I America

Category: States

States and Territories Of The United States

  • Pennsylvania: Historic Charm, Modern Adventure

    Pennsylvania occupies a singular place in American history, culture, and geography. It is the state where the United States was born — where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where the Constitution was written, and where the ideals of American democracy were first given form and language. It is also a state of extraordinary natural beauty, from the Pocono Mountains in the northeast to the Laurel Highlands in the southwest, from the broad farmlands of Lancaster County to the wild, ridge-and-valley terrain of its Appalachian interior. It is home to two of the great American cities — Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — each with a character so distinct from the other that they seem to belong to different states entirely, and between them stretches a middle Pennsylvania of small cities, college towns, historic battlefields, and landscapes of quiet, rolling beauty that rewards the traveler who takes the time to explore it.

    Pennsylvania is called the Keystone State, and the name is apt in more ways than one. Geographically, it sits at the center of the original thirteen colonies. Historically, it was the keystone of the new American republic — the state whose compromises, whose intellectual tradition, and whose diverse population made union possible. And for the traveler, it is a keystone destination — a place of extraordinary variety and depth that connects the coastal sophistication of the northeastern United States with the working-class heartland of the American interior, and that offers more layers of history, culture, and natural experience than most visitors ever fully discover.

    Why Visit Pennsylvania
    Pennsylvania receives over 200 million visitors annually, drawn by a combination of historical significance, natural beauty, cultural attractions, and some of the most distinctive regional food and culture in the United States. The Philadelphia area alone contains more artifacts of early American history than anywhere else in the country. The Pennsylvania Dutch Country of Lancaster County offers a window into one of the most distinctive and enduring alternative communities in the Western world. The battlefields of Gettysburg preserve the landscape of the most consequential battle ever fought in North America. Pittsburgh has reinvented itself from a steel city into one of the most livable and culturally vibrant mid-sized cities in the United States. And the forests, rivers, and mountains of Pennsylvania’s vast interior offer outdoor experiences of genuine quality in a state that is far wilder than its position on the northeastern megalopolis corridor might suggest.

    Philadelphia
    Philadelphia is the founding city of the United States — the place where American democracy was conceived, debated, and given its definitive written form. It is also one of the great American cities on its own terms, with a world-class museum culture, an outstanding and rapidly evolving restaurant scene, neighborhoods of extraordinary character and beauty, and a civic identity so fierce and particular that it has become part of the cultural fabric of the nation. Philadelphians are proud, passionate, occasionally profane, and deeply attached to their city in a way that is one of the most endearing things about the place.

    Historic Philadelphia
    Independence National Historical Park, managed by the National Park Service, preserves the most concentrated collection of sites associated with the founding of the United States anywhere in the world. At its center is Independence Hall — the single most important building in American history. It was here that the Second Continental Congress met to debate and adopt the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and here that the Constitutional Convention gathered in 1787 to draft the Constitution of the United States. The building itself is a Georgian masterpiece of red brick and white woodwork, and the Assembly Room where both documents were signed has been restored to its 18th-century appearance with extraordinary care. Tours of the building, led by National Park Service rangers, are among the finest interpretive experiences available at any historical site in the United States. Admission is free, but timed entry passes are required and should be reserved well in advance.

    The Liberty Bell, housed in the Liberty Bell Center directly across Chestnut Street from Independence Hall, is the most recognizable symbol of American freedom in the world. The bell, cast in London in 1752 and famously cracked, was used to call the Pennsylvania Assembly together and to mark important public occasions. Its association with the abolitionist movement in the 19th century, when activists adopted it as a symbol of the contradiction between the ideals of American liberty and the reality of slavery, gave it the iconic status it retains today. The center presents the bell in a glass pavilion that allows it to be viewed against the backdrop of Independence Hall — a deliberately composed historical sight line of considerable power.
    The surrounding blocks of the park contain numerous other historically significant sites. Congress Hall, where the United States Congress met from 1790 to 1800 while Philadelphia served as the national capital, is one of the finest preserved Federal-period public buildings in existence. The Second Bank of the United States, a magnificent Greek Revival temple designed by William Strickland in 1824, houses a portrait gallery of the founders of the republic. Carpenters Hall, where the First Continental Congress met in 1774, is a beautifully preserved Georgian building operated by the Carpenters Company of Philadelphia — the oldest trade guild in the United States, founded in 1724.

    Elfreth’s Alley, a narrow cobblestone lane just north of the park, is the oldest continuously inhabited residential street in the United States, with a row of 32 homes dating from 1702 to 1836 that are remarkably well preserved. Walking its brick-paved length, with the small Federal and Georgian houses leaning slightly toward each other overhead, is one of the most direct experiences of early American urban life available anywhere. The nearby Christ Church, where George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Betsy Ross worshipped, is a magnificent Georgian church of 1744 with a graveyard containing the graves of five signers of the Declaration of Independence.

    The Museum of the American Revolution, which opened in 2017 on Third Street just blocks from Independence Hall, is the finest museum of its subject in the United States. Its permanent collection and narrative galleries tell the story of the Revolution with intellectual rigor, emotional power, and a willingness to engage with the Revolution’s complications and contradictions — the roles of women, enslaved people, Native Americans, and loyalists alongside the founding narrative of the patriots. The centerpiece of the museum is a theatrical presentation built around George Washington’s field tent, used throughout the Revolutionary War — an object of extraordinary historical resonance.

    Old City and Society Hill
    The neighborhoods immediately surrounding the historical park are among the most beautiful and historically layered urban districts in the United States. Old City, to the north and east of the park, was the commercial heart of colonial Philadelphia and retains dozens of buildings from the 18th and early 19th centuries alongside galleries, restaurants, and bars that have made it one of Philadelphia’s most active neighborhoods. Society Hill, to the south, is a residential neighborhood of 18th and 19th-century brick rowhouses interspersed with modern infill buildings — including three towers designed by I.M. Pei in the 1960s — that is one of the finest examples of urban historic preservation in the United States.

    Center City
    Philadelphia’s downtown, known as Center City, was laid out by William Penn in 1682 in a grid plan that was among the most influential urban designs in American history, serving as the template for dozens of subsequent American cities. The plan centered on five public squares, four of which survive as parks, and a central square that is now the site of Philadelphia City Hall — a massive Second Empire building of 1901 that is the largest municipal building in the United States by floor area and is capped by a bronze statue of William Penn that, by a gentleman’s agreement among developers, stood as the tallest point in the Philadelphia skyline until 1987.
    Broad Street, running north-south through the center of the city, is Philadelphia’s great ceremonial avenue, lined with cultural institutions and civic buildings. The Avenue of the Arts designation along South Broad Street encompasses the Academy of Music — the oldest continuously operating opera house in the United States, an Italian Renaissance jewel of 1857 that is the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra — the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, the Wilma Theater, and the Philadelphia Film Center. The Philadelphia Orchestra itself, one of the finest orchestras in the world, has been known since the early 20th century for a lush, warm sound called the Philadelphia Sound that remains one of the great achievements of American classical music.

    The Reading Terminal Market, housed in the train shed of the former Reading Railroad terminal at 12th and Arch Streets, is one of the great indoor public markets in the United States — a vast, bustling space where Pennsylvania Dutch vendors from Lancaster County sell scrapple, whoopie pies, shoofly pie, and fresh produce alongside butchers, fishmongers, cheese sellers, spice merchants, and some of the best lunch counters in Philadelphia. The Amish vendors, who appear only on certain days of the week, are among the most popular and authentic attractions in the market.
    Rittenhouse Square, the finest of Penn’s original five squares, is the heart of Philadelphia’s most elegant residential neighborhood — a beautifully planted park surrounded by luxury apartment buildings, boutique hotels, and the finest concentration of restaurants in the city. The blocks radiating from the square are lined with brownstone and brick rowhouses, independent shops, and the kind of civilized, walkable urban life that Philadelphia does as well as any American city.

    The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Parkway
    The Benjamin Franklin Parkway, modeled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris, sweeps diagonally from City Hall to Fairmount Park and is lined with some of Philadelphia’s finest cultural institutions. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, perched at the head of the Parkway on a neoclassical Greek temple of 1928 and immortalized in the popular imagination by the Rocky films — the museum’s front steps are one of the most visited sites in Philadelphia — is one of the great art museums in the United States. Its collection of over 240,000 objects includes outstanding holdings in American art, European painting and decorative arts, Asian art, and one of the most comprehensive collections of armor in the world. The museum’s period rooms — complete architectural interiors transported from their original locations in Europe and Asia — are among the finest in any American museum.

    The Barnes Foundation, relocated from its original suburban home to a purpose-built building on the Parkway in 2012, houses one of the most astonishing private art collections ever assembled — 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, and 46 Picassos, along with African sculpture, ironwork, and decorative arts, displayed according to the idiosyncratic but deeply considered installation principles of its founder, Albert C. Barnes, who believed that art should be experienced without labels or hierarchies, in direct visual relationships with other objects. The experience of walking through the Barnes galleries is unlike any other museum experience in the world. The Rodin Museum on the Parkway contains the largest collection of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures outside of Paris, displayed in a beautiful beaux-arts building and garden.

    Philadelphia Neighborhoods
    Philadelphia’s neighborhoods are one of its greatest assets — a collection of distinct communities, each with its own identity, architecture, food scene, and character, spread across a compact and walkable urban fabric.
    Fishtown and Northern Liberties, just north of Old City along the Delaware River waterfront, have been the center of Philadelphia’s creative and culinary renaissance over the past 15 years. The restaurants along Girard Avenue and Frankford Avenue, the bars and music venues of Fishtown, and the independent shops and galleries of Northern Liberties make these two neighborhoods the most dynamic in the city. Frankford Hall, a massive German beer garden in Fishtown, and the outstanding restaurants of East Passyunk Avenue — a diagonal street in South Philadelphia that has become arguably the finest restaurant corridor in the city — represent Philadelphia’s food scene at its most inventive.

    South Philadelphia is the old Italian-American neighborhood of the city, home to the Italian Market on 9th Street — the oldest outdoor market in the United States, where vendors have been selling produce, meat, cheese, and fish from open-fronted stalls since the 1880s — and to the cheesesteak stands that have made Philadelphia’s most famous food export a subject of civic passion and endless debate. Pat’s King of Steaks and Geno’s Steaks, facing each other at the intersection of 9th Street and Passyunk Avenue, have been rivals since 1966 and draw visitors from around the world to eat their cheesesteaks on the sidewalk at all hours.

