You board a plane in Washington, make a connecting flight in Philadelphia, fly 2,000 miles south into the tropics and alight in the Antilles.
The officials are speaking Spanish but no one asks for your passport. You pay the taxi driver in dollars and in the hotel room you turn on TV and zap through the same channels as you see in Washington. Where are you?
A few more clues. You are on an island with one of the highest incomes per head in Latin America, the world's highest density of Burger King restaurants, the world's largest JC Penney store, soon to have the first Macy's outside the US and producing about half the prescription drugs sold in the US including Viagra.
The car number plates tell you this is the Isla Encantado, the Enchanted Isle. The temperature has never been known to fall below 70 degrees Fahrenheit or go above 97 degrees 365 days a year, day or night. The beaches, breakers and palm trees are straight out of the tourist brochures.
Two Irishmen, Field Marshal Alexander O'Reilly and Chief Engineer Thomas O'Daly made the island's capital one of the strongest defended cities in the Americas, resisting assaults by the French, British and Dutch. But that was back in the 18th century when the Spanish ruled the island which Christopher Columbus "discovered" in 1493 and called San Juan Batista.
The native Tainos Indians, who did not long survive the Spanish occupation, called the island Boriquen - the land of the brave lord. Today it is called Puerto Rico - a US territory, but not the US.
Traces of the ancient Indian culture remain in the mountainous interior. But the dominant influence is still Spanish mixed with African, the latter brought by the slaves who worked the sugar and coffee plantations.
The Spanish were chased out by US troops in 1898 and the troops are still here. Puerto Rico has become a US territory with "commonwealth" status.
The four million inhabitants are US citizens and were liable for military service, but they can't vote in Presidential elections and do not elect members to Congress in Washington.
Until it got its own constitution in 1952, the island was ruled by a Governor appointed by Washington. It was a bit like Ireland under the Viceroys.
Today, the Puerto Ricans elect their own Governor and have self-rule, or autonomy, through elected assemblies. But they are unhappy with their dependent status even if they don't have to pay US taxes.
The islanders keep having non-binding referenda to decide whether to become a full state of the US, as Alaska and Hawaii did, or to retain commonwealth status, or to become independent. The most recent one held last December resulted in just over 50 per cent voting for "none of the above."
This was the option recommended, paradoxically, by the pro-commonwealth party. The reason was that it was not happy with the way the pro-statehood Governor, Pedro Rossello, had defined "commonwealth" in the referendum.
The supporters of the island becoming the 51st state of the USA are slowly increasing and totalled 47 per cent last December. Supporters of independence got less than 3 per cent. Still scrawled on a bridge in the capital, San Juan, is "Boicot al plebiscito". About 30 per cent abstained, but whether that was a deliberate boycott would be hard to know.
Although the Puerto Ricans are well-off compared with the rest of Latin America and get $10 billion in annual subsidies from the US, they fall well below American affluence.
Puerto Rico's per capita income of $8,500 is half that of Mississipi, the poorest state in the US. Mr Rossello, who calls the present status a "disenfranchised ghetto", is pushing hard for full integration because be believes it will assure the island's economic future.
But only a quarter of the islanders speak English and many rightly fear that the dominant Hispanic culture will be diluted by becoming a state.
In the US there are fears that adding a mainly Spanish-speaking state, which would have a larger population than half of the present ones, would bring its own problems. Already there are about three million Puerto Ricans living in the US.
The uncertain outcome of December's referendum has left the Clinton Administration with a problem. With the island almost evenly divided between supporters of the present commonwealth status and statehood, it is not time for a new initiative.
However, there is little sign of a flare-up of the independence movement which in the 1950s led to an assassination attempt on President Truman outside the White House and to the wounding of several members of Congress with shots from the public gallery. At one stage, Puerto Rican politicians studied how Ireland won independence from Britain and became a "Free State". Tourists do not have to worry about these political problems. It has great beaches, swimming, surfing and snorkelling on its Atlantic and Caribbean coastlines. Up in the mountains, the El Yunque rainforest is carefully preserved and the local parrots, which nearly died out, are coming back.
If that sounds too strenuous, one can tour the Bacardi rum distillery. And the pina coladas are as good as you would expect from the island that invented them.