I'm thinking of travelling the states with a friend either next summer or the summer after. I did grow up in America, but I havent been there for around 12 years so I was interested in seeing if it was familiar still.

Ideally I'd like to fly out to NYC from London and start there and move onto Chicago and so on, but I'm not sure how this 'route' would work out. It's a bit much when the bus and train duration times would be around 20 hours from nyc to chicago. Can anyone rec. some good routes, places to check out before chicago, good travel/bus/train companies?

Also who here has travelled the US before? was it worth it? what did you think?