By: Matt Meltzer
Credit: Flickr User Leonardo Stabile
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 14 of the most American things you can possibly do in America.
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.
Credit: Flickr User YoTuT
4. Walk on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
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.
Credit: 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 2 a.m. 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.
Credit: 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!
Credit: Matt H. Wade
13. Catch a Broadway show
Spend $175 for tickets to 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 for 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 72-ounce 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.
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