    Germantown, a former independent township incorporated into Philadelphia in 1854, preserves some of the finest colonial-era architecture in the region, including Cliveden — the stone mansion where the Battle of Germantown was fought in 1777 — and a collection of early houses that rival anything in the historic district downtown for authenticity and age.
    Fairmount Park, the largest urban park system in the United States by some measures, stretches along both banks of the Schuylkill River from the Art Museum to the northwestern edge of the city and encompasses over 2,000 acres of woods, meadows, historic houses, gardens, and the boathouse row along the Schuylkill that is one of the most picturesque sights in Philadelphia — a line of Victorian boathouses reflected in the river, particularly beautiful when lit at night.

    Pennsylvania Dutch Country
    Lancaster County, approximately 70 miles west of Philadelphia, is home to one of the most distinctive and enduring communities in North America — the Pennsylvania Dutch, a term that encompasses several Anabaptist religious communities, most notably the Old Order Amish and the Old Order Mennonites, who have maintained a way of life largely unchanged from the 18th century in deliberate rejection of the modern world.
    The Amish of Lancaster County — approximately 40,000 people — live without electricity, automobiles, or most modern technology, farming their fields with horses, traveling by horse-drawn buggy, and organizing their community life around their faith in a way that is simultaneously deeply foreign and deeply moving to outside observers. The landscape of Lancaster County is one of the most beautiful farmscapes in the eastern United States — rolling hills of exceptional fertility, red barns and white farmhouses set in fields of corn and tobacco, the roads busy with the clatter of iron-shod hooves on asphalt.

    The city of Lancaster itself is a handsome small city with an excellent central market — the Lancaster Central Market, the oldest continuously operating farmers market in the United States, held in a magnificent Romanesque Revival market house of 1889 — and a growing restaurant and arts scene that has transformed it into one of the more interesting small cities in Pennsylvania. The surrounding county contains dozens of small towns and villages of considerable charm, including Lititz — frequently cited as one of the most beautiful small towns in the United States, with a beautifully preserved main street, the Wilbur Chocolate factory and museum, and the Sturgis Pretzel House where the American hard pretzel was invented in 1861.
    Visiting Pennsylvania Dutch Country requires sensitivity and respect. The Amish do not seek tourism and do not generally wish to be photographed. Responsible tourism means patronizing Amish-owned businesses — roadside farm stands, quilt shops, and furniture makers — rather than gawking from car windows, and engaging with the community through the excellent interpretive facilities at the Amish Experience at Plain & Fancy Farm and the Mennonite Information Center, which offer context and perspective that make the visit far more meaningful.

    The food of Lancaster County is an experience in itself — hearty, unpretentious, and deeply traditional. Shoofly pie, a molasses-based pastry with a crumb topping, is the iconic Pennsylvania Dutch dessert. Scrapple — a loaf of cornmeal and pork scraps seasoned with herbs and pan-fried — is a breakfast staple that divides opinion sharply along regional lines but is a genuine Pennsylvania original. Whoopie pies, soft chocolate cake sandwiches filled with white cream, are sold everywhere and are irresistible. Lebanon bologna, a cured beef sausage made in Lebanon County, is another regional specialty of considerable distinction.

    Gettysburg
    Gettysburg is one of the most profoundly significant places in American history. It was here, over three days from July 1 to 3, 1863, that the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia fought the largest and bloodiest battle ever waged in North America — a confrontation that resulted in approximately 51,000 casualties, turned the tide of the Civil War, and effectively ended the Confederacy’s ability to wage offensive warfare. It was here also that Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, his 272-word masterpiece of American prose, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in November 1863.

    Gettysburg National Military Park encompasses nearly 6,000 acres of battlefield terrain preserved largely as it appeared in 1863, marked by hundreds of monuments erected by the veterans of both sides in the decades following the war. The scale and completeness of the battlefield’s preservation is extraordinary — visitors can drive, cycle, or walk across the actual ground where the battle was fought, stand at the positions held by individual regiments, and understand the tactical geography of the engagement with an immediacy that no museum exhibition can replicate.

    The Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center is the essential starting point — its museum galleries tell the story of the Civil War and the Gettysburg campaign with intelligence and depth, and its cyclorama — a massive 360-degree painting of Pickett’s Charge created in 1884, restored to its original dimensions — is one of the most remarkable historical artworks in the United States. Licensed battlefield guides, available through the visitor center, provide an irreplaceable layer of interpretation to the battlefield tour. Little Round Top, the rocky hill whose defense on the second day of battle arguably saved the Union army from destruction, offers views across the battlefield that make the tactical situation viscerally clear. The High Water Mark on Cemetery Ridge, where Pickett’s Charge was repulsed on the third day, is among the most emotionally charged acres in American history.

    The town of Gettysburg itself is a pleasant small borough with good restaurants, a handful of excellent small museums including the Shriver House Museum and the David Wills House where Lincoln completed the Gettysburg Address, and an independence of spirit that resists the worst impulses of battlefield tourism. The Soldiers’ National Cemetery, where Lincoln spoke and where the Union dead are buried in carefully ordered semicircular rows, is a place of genuine quiet and solemnity.

    Pittsburgh
    Pittsburgh is one of the great American urban reinvention stories. For a century, it was the steel capital of the world — a city of blast furnaces, rolling mills, and rivers of molten metal that made it the industrial engine of the United States and filled its air with smoke so thick that streetlights burned at noon. When the steel industry collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s, Pittsburgh lost a quarter of its population and faced a crisis of identity and purpose that seemed potentially terminal. What has happened since is a model for post-industrial cities everywhere — a transformation driven by the universities, the medical industry, technology, and the arts that has made Pittsburgh one of the most livable, most interesting, and most surprising cities in the United States.

    Pittsburgh is defined by its geography — a city of extraordinary drama, built on the hills, bluffs, and river valleys at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, which join to form the Ohio River at the Point. The city’s topography, which required the construction of more bridges than any other city in the world except Venice — Pittsburgh has 446 bridges — creates constantly changing perspectives and vistas of genuine beauty.

    Downtown and the Point
    Point State Park, at the tip of the Golden Triangle where the three rivers meet, is the site of Fort Pitt, the British fortification that succeeded the French Fort Duquesne and whose name became Pittsburgh’s. The fort’s reconstructed blockhouse, the oldest surviving structure in western Pennsylvania, still stands in the park. The fountain at the Point — one of the largest in the world — marks the precise confluence of the rivers and is one of the defining images of Pittsburgh.
    The Golden Triangle — Pittsburgh’s downtown, enclosed by the two rivers — contains the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, a magnificent sustainable building by Rafael Viñoly that spans a ravine and is considered one of the finest convention centers in the United States. PPG Place, a complex of six Gothic-inspired glass towers designed by Philip Johnson in 1984, is one of the most striking commercial developments in any American city, its thousands of mirrored glass panes reflecting the surrounding architecture and sky in constantly shifting patterns.

    Oakland
    Oakland, several miles east of downtown, is Pittsburgh’s cultural and educational center — home to the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the finest concentrations of museums and cultural institutions in any American neighborhood outside Manhattan.
    The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, founded by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie as his philanthropic gift to the city, occupy a magnificent Beaux-Arts complex in the heart of Oakland. The Carnegie Museum of Natural History contains one of the finest dinosaur fossil collections in the world — Carnegie himself financed the expeditions that uncovered the specimens, and the Dinosaur Hall is a landmark of natural history museum design. The Carnegie Museum of Art, in the same building, has an outstanding collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, decorative arts, and a superb collection of architectural casts. The Carnegie Science Center on the North Shore, with its planetarium and interactive exhibitions, is one of the finest science museums in the region.

    The University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning — a 42-story Gothic Revival tower completed in 1937 — is one of the most extraordinary academic buildings in the United States. Its Commons Room, the largest Gothic interior in the Western Hemisphere, is open to the public, and the building’s remarkable Nationality Rooms — 31 classrooms decorated in the traditional styles of the cultures that contributed to Pittsburgh’s immigrant population — are a UNESCO Creative City of Design landmark and one of the most unusual and moving cultural experiences in Pittsburgh.
    The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, adjacent to the Carnegie complex in Schenley Park, is one of the finest Victorian glass conservatories in the United States — a magnificent iron and glass structure of 1893 surrounded by gardens that are beautiful in every season and extraordinary during the holiday flower shows.

    The Neighborhoods
    Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods are the heart of the city’s character — a collection of distinct communities perched on hillsides and nestled in river valleys, connected by the famous inclines that carry passengers up the steep slopes of Mount Washington and offer the finest views of the city.
    The Duquesne Incline and Monongahela Incline, both more than 140 years old and both still in daily operation, carry passengers from the South Side up the face of Mount Washington — and the view from the top, looking down across the Golden Triangle to the confluence of the three rivers, is one of the finest urban panoramas in the United States. At night, with the downtown towers reflected in the rivers below, it is one of the most beautiful city views in America.

    The Strip District, along the Allegheny River just east of downtown, was the city’s wholesale produce and food distribution center for over a century and retains that character in the most wonderful way — a long corridor of food merchants, produce stalls, ethnic grocery stores, restaurants, and bars that is at its most vibrant on Saturday mornings, when the sidewalks overflow with shoppers and the air fills with the smells of coffee, fresh bread, and kielbasa from the Polish and Eastern European butchers that remain a Pittsburgh institution.
    Lawrenceville, stretching along Butler Street north of the Strip District, has been the center of Pittsburgh’s creative renaissance — a working-class neighborhood of brick rowhouses that has attracted artists, chefs, and entrepreneurs to create one of the most dynamic restaurant and bar scenes in the city, including the outstanding Cure restaurant and the remarkable modernist building of the Union Project.

    Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, affluent residential neighborhoods east of Oakland, are Pittsburgh’s most elegant and commercially sophisticated areas, with outstanding independent bookshops, specialty food stores, and restaurants lining Walnut Street and Murray Avenue.
    The North Shore, across the Allegheny from downtown, is home to PNC Park — widely regarded as the most beautiful baseball stadium in the United States, its open concourse framing extraordinary views of the Pittsburgh skyline and the Roberto Clemente Bridge — and Acrisure Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the most storied franchises in professional football.

    Andy Warhol and Pittsburgh’s Arts Scene
    Pittsburgh’s most famous artistic son is Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, the son of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant parents. The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Shore is the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world — seven floors of Warhol’s paintings, drawings, films, photographs, and archival materials in a former warehouse building that does full justice to the breadth, wit, and strange depth of his achievement. The collection includes major paintings from every phase of his career, his extraordinary time capsule boxes, his film archive, and personal memorabilia that illuminate the journey from working-class Pittsburgh to the Factory and global celebrity.
    Pittsburgh’s arts scene extends well beyond the Warhol. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, based in Heinz Hall, is one of the finest orchestras in the United States. The Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and Pittsburgh Opera are important regional companies. The city’s gallery scene, concentrated in the cultural district downtown and in the neighborhoods of Lawrenceville and East Liberty, is active and growing.

