The 25 most American things you can do in America

Because being a True American involves more than drinking canned beer while standing on your furniture, we've compiled a list of other ways to celebrate the birth of this great nation. From shooting guns and visiting Walmart, to eating donut burgers while driving Route 66, here are 25 of the most American things you can possibly do in America. Happy Birthday USA! 

1. Visit the Grand Canyon
Drive through the desert, get there, enjoy its beauty for five minutes, spend another five minutes there because you feel bad, then figure out what to do with the rest of your day.

2. Go to Walmart
You’ll be equal parts intrigued and repulsed, and wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever…. wow, a two-pound bag of Cheetos for $1.82?!?! Hey, grab me a cart…

3. Grill up a huge piece of meat. Or an entire animal, for that matter.
Our forefathers didn’t take over an entire continent so we’d have enough land to grow lettuce and eat sustainable fish. Either find the biggest piece of meat you can and cook it on an open fire, or they died for nothing.

national mall
Flickr user YoTuT

4. Walk on the National Mall in Washington, DC
Just to clarify, we mean the giant outdoor park/quad/public gathering place that's dotted by the Capitol building, Smithsonian Museums, veterans' memorials, and presidential statues so beautiful they’d make an eagle cry. Not the one out at Pentagon city with the really GOOD Abercrombie and a Sbarro.

5. Shoot guns. Preferably automatic ones, and out in field somewhere.
You might ask, “What did that old refrigerator and rusty tractor ever do to force you to fill 'em with 100 rounds per minute of hot lead?” Nothing. Nothing at all.

6. Spend a day at Disney World
This is the place where dreams come true. Assuming your dreams include waiting three hours under a scorching sun in a line with screaming children, all for a ride that's shorter than a hockey penalty.

bulldogs fans
The Matador Sports

7. Attend an SEC football game
If football is America's religion, then the SEC is our militant fundamentalist sect. Fair warning though, if you’ve never seen a grown man cry because an 18-year old kid he’s never met dropped a football, it might be a little intense for you.

8. Do something you’ll never speak of again in Vegas
No, that girl sitting alone at the Baccarat Bar really IS a girl. And yes, the 2am wedding you had performed by an Elvis impersonator can be easily annulled.

9. Visit Graceland
Since only one guy in the history of America has been called “The King,” think of this as the American version of visiting Windsor or Versailles. Except instead of Renaissance-styled ceilings made of gold, we’ve got the Jungle Room. Advantage: America.

NASCAR
Wikimedia Commons

10. Go to a NASCAR race
Why is watching cars make left turns in a circle for four hours infinitely more popular in America than soccer? Clearly you don’t appreciate the value of public chain-smoking, BYOB, and premature hearing loss.

11. Eat some crazy burger made of grilled cheese and donuts
You think we got to be the most obese country in the world by just sitting on our ass and eating? Hell no! Americans innovate, and we come up with stuff like a burger topped with a fried egg and served on a bacon donut.

12. Watch a movie at a drive-in theater
In America, we don’t leave our cars unless it’s absolutely necessary. Case in point: The drive-in movie where you can complete an entire date -- from dinner, to a movie, to sweaty, uncomfortable heavy petting -- without ever having to leave the front seat. Sure, they may be the product of a bygone era, but if you can track one down -- definitely go!

broadway shows
Matt H. Wade

13. Catch a Broadway show
Spend $175 for tickets to the “Book for Mormon" and sit closer to the Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan than you are to the actual stage, or wait three hours on the TKTS line in Times Square, find out “Book of Mormon” is sold out, and end up with tickets for “50 Shades: the Musical”. It’s definitely a classic. Much better than Cats. We'd see it again, and again, and again.

14. Take a mass-eating food challenge. In Texas.
As you're no doubt aware from syndicated American television overseas, everything's bigger in Texas; so there’s no better place to test your gastric limits than with the 72oz steak challenge at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo. Eat the full meal in one hour, and it's free. Afterwards you’ll feel extremely patriotic -- unfortunately, that’s not patriotism your heart is exploding with.

15. Cross the Golden Gate Bridge
Throw on your heaviest jacket, head to Golden Gate Park, and stroll across the bridge while perpetually commenting on “how cold it is here, especially for August”.

Route 66
FOTOPEDIA

16. Take a road trip. Eat nothing but fast food.
Drive through the heart of America on Route 66, but don’t you dare try any of the local cuisine. Be a true American, eat only at places with signs you can see from the highway, and then feel even more American as you supersize yourself.

17. Have a “few” in New Orleans
If you can’t make it during Mardi Gras….no worries! Any time of year is a great time to down super-sugary grain alcohol, get a lap dance from a questionably-gendered stripper, and use a public sidewalk as your bedroom!

18. Go to a baseball game
It's not barely still called America's National Pastime for nothing. If there's one thing Americans like better than drinking beer, eating hotdogs, and yelling at the umpire during a baseball game, it's treating the home team like one of their own. Except for the Marlins. No one likes them.

Ray's Pizza
Flickr user Vincent Desjardins

19. Get a hotdog from a New York hotdog vendor, then eat a slice at Ray's Pizza
Which Ray's? Ask a group of New Yorkers, sit back, and prepare to listen to the dumbest hour-long argument you've heard. And don’t concern yourself with what the meat in your hotdog is, because according to the mud-caked sticker on the cart -- it’s totally kosher!

20. Eat late-night food at a diner
Because why go home after the bar closes when you can gorge yourself on a 3am meal of bacon, eggs, chicken wings, and a cheeseburger, all served by a chain-smoking waitress at one of these diners or the greatest house of waffles across the south.

21. Go to a wrestling match, or a monster truck rally, or a motorcross, or all three (!!!)
And after finding that city where you can attend all three in the same day, heaven will be a disappointment.

los angeles
CITYFIX.COM

22. Sit in Los Angeles traffic
Nowhere is the plight of the American commuter better exemplified than on the 405 during rush hour --- or any hour, for that matter. Laugh at the GPS' "estimated arrival time", revel in the fact it took you an hour to drive three miles, and then complain about it with the rest of LA.

23. Shotgun a Budweiser and then crush its lifeless husk on your forehead
This is actually a graduation requirement at every school in the SEC.

24. Climb to the top of the Empire State Building
Yes, it’s one of the world's most most overrated tourist attractions. No, you won’t get much of a view of the skyline from there. But if you go to New York and don’t have at least one selfie of yourself on the observation deck, nobody’s going to believe you went to New York.

giant sodas
Flickr user Ben Ostrowsky

25. Drink a soda the size of your head
Then refill it. As many times as you want. Because, much like people in America, it’s FREE!!!!!