WOW THE CLEVELAND FACTOR SHOW NORWEGIAN WOULD FRISCO’S WIRE OH WIRE FRIEND

The joy of this surge in connections to the US is that it has made unheralded cities direct-flight destinations. There are tribes in the Amazon who have heard of Chicago, but Norwegian also wings it from Gatwick to Oakland, San Francisco’s less-loved neighbour (visitoakland.com). Why go? Nice restaurants on Jack London Square – and fewer Summer Of Love souvenir T-shirts. Huh? Keanu Reeves’s character in Nineties action movie Point Break? Erm, yep. A pun to feed into the fact that, if you want to see a US city that definitely isn’t New York, you can also fly with Delta from Heathrow (returns £805) to

Salt Lake City (visitsaltlake.com).

It’s the Utah capital. It’s a gateway to Monument Valley. This is good. Icelandair (icelandair.com) serves 18 US airports, like Cleveland in Ohio (thisiscleveland.com), home of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (rockhall.com). You go via Reykjavik, but you can fly from Glasgow and Manchester – not just Gatwick and Heathrow. Glasgow-Cleveland returns from £495. It’s worth remembering amid this talk of low-cost carriers that BA also serves a couple of, er, less-adored US urban hotspots. One of them is Baltimore ( from Heathrow; returns from £697). This Maryland big beast is mostly recognised as a setting for crime drama

The Wire. Ignore that. Its food scene is great – baltimore.org/restaurants. OK, so Concorde may have sonicboomed off into retirement, but the absence of that pointy-nosed pop star of the skies aside, there has never been an easier time to travel from Britain to the US. Almost every week sees the launch of a new flight route to the land of the free refills, with British Airways (ba.com) getting in on the act next month – by launching (on May 4) the first direct service to Nashville from a UK airport (Heathrow, to be specific) in 23 years. A long weekend in the countrymusic-obsessed city (visitmusiccity.com), which has been the proving ground of everyone from Johnny Cash to Dolly Parton, pictured, to Taylor Swift? Yep, go on then. Returns cost from £756. The recent revolution in flights to the States is not really down to the national carriers. It’s the brainwave of “low-cost long-haul” airlines like Norwegian (norwegian.com). Norwegian? Does that mean flying via Oslo? It does not. These canny Vikings have a hub at Gatwick and fly directly to 11 US cities from London’s second airport. This, as of last month, includes Chicago (choosechicago.com). From £305 return.