    The Pocono Mountains
    The Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania have been a resort destination for over 150 years, drawing visitors from New York City and Philadelphia to their lakes, forests, and — in winter — ski slopes. The Poconos are not dramatically high mountains by any standard, but they offer an accessible natural escape from the urban corridor that is a significant part of their enduring appeal.
    Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, on the New Jersey border at the southern end of the Poconos, preserves a remarkable stretch of the Delaware River as it cuts through the Kittatinny Ridge in one of the most scenic river gaps in the eastern United States. The Appalachian Trail traverses the ridge above the gap for miles, and the river is outstanding for canoeing, kayaking, and fishing. Dingmans Falls and Silverthread Falls, accessible by short trails within the recreation area, are among the finest waterfalls in Pennsylvania.
    Jim Thorpe, a small borough at the southern gateway to the Poconos named for the legendary Native American athlete, is one of the most surprisingly beautiful small towns in Pennsylvania — its Victorian architecture intact and well preserved, its steep streets climbing the hillside above the Lehigh River gorge. The Lehigh Gorge, carved deeply into the surrounding plateau by the Lehigh River, is one of the finest whitewater rivers in the East and is accessible by trail and bicycle from Jim Thorpe.

    The Laurel Highlands
    The Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny Mountains southeast of Pittsburgh, are home to some of the most spectacular natural scenery in the state and to one of the greatest works of American architecture.
    Fallingwater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1939 for the Kaufmann department store family of Pittsburgh, is widely considered the finest work of residential architecture in the United States and one of the masterpieces of 20th-century architecture anywhere in the world. The house is built over a waterfall on Bear Run — its cantilevered concrete terraces extending dramatically over the rushing stream below — in a synthesis of architecture and natural site so complete that the two seem inseparable. The American Institute of Architects has twice named it the best all-time work of American architecture. Tours of the house, which must be reserved well in advance, are offered at various levels of access, and the experience of walking through the rooms and standing on the terraces above the waterfall is one of the most genuinely thrilling architectural experiences available anywhere.

    Ohiopyle State Park, surrounding Fallingwater in the Youghiogheny River gorge, is one of Pennsylvania’s finest natural areas — a rugged, forested gorge where the Youghiogheny River provides some of the best whitewater rafting in the eastern United States, ranging from gentle family floats to challenging Class IV rapids. The Ferncliff Peninsula, where the river makes a dramatic horseshoe bend, is a National Natural Landmark protecting a remarkable assemblage of wildflowers and unusual plant communities.
    Kentuck Knob, another Frank Lloyd Wright house just a few miles from Fallingwater, is less celebrated but equally interesting — a low, hexagonal Usonian house of 1956 set on a wooded hillside with a sculpture park containing significant works by artists including Andy Goldsworthy, whose stone walls wind through the surrounding forest.
    Fort Necessity National Battlefield nearby preserves the site of George Washington’s first military engagement — a skirmish in 1754 that was a precursor to the French and Indian War and that set in motion a chain of events leading ultimately to American independence.

    Central Pennsylvania and State College
    The center of Pennsylvania is a world of ridge-and-valley Appalachian terrain, small cities, and the flagship campus of Penn State University — one of the largest universities in the United States.
    State College, home to Penn State’s main campus at University Park, is a quintessential American college town — dominated by the university, alive with energy during the academic year, and the site of Beaver Stadium, one of the largest stadiums in the world, which fills with over 106,000 passionate fans on autumn football Saturdays in scenes of extraordinary spectacle. The Palmer Museum of Art on campus is an excellent university art museum with a surprisingly strong collection.

    The Pennsylvania Grand Canyon — Pine Creek Gorge in Tioga County — is the most dramatic natural landscape in the state, a gorge carved 1,000 feet deep into the Allegheny Plateau by Pine Creek. The views from Leonard Harrison State Park on the eastern rim and Colton Point State Park on the western rim are genuinely stunning, and the Pine Creek Rail Trail along the gorge floor follows the route of the former railroad through one of the finest long-distance cycling routes in Pennsylvania.
    Harrisburg, the state capital, sits on the Susquehanna River at the center of Pennsylvania and is a city of genuine historical importance. The Pennsylvania State Capitol building, completed in 1906, is one of the finest state capitol buildings in the United States — its dome modeled on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, its interior decorated with mosaics and murals of extraordinary quality by the artist Edwin Austin Abbey.

    The Pennsylvania Wilds and Northern Pennsylvania
    The northern tier of Pennsylvania is one of the most underdeveloped and least visited parts of the state — a vast plateau of state forest, wild rivers, and small communities with a genuine frontier quality that distinguishes it sharply from the densely populated corridor to the south.
    Elk County is home to the largest free-roaming elk herd in the eastern United States — approximately 1,400 animals that are regularly visible in the meadows around the town of Benezette, particularly at dawn and dusk during the fall rut, when the bulls bugle across the valleys in one of the most dramatically wild sounds available anywhere in the eastern United States. The Pennsylvania Elk Viewing Area outside Benezette is the primary observation point, and autumn weekends draw wildlife enthusiasts from across the region.
    The Pine Creek Gorge, Kettle Creek, and the First Fork Sinnemahoning are outstanding trout fishing streams in a region of forests and ridges that receives relatively few visitors and rewards those who seek it out with a sense of genuine remoteness.

    Practical Travel Information
    Getting Around
    Pennsylvania is easily traversable by car. The Pennsylvania Turnpike — one of the oldest limited-access highways in the United States, opened in 1940 — runs across the state from the New Jersey border to Ohio, connecting Philadelphia with Pittsburgh in approximately five hours under normal conditions. Interstate 81 runs north-south through the center of the state. Amtrak connects Philadelphia and Pittsburgh via the Pennsylvanian train once daily, a journey of roughly seven hours through the Appalachian landscape that is one of the more scenic rail journeys in the eastern United States. Philadelphia is also served by Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, connecting it to New York City in approximately one hour and fifteen minutes and to Washington, D.C. in approximately two hours.
    Within Philadelphia, the SEPTA transit system operates subways, trolleys, and buses serving the city and surrounding region. Pittsburgh’s Port Authority operates a light rail system and extensive bus network.

    Best Time to Visit
    Pennsylvania is a year-round destination, but the finest seasons are spring and fall. Spring brings wildflowers to the state forests, the flowering of the orchards in Adams and Lancaster Counties, and the renewal of the cities after winter. Fall foliage is excellent throughout the state, typically peaking in the northern tier in late September and in the Laurel Highlands and central regions in mid-October. Summer is warm and occasionally humid but is peak season for outdoor recreation — hiking, paddling, and cycling in the state forests and parks. Winter brings skiing to the Poconos and Laurel Highlands and a particular beauty to the farmscapes of Lancaster County under snow.

    Food and Drink
    Pennsylvania’s food culture is one of the most distinctive in the United States. Beyond the Philadelphia cheesesteak and the Pennsylvania Dutch traditions of Lancaster County, the state has a rich food heritage rooted in its immigrant communities. Pierogies — the Polish filled pasta dumplings that became a Pittsburgh staple through the city’s Eastern European immigrant communities — are as fundamental to Pittsburgh’s food identity as the cheesesteak is to Philadelphia’s. Soft pretzels, rooted in the Pennsylvania German tradition and sold from street carts throughout Philadelphia, are another essential Pennsylvania food experience.
    Pennsylvania is also a significant wine and craft brewing state. The Finger Lakes reach into the state’s northern border, and the Lake Erie Wine Region in Erie County produces excellent cool-climate wines. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh both have outstanding and rapidly growing craft brewing scenes — Philadelphia in particular has become one of the finest craft beer cities in the United States.

    A Few Final Thoughts
    Pennsylvania rewards the traveler who moves slowly and pays attention to what is around them. The famous destinations — Independence Hall, Gettysburg, Fallingwater, Niagara — are genuinely extraordinary, and no visitor should miss them. But some of the finest experiences Pennsylvania offers are quieter and less celebrated: the drive through the farms of Lancaster County on a September morning, the walk along the Lehigh Gorge as the leaves turn, the view from Mount Washington over Pittsburgh at night, the stillness of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon at dawn, the taste of a soft pretzel warm from a street cart on Market Street in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania gave the United States its founding documents, its philosophical framework, and in many ways its sense of national possibility. Spending real time in this deep, various, and endlessly interesting state is a way of understanding those gifts more fully — and of finding, in its landscapes and communities, the America that the founders imagined and that travelers still come seeking.

  • llinois: Where Culture Meets the Coastline

    Illinois is one of the most surprisingly diverse travel destinations in the United States. Most visitors picture Chicago and nothing else, but the Prairie State stretches across nearly 400 miles from north to south, encompassing world-class urban culture, rolling river valleys, historic small towns, ancient Native American monuments, and landscapes that shift from the dense forests of the Shawnee Hills to the wide-open flatlands of the central plains. Whether you are a first-time visitor or a returning traveler, Illinois rewards the curious with layers of history, natural beauty, and genuine Midwestern warmth that are easy to overlook and impossible to forget once discovered.

    CHICAGO: THE CITY THAT NEVER STOPS
    No honest guide to Illinois begins anywhere other than Chicago. The third-largest city in the United States, Chicago sits on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan and functions as the cultural, culinary, financial, and architectural capital of the entire Midwest. It is a city that demands your attention the moment you arrive, whether you step off a plane at O’Hare International Airport or cross into the city limits by train on the famous Metra or Amtrak lines.

    The architectural legacy of Chicago is unmatched anywhere in the world. The city essentially invented the modern skyscraper after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 leveled much of the downtown core. In the decades that followed, Chicago became a laboratory for architectural ambition. Today, visitors can take boat tours along the Chicago River operated by the Chicago Architecture Center, which offers some of the most educational and visually stunning guided experiences available in any American city. From the river, you look up at the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), the Tribune Tower, Marina City’s iconic corncob-shaped towers, and dozens of other buildings that changed how humans think about constructing cities.
    The Millennium Park in the heart of downtown is a must-visit public space. Cloud Gate, the enormous reflective sculpture by artist Anish Kapoor known affectionately as “the Bean,” has become one of the most photographed artworks in the world. The adjacent Jay Pritzker Pavilion hosts free outdoor concerts throughout the summer, and the surrounding gardens and fountains make this a genuinely democratic gathering place where tourists and locals mingle without pretense.

