliberately. Shoppers take the coach to Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, about ninety minutes north — Levi's, Coach, Kate Spade, Ralph Lauren at forty to seventy percent off, and the kind of queue at opening time that tells you Indian families found this place years ago. Museum people split between the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue and the Museum of Natural History on the park's west side. Admission at the Met is a suggested donation — technically you can pay a dollar.

The High Line is the third option: an old elevated freight rail line running from 34th Street down through the West Side, turned into a walkway with planted gardens. It takes forty minutes end to end and the views of the Hudson and the city's glass back are unusual enough to be worth it. Our tour manager holds Broadway allocations at face value — ask at the desk by noon if you want the evening show.

The Amtrak Northeast Regional from Penn Station to Washington Union Station takes three and a half hours and puts you in the centre of the capital — no airport security, no belt-off-shoes ritual, no bus from a distant terminal. The seat is wide, the café car sells filter coffee and samosas are not on the menu but the window seat is. Watch New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland go past. Faster door to door than flying.

Check in after the train and drive the monuments at night — the Lincoln Memorial lit up at the far end of the Reflecting Pool, the Capitol dome floodlit, the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Washington by day is a museum city; by night it is a stage set, and the best hour is the one between nine and ten when the tourist coaches thin out and you have the steps of the Lincoln to yourselves, almost.

The National Mall is the world's largest free museum campus: nineteen Smithsonian institutions in two kilometres, with the US Capitol at one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other. The Air and Space Museum has the original Wright Flyer from Kitty Hawk, the Apollo 11 command module and a space suit Neil Armstrong wore. The Natural History Museum has the Hope Diamond and a dinosaur hall the children will not leave. Admission to both: zero.

The guide sets fixed meeting points at noon and at three, and lets families go at their own pace between those. The National Portrait Gallery and the African American History Museum are also on the Mall if the group has appetite. Skip the queue for the gift shops; they are identical at every Smithsonian.

The flight from Washington to Las Vegas crosses three time zones in roughly five hours — you land close to the hour you took off, which confuses the body clock in a helpful direction. The Strip hotels are a short transfer from Harry Reid International; check in, freshen up. Nothing in Las Vegas looks good in daylight — the neon needs dark to do its job.

Walk the Strip after eight: the Bellagio fountains run every fifteen minutes and the show is choreographed to music — free, eight minutes, worth every one. The Venetian has an indoor canal with gondolas at a price the guide will tell you is a choice, not a requirement. The half-scale Eiffel Tower replica at Paris Las Vegas has a viewing deck. The whole walk takes two hours if you stop, four if you eat and stop.

An early morning coach from the hotel runs west on US-93 to the Hoover Dam — the dam is at the border of Nevada and Arizona, 221 metres tall, and the guide has the numbers but none of them prepare you for how concrete can silence people. Then south on Route 93 to the West Rim of the Grand Canyon, about two and a half hours from Las Vegas in total.

At the rim you get long, unhurried time at the viewpoints. The Colorado River is 1,400 metres below your feet — the canyon is a mile deep, and the far rim is fourteen miles away. The glass Skywalk extends over the canyon on a horseshoe frame and costs extra on the day; a good number of the group will pay it without being asked. Back in Las Vegas by six, and the evening belongs to a show.

Nothing is booked today. The hotel pool is earning its keep by ten in the morning — Las Vegas pools are architecturally serious and the sun is consistent. Premium South Outlets are twenty minutes by Uber. The Mob Museum downtown has three floors of organised crime history, prohibition-era courtrooms and a speakeasy in the basement — budget three hours.

The Fremont Street Experience is the free evening option if you skip the Strip: a canopy of 2,000 square metres of LED screen, four blocks long, plays music shows every hour after dark. Our desk holds Cirque du Soleil allocations for the group at face value — book by noon if you want the evening performance, because the walk-up window sells out by eight.

A short morning flight north along the coast — the window seat on the left side of the plane gives you the California coastline for most of the approach. San Francisco International is south of the city; the transfer into town crosses the bay on the freeway and the view of the city from the bridge approach is the first of many moments where the place surprises you.

The afternoon introduction drive climbs Twin Peaks for the city laid out below — on a clear day you can see from the Golden Gate south to the airport — then winds down Lombard Street, the one-block crooked road that is steeper than it looks and slower in traffic than you plan. The drive ends at Fisherman's Wharf, where sea lions have occupied the pontoons at Pier 39 since 1989 and clearly have no intention of leaving.

Across the Golden Gate with photo stops on both sides — the south side gives you the city and the bridge together; the north side gives you the span against the Marin hills. The fog usually burns off the bridge by late morning, and the guide times the crossing for it. Lunch in Sausalito, a small harbour village on the Marin shore: restaurants on the waterfront, the kind of quiet that is twenty minutes from San Francisco and a different planet.

Back by bay cruise from Sausalito to Fisherman's Wharf — sixty minutes on the water, past Alcatraz Island. The guide tells the story of the prison: that it held Al Capone, that three men escaped the island in 1962 on a rubber raft and were never found, and that the FBI officially calls them drowned. The 'officially' is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Ride a cable car from Powell Street end to end — the gripman hauls the car up the 17-degree grade by a moving cable under the road, a system that has not changed since 1873. Walk Chinatown on Grant Avenue, the oldest in North America, where the produce stalls, the fortune cookie factories and the temple on Waverly Place are all within four blocks.

The optional half-day coach goes south on 101 past Stanford University into Silicon Valley — Palo Alto, the original HP garage on Addison Avenue, and the Apple Park visitor centre at Cupertino where the Apple Store is a glass cylinder and the photograph outside it is mandatory for roughly half of every Gujarati group. Pack tonight. The airport transfer leaves early tomorrow.

Breakfast, group check-out and the transfer to San Francisco International. Most India-bound flights go via the Gulf — Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha — adding five to six hours to the journey but usually saving on the fare. With the date line working against you, you land in India a day and a half after you took off by the calendar. Plan the office return accordingly.

Two things to remember at Indian customs: anything bought in the USA above your duty-free allowance must be declared, and wood products — certain carvings, boards and utensils — may be checked at the agricultural counter. Keep the purchase receipts in your carry-on, not your checked bag.