    Chicago’s museum campus along the lakefront is extraordinary. The Art Institute of Chicago houses one of the finest collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings outside of Europe, including Georges Seurat’s monumental “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” The Field Museum of Natural History holds Sue, one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered. The Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium round out a cluster of world-class institutions all within easy walking distance of each other.
    The neighborhoods of Chicago are worth exploring as destinations in their own right. Wicker Park and Bucktown are hubs of indie music, vintage shopping, and creative dining. Pilsen is a vibrant Mexican-American neighborhood whose streets are lined with murals and whose taquerias rival anything you would find south of the border. Chinatown on the South Side serves exceptional dim sum and offers a window into a community that has thrived in Chicago for more than a century. Hyde Park is home to the University of Chicago and the Obama Presidential Center, currently one of the most anticipated museum developments in the country.

    Chicago’s food scene deserves a dedicated section of its own. The city is famous for its deep-dish pizza, a thick, buttery, almost casserole-like creation whose relationship to traditional pizza is debated passionately by those who love it and those who dismiss it. Giordano’s, Lou Malnati’s, and Pequod’s are among the most celebrated deep-dish establishments. Equally iconic is the Chicago-style hot dog, which is emphatically never topped with ketchup. A proper Chicago dog includes yellow mustard, chopped white onions, bright green relish, a dill pickle spear, tomato slices, sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt, all served on a poppy seed bun. Beyond these local classics, Chicago has become a serious fine dining destination. The city has produced internationally acclaimed chefs and houses some of the most innovative restaurants in North America.

    The music legacy of Chicago cannot be overstated. Chicago blues, which evolved from the Mississippi Delta tradition brought north by African American migrants during the Great Migration, gave the world an entirely new sonic vocabulary. Artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Buddy Guy transformed the raw acoustic blues of the rural South into an electrified, urban sound that directly influenced rock and roll, jazz, and virtually every popular genre that followed. Buddy Guy’s Legends on South Wabash Avenue remains a pilgrimage site for music lovers, and Guy himself occasionally still performs there.

    SPRINGFIELD: LINCOLN’S TOWN
    Two hundred miles south of Chicago, the state capital of Springfield offers a completely different kind of Illinois experience. Springfield is Abraham Lincoln’s city. He practiced law here, raised his family here, won the presidency here, and was buried here after his assassination in 1865. The Lincoln associations are everywhere and genuinely moving for those who approach them with open eyes.
    The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is one of the finest presidential museums in the country. It combines serious historical scholarship with remarkably effective theatrical presentation, including life-size dioramas of scenes from Lincoln’s life that manage to be both emotionally powerful and historically rigorous. The museum does not shy away from the complexities of Lincoln’s era, addressing slavery, the Civil War, and the political tensions of the 1850s and 1860s with honesty and depth.

    Lincoln’s Home National Historic Site preserves the only home Abraham Lincoln ever owned. The two-story frame house on the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets is where Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd raised their four sons before departing for Washington in 1861. The National Park Service maintains the surrounding neighborhood as it appeared in Lincoln’s time, with period-accurate landscaping and a buffer of historic homes that creates an extraordinary sense of stepping into the mid-nineteenth century.

    The Lincoln Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery is the burial site of Lincoln, his wife, and three of their sons. The tomb is surmounted by a tall obelisk and surrounded by bronze battle groups representing the four branches of the Civil War military. Visitors rub the nose of a bronze bust of Lincoln near the entrance for good luck, a tradition that has polished the nose to a brilliant shine. The tomb is a genuinely solemn and dignified place, and the feeling of standing near the president who arguably did more than any other to define the character of the United States is difficult to describe adequately.

    Springfield also has the Dana-Thomas House, a Prairie-style masterpiece designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1902. It is among the best-preserved and most complete of Wright’s early Prairie houses, and the guided tours are excellent. The Old State Capitol State Historic Site, a beautiful Greek Revival building in the heart of downtown Springfield, is where Lincoln gave his famous “House Divided” speech and where he lay in state after his assassination.

    GALENA: THE FROZEN-IN-TIME RIVER TOWN
    In the far northwestern corner of Illinois, tucked into the lead-mining hills above the Galena River, sits one of the most beautifully preserved nineteenth-century towns in the entire Midwest. Galena was once one of the most important commercial cities west of Chicago, its wealth built on the lead mines that operated throughout the region in the mid-1800s. When the lead ran out and the railroads bypassed the town, Galena’s growth effectively stopped, which means that its remarkable collection of Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate architecture survived intact.

    Walking the streets of Galena today is a genuine time-travel experience. Main Street slopes upward from the river and is lined with historic buildings housing antique shops, art galleries, restaurants, and bed-and-breakfast inns. The Galena History Museum tells the story of the town’s boom years with impressive collections of artifacts and period photographs.
    Galena was also the home of Ulysses S. Grant before the Civil War and after the presidency. The Ulysses S. Grant Home State Historic Site preserves the Italianate house that the citizens of Galena presented to Grant upon his return from the war as a hero. The house is furnished with Grant-family pieces and gives a surprisingly intimate view of the general and president as a private citizen.

    The surrounding countryside of Jo Daviess County is among the most scenic in Illinois, with rolling hills, apple orchards, and winding roads that offer excellent cycling and motorcycling in warmer months. Eagle Ridge Resort near Galena is a large and well-regarded destination with golf courses, a marina, and extensive lodge accommodations set within forested hills.

    CAHOKIA MOUNDS: AN ANCIENT CITY
    Just east of St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, lies one of the most significant and underappreciated archaeological sites in North America. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site preserves the remains of a pre-Columbian Native American city that at its peak, around the year 1100 CE, may have been home to as many as 20,000 people, making it larger than London at the same time in history.
    The Mississippian culture that built Cahokia constructed dozens of earthen mounds of varying sizes across the landscape. Monks Mound, the largest, covers more ground at its base than the Great Pyramid of Giza and rises in four terraces to a height of about one hundred feet. Standing at the top of Monks Mound and looking out across the surrounding plain, where the outlines of the ancient city’s organization can still be perceived in the landscape, is a profoundly humbling experience.
    The interpretive center at Cahokia is well-designed and comprehensive, explaining the culture, economy, social organization, and eventual decline of this civilization. Cahokia has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a recognition that is still surprisingly little known among American travelers. A visit here fundamentally changes your sense of the depth and complexity of human history on the North American continent.

    SHAWNEE NATIONAL FOREST: ILLINOIS’S WILD SOUTH
    The southernmost tip of Illinois, where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi, looks and feels nothing like the flat cornfields most people associate with the state. The Shawnee National Forest covers more than 280,000 acres across sixteen counties in southern Illinois, and within its borders are landscapes of extraordinary beauty and geological drama.
    Garden of the Gods Wilderness Area contains sandstone rock formations that have been sculpted by millions of years of erosion into shapes of haunting strangeness. Balanced Rock, Camel Rock, and Table Rock are among the formations that attract hikers and photographers from across the region. The overlook at Anvil Rock offers one of the finest panoramic views in the entire state, looking out over a forested ridge-and-valley landscape that seems to belong more to Appalachia than to the Midwest.

    The Garden of the Gods is most spectacular in autumn, when the hardwood forest ignites in shades of red, orange, and gold. The hiking trails range from easy walks to more demanding routes through rugged terrain, and the area is accessible enough to be enjoyed by families while wild enough to satisfy serious outdoor adventurers.
    Bell Smith Springs is another outstanding area within the Shawnee, featuring a natural bridge, swimming holes in sandstone canyons, and trail networks winding through a deeply forested landscape. The Cache River State Natural Area in the extreme south of the state protects a remnant of the bald cypress swamp ecosystem that once covered much of this region, and its ancient trees, some of them over a thousand years old, create an atmosphere of primal, almost primordial beauty.
    Makanda, a small village at the edge of the forest, calls itself the “Wildflower Capital of Illinois” and hosts an annual Boardwalk art fair that draws artisans from across the region. The village has a slightly countercultural, bohemian character that sits charmingly against the wild landscape surrounding it.

    THE RIVER ROAD AND THE ILLINOIS RIVER VALLEY
    Running through the heart of Illinois, the Illinois River has shaped the state’s history and landscape for thousands of years. The Illinois River Road National Scenic Byway traces the river’s course through a landscape of bluffs, wetlands, and small towns that retains much of its nineteenth-century agricultural character.
    Starved Rock State Park is one of the most visited natural areas in Illinois for very good reason. The park sits where the Illinois River cuts through a series of sandstone outcroppings, creating dramatic canyons and waterfalls that are particularly spectacular after heavy rain or in early spring when snowmelt feeds the streams. Eighteen canyons are accessible by well-maintained trails, and the views from the summit of Starved Rock itself, a massive sandstone butte rising directly above the river, are exceptional.

    Nearby Matthiessen State Park is often overlooked by visitors to Starved Rock but is in some ways even more beautiful, its canyons deeper and its waterfall more dramatic. The two parks together constitute one of the finest hiking destinations in the entire Midwest.
    The small towns along the Illinois River Road, including Utica, Ottawa, Hennepin, and Havana, offer antique shops, locally owned restaurants, and a quiet Midwestern pace of life that is increasingly rare. The valley is excellent birding territory, particularly during spring and autumn migrations, when hundreds of species pass through or pause along the river corridor.

    ROCK ISLAND AND THE QUAD CITIES
    Where Illinois meets Iowa at the Mississippi River, the Quad Cities metropolitan area straddles the state line with energy and character. Rock Island, on the Illinois side, is home to the Rock Island Arsenal, an island in the Mississippi that has been a federal military installation since the Civil War. The Rock Island Arsenal Museum is the second-oldest military museum in the country and houses a remarkable collection of weapons, equipment, and artifacts from American military history.
    The Quad Cities area has invested substantially in its riverfront, and the district along the Mississippi offers riverboat casinos, restaurants, parks, and the Figge Art Museum, which houses a strong collection with particular depth in Midwestern Regionalist painting. The area is also known for its live music scene and its festivals, including the annual RIBCO Blues Fest that celebrates the region’s musical heritage.

    PRACTICAL TRAVEL INFORMATION
    Illinois is accessible by air through Chicago O’Hare International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world, and Chicago Midway Airport, which handles a large volume of domestic flights on budget carriers. Springfield, Peoria, Rockford, and other cities have regional airports with connecting service to major hubs.
    Amtrak serves Illinois extensively by Midwest standards. The Chicago hub connects to Springfield, Galesburg, Quincy, Carbondale, and other Illinois cities, and Chicago is the western terminus or connection point for many long-distance routes including the California Zephyr, the Southwest Chief, the City of New Orleans, and the Lincoln Service.
    Within Chicago, the CTA elevated rail system, universally known as the “L,” is an efficient and iconic way to navigate the city. The Loop, which is the central business district and named for the elevated rail tracks that encircle it, is easily walkable once you arrive. Outside of Chicago, a car is essentially necessary to explore the state effectively.

    Illinois experiences all four seasons with considerable intensity. Summers are warm to hot and humid, with July temperatures frequently reaching into the upper eighties and nineties Fahrenheit. Winters can be harsh, particularly in northern Illinois, where significant snowfall and temperatures well below freezing are common. Spring and autumn are beautiful and are the preferred seasons for most outdoor activities. Cherry blossom season in early spring is lovely in Chicago’s parks, and autumn color in the Shawnee National Forest and the Illinois River valley is reliably spectacular from mid-October through early November.

    The state sales tax in Illinois is among the highest in the nation, and Chicago adds its own city and county taxes on top of state rates, so budget travelers should be aware that restaurant meals, hotel rooms, and retail purchases will carry significant tax burdens. That said, many of Illinois’s greatest attractions, including the lakefront parks in Chicago, the state historic sites, and the national forest, are free or very low cost to visit.

    CLOSING THOUGHTS
    Illinois is a state of genuine contrasts and genuine surprises. It is Chicago’s skyline reflected in the calm surface of Lake Michigan and the haunting silence of an ancient earthen mound rising above the Mississippi floodplain. It is the smell of a deep-dish pizza emerging from the oven and the sight of sandstone canyons hidden in a southern forest that nobody told you existed. It is Lincoln’s ghost walking the streets of Springfield and the blues wailing out of an open door on a summer night in Chicago.
    The traveler who comes to Illinois expecting only Chicago will not be disappointed by Chicago, but will go home having missed the deeper, stranger, more complex Illinois that lies beyond the city limits. The traveler who makes the effort to go further, to drive south into the Shawnee Hills, to follow the river road through the Illinois valley, to stand before the earthworks of Cahokia or walk the Victorian streets of Galena, that traveler will discover that Illinois is not a flyover state at all, but a destination worth returning to, season after season, for a lifetime.

  • Ohio: More Than a Place, It’s Home

    Ohio sits at the geographic and cultural crossroads of the United States. Bordered by Lake Erie to the north, the Ohio River to the south, Pennsylvania to the east, and Indiana to the west, it occupies a position that has made it a meeting point of peoples, ideas, industries, and landscapes since long before the nation was founded. Eight American presidents were born in Ohio, more than any other state. It was the birthplace of aviation, the home of the first professional baseball team, and the state that produced Neil Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the moon. Yet Ohio remains stubbornly underestimated as a travel destination, which means that those who do make the effort to explore it properly are rewarded with world-class museums, extraordinary natural scenery, vibrant cities, and a warmth of welcome that is genuinely Midwestern in the best possible sense of that word.

    Ohio is not a state that announces itself with dramatic mountain ranges or tropical coastlines. Its beauty is more subtle, more accumulated, more human in scale. It reveals itself gradually, through the mist rising off a glacial lake at dawn, through the sudden appearance of a sandstone gorge hidden in a state park nobody warned you about, through the remarkable density of exceptional art and history packed into its cities, and through the conversations you find yourself having with people who seem to have time for you in a way that faster-paced parts of the country rarely allow.

    CLEVELAND: THE COMEBACK CITY
    Cleveland has been redefining itself for decades, and the results of that transformation are now impossible to ignore. Situated on the southern shore of Lake Erie at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, Cleveland was one of the great industrial powerhouses of twentieth-century America. The decline of the steel and manufacturing industries hit Cleveland hard, but the city responded with a sustained effort at cultural investment and urban renewal that has produced one of the most genuinely interesting mid-sized cities in the United States.
    The single most compelling reason to visit Cleveland, for many travelers, is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Designed by architect I.M. Pei and opened in 1995, the museum sits dramatically on the lakefront with its geometric glass facade catching the light off Lake Erie. The permanent collection traces the entire history of rock and roll from its roots in blues, gospel, country, and rhythm and blues through every subsequent evolution of popular music. Rotating exhibits focus on individual artists and specific eras, and the scope of the collection, encompassing handwritten lyrics, original instruments, performance costumes, film footage, and interactive listening stations, makes this a pilgrimage site for any serious lover of popular music.

    The annual induction ceremony, held at the museum or at a nearby venue, is one of the most watched events in the music world.
    The Cleveland Museum of Art ranks among the finest art museums in the entire United States. Its collection spans five thousand years of human artistic production across virtually every culture and medium. The museum’s holdings of medieval armor, Asian art, and American painting are particularly distinguished, and the building itself, a neoclassical structure fronted by a reflecting pool and recently expanded with a soaring atrium, is architecturally magnificent. Admission to the permanent collection is free, which makes the Cleveland Museum of Art one of the great cultural bargains available to any American traveler.

    University Circle, the neighborhood surrounding the art museum, is one of the densest concentrations of cultural institutions in any American city. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, Severance Music Center where the world-renowned Cleveland Orchestra performs, and the Cleveland Institute of Art are all within comfortable walking distance of each other. An afternoon spent wandering University Circle, ducking in and out of museums, eating lunch at one of the neighborhood’s excellent cafes, and listening to a free outdoor concert in summer constitutes a near-perfect cultural day.

    The West Side Market, opened in 1912 in the Ohio City neighborhood just across the river from downtown, is one of the oldest and largest indoor-outdoor markets in the United States. More than a hundred vendors sell fresh produce, meats, seafood, baked goods, dairy products, and prepared foods under an ornate vaulted ceiling that makes the space feel almost cathedral-like. Saturday mornings are the busiest and most atmospheric time to visit, when the market is packed with locals doing their weekly shopping alongside visitors from out of town.
    The Flats, the entertainment district along both banks of the Cuyahoga River as it winds through downtown toward the lake, has undergone multiple cycles of boom and decline but continues to offer a lively concentration of restaurants, bars, and event venues in a setting that takes full advantage of the dramatic riverine topography. The view of the river, the bridges, and the downtown skyline from the Flats at night is one of the distinctive visual pleasures of Cleveland.

    Cleveland’s food scene has expanded dramatically in recent years. The East Fourth Street dining corridor in downtown is packed with acclaimed restaurants. Little Italy, a historic neighborhood adjacent to University Circle, is thick with trattorias and Italian bakeries whose cannoli and biscotti have been satisfying visitors for over a century. Tremont, a renovated neighborhood on the near west side, has become a center of creative dining and gallery culture, with excellent restaurants occupying renovated industrial and residential buildings along streets lined with mature trees.

    COLUMBUS: A CITY IN FULL BLOOM
    Ohio’s capital and largest city, Columbus, is one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing cities in the Midwest. Home to the Ohio State University, one of the largest universities in the country by enrollment, Columbus has the energy, diversity, and creative restlessness that large university cities tend to generate. But Columbus has outgrown any easy categorization as merely a college town. It is a genuine metropolitan destination with a distinctive identity that continues to evolve.
    The Short North Arts District, a mile-long stretch of High Street between downtown Columbus and the Ohio State campus, is the cultural heartbeat of the city. Galleries, boutiques, restaurants, bars, and performance spaces line both sides of the street in a concentration of creative energy that has few peers in the Midwest. The Gallery Hop on the first Saturday of every month brings thousands of people into the district for an evening of open galleries and street energy that is one of the liveliest regular events in any Ohio city.
    The Columbus Museum of Art is a genuinely excellent regional museum with a strong permanent collection and a particular emphasis on wonder, imagination, and the connection between art and creative thinking. The museum’s WonderLab is an interactive space designed to blur the line between art and play for visitors of all ages, and the museum’s programming is consistently inventive and community-oriented.

    The Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens is a hidden gem that surprises many first-time visitors to Columbus. The conservatory’s collection of Dale Chihuly glass sculptures, installed permanently throughout the various climate zones of the facility, creates an extraordinary dialogue between the organic world of tropical plants, desert cacti, and temperate forests and the blazing colors of blown glass. The surrounding formal gardens are beautifully maintained and offer a peaceful retreat in all seasons.

    The German Village neighborhood, just south of downtown Columbus, is one of the finest surviving examples of a nineteenth-century German immigrant community in the United States. Several blocks of brick streets, brick sidewalks, and beautifully maintained brick homes create an atmosphere of almost European solidity and charm. The Book Loft of German Village, a legendary independent bookstore occupying a warren of thirty-two interconnected rooms in a historic building, is a destination unto itself. Schiller Park, at the heart of the neighborhood, hosts an outdoor Shakespeare festival each summer that draws large and enthusiastic audiences.

    Ohio’s state capital building, the Ohio Statehouse, is among the most architecturally distinguished capitol buildings in the country. The Greek Revival structure, completed in 1861, lacks a traditional dome, its designers having opted instead for a low rotunda that gives the building a dignified restraint often lacking in more ostentatious state capitols. Free tours are offered regularly and cover both the architecture and the political history of the state in considerable depth.

    CINCINNATI: QUEEN CITY OF THE OHIO
    Cincinnati occupies a spectacular natural setting on the northern bank of the Ohio River, its hills rising steeply from the water in a series of ridges and valleys that give the city a topographic drama unusual among Midwestern cities. Founded in the late eighteenth century as one of the first major settlements west of the Allegheny Mountains, Cincinnati developed rapidly as a river trading center and became one of the most cultured and prosperous cities in antebellum America. That legacy of culture and civic ambition endures in a city that continues to punch significantly above its weight.

    The Cincinnati Art Museum, set atop Eden Park above the city, houses an exceptional collection of over sixty-seven thousand works spanning six thousand years of art history. The museum’s holdings of ancient Near Eastern art, European old masters, and American decorative arts are particularly strong. Like Cleveland’s museum, admission to the permanent collection is free, a generosity that reflects Cincinnati’s long tradition of civic cultural investment.
    The Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal is one of the most impressive destinations in Ohio. Union Terminal itself is a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture completed in 1933, a vast half-dome structure that was once one of the busiest rail stations in the country. Restored at enormous expense and reopened in 2018, the building now houses the Cincinnati History Museum, the Cincinnati Children’s Museum, the Museum of Natural History and Science, and the Cincinnati Historical Society Library, all under one spectacular rotunda decorated with murals by German artist Winold Reiss that stand among the finest examples of Art Deco public art in the United States.

    The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden is consistently ranked among the top zoos in the country. It is also one of the oldest, having opened in 1875, which makes it the second-oldest zoo in the United States. The zoo has been a leader in animal conservation and breeding programs for endangered species, and its botanical gardens, particularly beautiful during the holiday season when elaborate light displays transform the grounds, draw visitors throughout the year.

    Over-the-Rhine, the neighborhood immediately north of downtown Cincinnati, is one of the most extraordinary concentrations of intact Italianate Victorian architecture in the entire United States. The neighborhood was built by German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, its name derived from the Miami and Erie Canal that once divided it from downtown, which German residents compared to the Rhine River separating their homeland’s cities. After decades of disinvestment and population loss, Over-the-Rhine has undergone a remarkable revival, its historic buildings now housing restaurants, breweries, art galleries, boutiques, and residential lofts. Findlay Market, the oldest continuously operating public market in Ohio, anchors the neighborhood with a vibrant Saturday farmers market that is among the best in the Midwest.

    Cincinnati has a strong claim to being America’s great craft beer city. The city’s German heritage created a deep brewing culture that survived Prohibition and has been spectacularly revived in recent decades. The city hosts dozens of craft breweries, and the annual Cincinnati Craft Beer Week draws enthusiasts from across the region. Christian Moerlein Brewing Company, which traces its lineage to one of Cincinnati’s great pre-Prohibition brewers, produces a range of beers in a large brewpub overlooking the Ohio River.
    The food culture of Cincinnati includes several local specialties worth seeking out. Cincinnati chili is an institution, a spiced meat sauce related to but distinctly different from Texas or New Mexican chili, served over spaghetti at establishments like Skyline Chili and Gold Star Chili in a ritual ordering system involving “ways” that denote the combination of ingredients. It is an acquired taste for many visitors, but trying it is an essential Cincinnati experience. Goetta, a breakfast sausage made from ground meat and steel-cut oats, is another Cincinnati original that you will not find anywhere else.

    The Newport Aquarium, just across the Ohio River in Kentucky but functionally part of the greater Cincinnati tourist experience, is one of the finest aquariums in the inland United States, with shark tanks, penguin exhibits, and a remarkable walk-through tunnel that gives visitors a 360-degree view of marine life swimming overhead and on all sides.

    HOCKING HILLS: OHIO’S NATURAL MASTERPIECE
    Southeast of Columbus, where the flat farmland of central Ohio gives way to the Hocking Hills region, the landscape transforms into something entirely unexpected. Carved by glacial meltwater and millions of years of erosion through the Black Hand Sandstone formation, the Hocking Hills contains a series of gorges, caves, waterfalls, and rock formations of breathtaking beauty. This is Ohio’s most visited natural area, and the number of visitors it receives each year is a testament to how completely it confounds visitors’ expectations of what Ohio looks like.

    Old Man’s Cave is the most famous site in the Hocking Hills, a deeply recessed cave carved into the gorge walls of Hocking Creek, with a waterfall cascading over the entrance and a trail system winding through the canyon to a series of additional caves and overhanging ledges. The cave takes its name from a nineteenth-century hermit who reportedly lived and died within its shelter. The surrounding gorge, thick with hemlock trees and ferns even in midsummer, has a cool, moist, prehistoric quality.
    Ash Cave is the largest recess cave in Ohio, a horseshoe-shaped overhang some seven hundred feet across and one hundred feet deep, with a spectacular waterfall dropping to a pool at its entrance. After rain, the falls are thunderous and the spray fills the cave with a luminous mist. In winter, the falls freeze into elaborate formations of ice that draw photographers from across the state.

    Cedar Falls is widely considered the most beautiful waterfall in Ohio. Unlike the single-drop falls at Ash Cave, Cedar Falls descends in a rushing, braided cascade over sandstone ledges before pooling in a clear basin. The trail to Cedar Falls passes through a hemlock grove that maintains a cathedral-like atmosphere of cool shadow even on the hottest summer days.
    Rock House, accessible by a moderately strenuous trail, is the only true cave in the Hocking Hills system, a tunnel-like chamber cut through a sandstone fin with seven large window openings looking out over a heavily forested gorge. The combination of interior drama and exterior views is unlike anything else in the region.
    The town of Logan serves as the gateway to the Hocking Hills and has a range of accommodations, including many privately owned cabin rentals scattered through the surrounding forest. These cabins, offering privacy, hot tubs, and fireplaces deep in the woods, have made the Hocking Hills a popular weekend romantic getaway for residents of Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. Booking well in advance is essential, particularly for autumn weekends when the fall foliage draws enormous crowds.

    CUYAHOGA VALLEY NATIONAL PARK
    Between Cleveland and Akron, the Cuyahoga River flows through a deep, forested valley that represents one of the great environmental recovery stories in American history. The Cuyahoga River was so severely polluted by industrial waste in the mid-twentieth century that it famously caught fire in 1969, an event that shocked the nation and helped galvanize the environmental movement that produced the Clean Water Act. Today, the river runs clean through a valley that became Cuyahoga Valley National Park in 2000, the only national park in Ohio.
    The park encompasses thirty-three thousand acres of forest, wetlands, farmland, and river corridor. Beaver Marsh, accessible from the Towpath Trail that follows the route of the old Ohio and Erie Canal, is one of the finest wildlife viewing spots in the park, where beaver dams, great blue herons, turtles, and migratory waterfowl can be observed in abundance. The Brandywine Falls, a sixty-five-foot cascading waterfall in the northern section of the park, is one of the most photographed spots in Ohio and is accessible by a short, easy trail from the parking area.

    The Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad operates excursion trains through the park on vintage rail equipment, offering a relaxed and visually lovely way to experience the valley’s beauty, particularly in autumn when the hardwood forest is at peak color. The railroad connects with several trailheads along the Towpath Trail, allowing visitors to ride in one direction and hike back along the canal path.
    The park contains numerous historic sites related to the canal era, including restored canal locks, lockkeeper’s houses, and a visitors’ center at Canal Visitor Center in Valley View that explains the history of the Ohio and Erie Canal and its central role in Ohio’s development as a commercial and industrial state in the nineteenth century.

    THE OHIO AMISH COUNTRY
    Holmes County and the surrounding counties of east-central Ohio constitute the largest Amish settlement in the world, a fact that surprises many visitors who are unaware of Ohio’s substantial and long-established Amish and Mennonite communities. Traveling through this region is a quietly disorienting and genuinely moving experience. Horse-drawn buggies move along country roads at a steady trot. Farmsteads without utility lines sit amid immaculate fields. Children in plain dress play in yards. The pace of life here is not performed for tourists but is the genuine expression of a community living according to deeply held religious and cultural principles.
    Millersburg, the Holmes County seat, and the smaller towns of Berlin, Sugarcreek, Walnut Creek, and Charm are the centers of tourist activity in the region. The Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin offers an excellent introduction to the history and beliefs of these communities, including a massive painted cyclorama depicting the Amish migration to America that is an impressive work of folk art in its own right.

    The area is extraordinarily rich in excellent food. Amish cooking is abundant, hearty, and made from scratch, and numerous restaurants in the region serve traditional meals featuring chicken, roast beef, noodles, mashed potatoes, and fresh-baked pies in quantities designed for appetites sharpened by farmwork. Der Dutchman in Walnut Creek is among the most popular and is genuinely excellent. The local cheesemakers, particularly Guggisberg Cheese in Charm, produce Swiss and other varieties that have won national awards. The bakeries throughout the region sell bread, cookies, and pastries of exceptional quality at remarkably modest prices.
    Antiquing is a major draw in Amish country, with numerous multi-dealer antique malls and individual shops offering a full range of American country furniture, quilts, glassware, and farm equipment in a setting where the context makes browsing feel entirely appropriate. The handmade quilts produced by Amish women are particularly prized by collectors and range in price from the modest to the considerable depending on complexity and maker.

    Visitors to Amish country should be respectful of the community they are passing through. Photographing individuals, particularly in close-up or without any indication of consent, is widely considered disrespectful and intrusive. The Amish are not a tourist attraction but a living community, and treating them with the courtesy one would extend to any person whose home and neighborhood you are visiting is both ethically correct and practically conducive to a more genuine and rewarding experience.

    LAKE ERIE AND THE NORTH COAST
    Ohio’s northern border is defined by Lake Erie, and the one hundred miles of shoreline between the Pennsylvania border and the Toledo area offer beaches, islands, wineries, and wildlife refuges that constitute Ohio’s answer to a coastal vacation. Lake Erie is the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes, which makes its Ohio shores genuinely swimmable in summer in a way that the waters of the other Great Lakes often are not.
    The Lake Erie Islands, accessible by ferry from the Port Clinton and Sandusky areas, are among the most popular summer destinations in Ohio. Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island is the liveliest of the island communities, a small town whose summer population explodes with visitors who come for the beaches, the bars, the golf cart rentals, and the genuinely impressive Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial, a Doric column nearly four hundred feet tall commemorating Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s decisive victory over the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The memorial’s observation deck, accessible by elevator, provides a panoramic view of the lake and the surrounding islands on clear days.
    Kelleys Island, a short ferry ride from Marblehead, is the quieter and more nature-oriented of the main islands. The Glacial Grooves State Memorial on Kelleys Island preserves the largest easily accessible glacial grooves in the world, deep channels carved into the limestone bedrock by the advancing glaciers of the last ice age. The grooves are startlingly clear and immediate evidence of geological forces operating on an almost incomprehensible scale.

    The Marblehead Peninsula and the surrounding communities of Lakeside, Catawba Island, and Port Clinton are packed with rental cottages, fish fry restaurants, charter fishing operations, and marina facilities that create the full flavor of a Great Lakes vacation culture that has been drawing visitors from Ohio’s interior cities since the late nineteenth century. The Lakeside Chautauqua community, a gated summer community with a long tradition of cultural programming including lectures, concerts, and performances, is a fascinating anachronism that preserves a particular vision of improving summertime leisure.

    The Lake Erie wine region, stretching along the lakeshore west of Cleveland through Lake, Lorain, Erie, and Ottawa counties, benefits from the moderating influence of the lake on temperatures, creating a microclimate that extends the growing season and allows the cultivation of wine grapes in latitudes that would otherwise be too cold. The wineries of this region, including Grand River Cellars, Ferrante Winery, and Firelands Winery, produce wines from Riesling, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Gris, and other varieties that have earned growing recognition. A driving tour of the Lake Erie wine trail in late summer or early autumn, when the vineyards are heavy with fruit and the lake light has turned golden, is one of the most pleasurable and least crowded wine experiences available in the eastern United States.

    The Magee Marsh Wildlife Area west of Port Clinton is one of the most celebrated birding destinations in North America. During the spring songbird migration in May, warblers, thrushes, vireos, and dozens of other species pile up along the Lake Erie shoreline before crossing the open water, and Magee Marsh’s boardwalk trail through the lakeside trees offers views of birds at arm’s length that would be extraordinary anywhere else and are simply miraculous here. The Biggest Week in American Birding festival, held at Magee Marsh each May, draws thousands of birders from around the world and is a joyful and slightly obsessive gathering of people united by a shared passion for small, colorful, fast-moving creatures.

    DAYTON: BIRTHPLACE OF AVIATION
    Dayton occupies a unique place in the history of human civilization. It was here that Wilbur and Orville Wright ran their bicycle shop, conducted their aeronautical research, and developed the mechanical and theoretical foundations for the first successful powered airplane flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in December 1903. The Wright brothers’ connection to Dayton is honored with remarkable depth and comprehensiveness at the Wright Brothers National Memorial sites managed by the National Park Service.

    The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park encompasses several sites in and around the city, including the Wright Cycle Company Complex where the brothers operated their bicycle business, Huffman Prairie Flying Field where they conducted their post-Kitty Hawk test flights and developed the world’s first practical airplane, and Carillon Historical Park, which houses the Wright Flyer III, the third airplane the brothers built and the one that Orville Wright considered the world’s first practical airplane. The Wright Flyer III is a UNESCO World Heritage Site artifact and can be examined at close range in the Dayton History museum within the park.

    The National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base just east of Dayton is the world’s largest military aviation museum and is entirely free to visit. The collection spans the entire history of powered flight from the Wright brothers to the present day, encompassing nearly four hundred aircraft and missiles displayed across four massive hangars. Presidential aircraft including Air Force One planes used by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and subsequent presidents are on display. The restored cockpits of aircraft from both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars bring the history of air combat into immediate, visceral focus.

    TOLEDO: THE GLASS CITY
    Toledo, at the western end of Lake Erie, is known historically as the Glass City, a nickname earned by its extraordinary concentration of glass manufacturing that made it a world center of that industry for over a century. The legacy of that concentration is the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion, one of the finest collections of art glass and the finest building dedicated to glass art anywhere in the world. The pavilion itself, designed by the firm SANAA, is a stunning structure of curved glass walls enclosing glass galleries within a glass building, creating a luminous environment in which glass artwork is displayed against a constantly changing backdrop of natural light and reflection.

    The main building of the Toledo Museum of Art is an equally rewarding destination, its permanent collection including a particularly distinguished group of ancient Greek and Roman antiquities, European old masters, and American art. The museum is free to the public and is regarded as one of the finest mid-sized art museums in the United States.
    The Toledo Zoo, situated along the Maumee River south of downtown, is one of the highly rated zoos in the country, with strong collections of large mammals, a particularly acclaimed hippopotamus facility, and beautifully designed habitats that give the animals genuine space and the visitors genuine views.

    PRACTICAL TRAVEL INFORMATION
    Ohio is served by five major airports, with Columbus John Glenn International, Cleveland Hopkins International, and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International being the primary hubs. Dayton and Toledo have regional airports with connecting service. Amtrak serves several Ohio cities, including Cleveland, Toledo, and a Cleveland-to-Cincinnati corridor, though service is less frequent than in the Northeast and requires careful advance planning.

    Within Ohio’s cities, public transit ranges from adequate in Cleveland and Columbus to limited in smaller centers. A car is strongly recommended for exploring the state beyond the major urban cores, and Ohio’s highway system, anchored by several intersecting interstates, makes driving between cities fast and easy.
    Ohio experiences four genuine seasons. Summers are warm and humid, particularly in the south and along Lake Erie. Winters are cold, with significant lake-effect snow in the northern counties closest to Lake Erie, where snowfall can be dramatic and road conditions challenging from November through March. Spring arrives gradually but beautifully, with wildflower blooms in the state parks beginning in April. Autumn is arguably Ohio’s finest season, when the hardwood forests of the Hocking Hills, Cuyahoga Valley, and eastern hills put on a color display that rivals anything in New England, with far smaller crowds.
    Ohio is a relatively affordable travel destination. Hotel rates in Columbus, Dayton, and smaller cities are modest by national standards, and many of the state’s premier cultural attractions, including the Cleveland and Cincinnati art museums, are free. State park facilities are excellent and inexpensive, and the food culture across the state rewards those willing to seek out local institutions rather than national chains.

    CLOSING THOUGHTS
    Ohio is a state that has been taken for granted for too long, even by many of its own residents. It is the state that gave America its aviation pioneers, its most beloved president in Abraham Lincoln’s era, its first professional baseball club, and its astronaut who first stood on the moon. It has produced more than its share of writers, artists, musicians, and inventors. Its landscapes range from the Great Lakes shore to ancient sandstone gorges to rolling Amish farmland to urban neighborhoods of genuine distinction.
    The traveler who approaches Ohio with curiosity and without condescension will discover a state that rewards both attitudes generously. Ohio does not boast loudly about what it has to offer, which is itself a kind of Midwestern virtue. It simply offers, quietly and in abundance, and trusts that those who look closely enough will see the value of what is there. Those who do look closely will find themselves surprised, delighted, and almost certainly planning a return visit.

  • Georgia: Where Southern Grace Meets Wild Beauty

    Georgia: Where Southern Grace Meets Wild Beauty

    Georgia is a state of magnificent contradictions. It is the American South distilled to its most essential and most complex form, a place where antebellum history and civil rights legacy exist in permanent, necessary tension, where a world-class cosmopolitan city rises above red clay hills, where barrier islands draped in Spanish moss float in the Atlantic like something from a dream, and where the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains delivers waterfalls, gorges, and hiking trails of breathtaking quality. The Peach State, as it is affectionately known, though it actually produces fewer peaches these days than California or South Carolina, is a destination of extraordinary range and depth that rewards travelers willing to move beyond the obvious and engage with its full complexity.

    Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi River by land area, a fact that surprises many visitors who have not looked closely at a map. That size means genuine geographic diversity, from the mountain valleys of the north to the coastal plains of the south, from the Piedmont plateau of the center to the barrier island chain of the Atlantic coast. Each region has its own character, its own cuisine, its own history, and its own particular claim on the traveler’s attention.

    ATLANTA: THE CITY TOO BUSY TO HATE
    Atlanta adopted the slogan “the city too busy to hate” in the 1960s, a civic aspiration born during the civil rights era that reflected both the city’s pragmatic business culture and its determination to forge a different path from the more overtly resistant Southern cities of that period. Today Atlanta is the unquestioned capital of the American South, a metropolitan area of more than six million people, the headquarters of dozens of Fortune 500 companies, the home of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport which by passenger volume is consistently the busiest airport in the world, and a cultural center of genuine international significance.

    The single most important destination in Atlanta for understanding American history is the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood. The park encompasses the block where King was born in 1929, the Ebenezer Baptist Church where he and his father preached, the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame, and the King Center, where King and his wife Coretta Scott King are interred in a tomb surrounded by a reflecting pool fed by an eternal flame. Standing before that tomb and contemplating what King accomplished and what it cost him is one of the most emotionally powerful experiences available to any American traveler. The National Park Service visitor center does an outstanding job of presenting King’s life, philosophy, and legacy in context, and the surrounding Sweet Auburn Historic District preserves the streets and buildings of the community that shaped him.

    The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, set in beautiful gardens east of downtown, chronicles the life and presidency of Georgia’s most prominent modern political figure. Carter’s presidency from 1977 to 1981 is presented with admirable candor, acknowledging both the genuine accomplishments, including the Camp David Accords that produced a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and the considerable difficulties of those years. The museum also addresses Carter’s extraordinary post-presidential career in humanitarian work through the Carter Center, which has played a significant role in disease eradication and democratic election monitoring around the world. The gardens surrounding the library, designed around a Japanese-inspired landscape with a lake and waterfall, are among the most peaceful public spaces in Atlanta.

    The Georgia Aquarium, opened in 2005, was at the time of its opening the largest aquarium in the world and remains among the largest in the United States. Its most spectacular exhibit is the Ocean Voyager gallery, a massive tank holding whale sharks, manta rays, and thousands of other fish that visitors observe through an underwater tunnel and an enormous viewing window. The whale sharks alone, the largest fish in the ocean, are worth the admission price. The aquarium also maintains excellent exhibits on beluga whales, African penguins, sea otters, and diverse reef ecosystems.

    The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, adjacent to the Georgia Aquarium in Centennial Olympic Park, opened in 2014 and has rapidly established itself as one of the most important and emotionally affecting museums in the United States. The museum connects the American civil rights movement to broader global human rights struggles, and its immersive exhibits use sound, image, and physical experience to convey the courage required to confront institutionalized oppression. The lunch counter simulation, where visitors sit at a replica of a 1960s lunch counter and experience through sound and vibration what it felt like to be a sit-in protester subjected to harassment and physical intimidation, is one of the most effective pieces of museum theater in the country.

    The High Museum of Art is the premier art museum of the American South. Its building, a striking white structure designed by Richard Meier and expanded by Renzo Piano, is itself a significant work of architecture. The permanent collection includes strong holdings of American art, European paintings and decorative arts, folk and self-taught art, and photography. The museum has an active exhibition program that brings major traveling shows from the great museums of the world to Atlanta on a regular basis.
    Piedmont Park, the great green lung of midtown Atlanta, stretches across nearly two hundred acres of rolling terrain north of the city’s cultural corridor. The park hosts the Atlanta Dogwood Festival each spring and the Atlanta Jazz Festival each Memorial Day weekend, the latter a free outdoor event that draws enormous crowds to hear both established and emerging jazz artists. The park offers excellent running paths, sports fields, a lake, a dog park, and a farmers market on Saturday mornings that is one of the finest in the city.

    The Beltline is perhaps Atlanta’s most ambitious and successful recent urban project. An old railroad corridor encircling the city’s core has been gradually transformed into a twenty-two-mile loop of multi-use trails, parks, public art installations, and transit infrastructure that is reshaping how Atlantans move through and relate to their city. The Eastside Trail section, running from Piedmont Park through the Inman Park and Reynoldstown neighborhoods, is the most developed and most visited stretch, lined with restaurants, breweries, and retail businesses that have converted old industrial buildings into thriving commercial spaces. Walking or cycling the Beltline on a weekend morning, with its mix of joggers, families, dog walkers, and cyclists all sharing a car-free corridor through the city, gives a sense of Atlanta at its most optimistic and most livable.

    Atlanta’s neighborhoods are each worth exploring in their own right. Virginia-Highland is a bungalow neighborhood of tree-lined streets, independent restaurants, and a village-scale commercial district that has maintained its character through decades of surrounding development pressure. Little Five Points is Atlanta’s bohemian heart, with vintage clothing stores, record shops, tattoo parlors, and music venues clustered in a few blocks of quirky commercial architecture. Ponce City Market, a magnificently restored Sears Roebuck distribution warehouse, houses a food hall, retail shops, offices, and residential units in a conversion that has become a model for adaptive reuse projects around the country. Buckhead is Atlanta’s upscale address, with luxury hotels, high-end retail, and restaurants serving some of the finest food in the city.

    Atlanta’s food scene is one of the best in the South and increasingly competitive with the finest culinary cities in the country. The city has produced a generation of chefs working with Southern ingredients and traditions in ways that are simultaneously respectful and inventive. The West Egg Cafe, Staplehouse, Bacchanalia, and Optimist are among the establishments that have earned national recognition. But Atlanta’s most distinctive culinary contribution may be its chicken. The city has a passionate, almost theological relationship with fried chicken, and establishments ranging from family-owned takeout windows to full-service restaurants compete for the title of finest bird in a city of serious and opinionated eaters.

    SAVANNAH: THE JEWEL OF THE SOUTH
    If Atlanta is the South’s future, Savannah is its past preserved in amber, and the preservation is so complete and so beautiful that Savannah has become one of the most visited and most photographed cities in the United States. Founded in 1733 as the first settlement in the Georgia colony, Savannah was laid out according to a remarkable urban plan devised by its founder James Oglethorpe that organized the city around a series of squares, small public parks arranged in a grid that provided gathering places, green space, and social anchors for each neighborhood.

    Twenty-two of those original squares survive today, each shaded by enormous live oak trees draped with Spanish moss, each surrounded by historic townhouses, churches, and commercial buildings ranging in age from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Walking from square to square through Savannah’s historic district on a mild day, the light filtering through the canopy of moss-draped oaks, the azaleas blazing in spring, the scent of jasmine on warm evenings, is one of the most seductive urban experiences available anywhere in America.
    Forsyth Park, at the southern end of the historic district, is Savannah’s grandest public space. The park’s central fountain, a cast iron confection of nymphs and swans built in the mid-nineteenth century, is one of the most photographed landmarks in Georgia. The park is enormous by the standards of the historic district squares, covering thirty acres, and is used daily by residents for running, picnicking, playing sports, and walking dogs. On Saturday mornings, a farmers market rings the fountain with vendors selling local produce, prepared foods, flowers, and crafts.

    The Savannah College of Art and Design, known universally as SCAD, has transformed the historic district over the past four decades by purchasing and restoring dozens of historic buildings that might otherwise have deteriorated beyond saving. SCAD students now constitute a significant portion of Savannah’s population and contribute enormously to the city’s creative energy. The SCAD Museum of Art, housed in a magnificently restored antebellum railroad depot, hosts an impressive program of exhibitions featuring both student work and major contemporary artists.
    The Mercer-Williams House on Monterey Square is one of the most famous private residences in America, not because of its considerable architectural distinction as an Italianate mansion built during the Civil War era, but because it was the setting for the events described in John Berendt’s 1994 true-crime narrative Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. That book, which spent an extraordinary 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, introduced millions of readers to Savannah’s gothic social world, its eccentric characters, and its particular brand of decadent Southern beauty. The book remains deeply embedded in Savannah’s cultural identity, and the Mercer-Williams House is now operated as a museum.

    Bonaventure Cemetery, east of the historic district on a bluff above the Wilmington River, is one of the most beautiful and most visited cemeteries in the United States. The grounds, originally a plantation and later a private cemetery before becoming a municipal one, are shaded by immense live oaks whose canopy of Spanish moss creates an atmosphere of profound and melancholy beauty. The elaborate Victorian monuments, family mausoleums, and statuary of Bonaventure have been attracting artists and photographers for well over a century, and a slow walk through the grounds on a quiet morning is an experience of rare beauty and tranquility.

    The Savannah waterfront along Factor’s Walk and River Street has been developed into a tourist-friendly zone of restaurants, bars, galleries, and shops occupying old cotton warehouses built into the bluff above the river. It can be crowded and commercial, but the setting is genuinely dramatic, with massive container ships passing just yards from the restaurant terraces, and the view across the river to the low marshes of South Carolina is lovely in the late afternoon light.
    Savannah is one of the few cities in the United States where open container laws permit the consumption of alcohol on public streets, a policy that contributes to the festive atmosphere of the historic district on weekend evenings. The bar culture of Savannah is accordingly lively, and the concentration of excellent cocktail bars, live music venues, and evening restaurants in the historic district makes Savannah a particularly enjoyable city for adults traveling without children.

    THE GOLDEN ISLES: GEORGIA’S ATLANTIC PARADISE
    Georgia’s barrier island coast, known as the Golden Isles, is one of the most ecologically rich and visually stunning stretches of Atlantic shoreline in the eastern United States. The islands are separated from the mainland by a vast system of salt marshes that are among the most productive ecosystems on earth, nurseries for fish, shrimp, crabs, and countless species of birds. The marshes, which turn from vivid green in summer to gold in autumn and winter, give the Golden Isles their name and create a landscape of ethereal horizontal beauty.
    Jekyll Island is the most accessible and most fully developed of the Golden Isles, connected to the mainland by a causeway. Its history is extraordinary. From 1888 to 1942, Jekyll Island was the private winter retreat of an exclusive club whose members at various times included the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Goulds, Morgans, and Pulitzers, families representing a significant fraction of the nation’s total wealth. The Jekyll Island Club Historic District preserves the Victorian and Edwardian cottages, the clubhouse, and the outbuildings of this remarkable enclave, and today operates as a resort where visitors can stay in rooms that once housed America’s wealthiest families.

    Beyond its Gilded Age history, Jekyll Island offers beautiful beaches, an excellent bike path system that winds through maritime forest and along the oceanfront, a sea turtle conservation center that is one of the finest of its kind in the country, and a relaxed, uncommercialized atmosphere that distinguishes it from more heavily developed beach destinations.
    St. Simons Island is the largest and most populated of the Golden Isles, with a permanent residential community, a charming village commercial district, historic Fort Frederica National Monument preserving the site of James Oglethorpe’s military garrison, and long stretches of beach backed by live oak maritime forest. The lighthouse at the southern end of the island, built in 1872 and still operating, is open to the public and offers panoramic views over the island, the sound, and the surrounding marshes from its gallery.

    Cumberland Island, the southernmost and largest of Georgia’s barrier islands, is accessible only by ferry from the mainland town of St. Marys and has no paved roads, no hotels, no restaurants, and no commercial development of any kind. It is managed by the National Park Service as a National Seashore and accommodates only a small number of visitors per day, all of whom must make reservations well in advance. Those who make the effort to reach Cumberland find themselves in one of the most wild and beautiful places on the Atlantic coast.
    The island’s interior is a dense maritime forest of ancient live oaks festooned with Spanish moss, beneath which wild horses roam with the casual indifference of animals that have never learned to fear humans. The horses, descendants of domestic horses brought to the island centuries ago, are the island’s most famous residents and can often be seen grazing among the ruins of Dungeness, the magnificent Carnegie family mansion that burned in 1959 and now stands as a roofless shell slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding vegetation. The beach on Cumberland’s Atlantic side stretches for eighteen miles without a single structure visible in any direction, an almost incomprehensible expanse of pristine shoreline in the twenty-first century eastern United States.

    Sea Island, adjacent to St. Simons, is home to The Cloister, one of the most celebrated resort hotels in the American South. The Cloister has hosted presidents, royalty, and celebrities since its opening in 1928 and continues to offer a level of luxury and service that places it among the finest resort properties in the country. Its golf courses, spa, beach club, and dining facilities are exceptional, and the island’s exclusivity, accessible only to guests and property owners, ensures a tranquility that is itself a luxury.

    THE NORTH GEORGIA MOUNTAINS
    The southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains sweeps through the northern corner of Georgia, creating a landscape of forested ridges, waterfalls, whitewater rivers, and small mountain towns that offers a completely different Georgia from the coastal plains and the Piedmont cities. The north Georgia mountains are within a two-hour drive of Atlanta, which makes them an enormously popular weekend destination for the metro area’s residents and a worthwhile extension of any visit to the state.
    Amicalola Falls State Park is the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail approach trail and the jumping-off point for many of the thousands of hikers who attempt the full Appalachian Trail each year. The falls themselves, dropping 729 feet in a series of cascades down a steep mountainside, are the tallest cascading waterfalls in the eastern United States. The park’s lodge sits at the top of the falls and offers comfortable accommodation with mountain views that make it an excellent base for exploring the surrounding highlands.

    Tallulah Gorge State Park, in the mountains east of Gainesville, contains one of the most spectacular gorges in the eastern United States. The Tallulah River has cut a canyon nearly two miles long and one thousand feet deep through the quartzite rock of the Tallulah Basin, and the views from the rim overlooks are genuinely vertiginous. A limited number of permits are issued each day for hikers to descend into the gorge floor, where they must negotiate suspension bridges and a waterfall-sprayed boulder field to complete the circuit. The gorge descent is physically demanding and moderately technical but rewards those who attempt it with an experience of geological drama that is extraordinary even by the standards of a region rich in natural spectacles.

    The town of Helen in White County is one of Georgia’s strangest and most entertaining tourist phenomena. In the 1960s, a declining mountain hamlet facing economic collapse reinvented itself as a Bavarian Alpine village, replacing its storefronts’ facades with half-timbered, gabled, and stucco-finished architecture that makes it look, at first glance, like a transplanted fragment of Bavaria. The effect is undeniably artificial but has proven enormously popular. Helen draws millions of visitors per year, particularly during its annual Oktoberfest celebration, which runs from mid-September through early November and features German food, beer, and music in a mountain setting that is genuinely pleasant if you approach it with appropriate good humor.

    Dahlonega, in the heart of Georgia’s wine country, is a more historically authentic mountain town, its brick commercial district centered on a courthouse square that has been the center of Lumpkin County life since the 1830s. Dahlonega was the site of the first major American gold rush, which began in 1828, more than two decades before the more famous California rush of 1849. The Dahlonega Gold Museum, housed in the original courthouse, tells the story of that rush and the profound effect it had on Georgia, including its role in the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from their traditional homeland in what became known as the Trail of Tears. The area’s gold mining heritage is still celebrated, and visitors can pan for gold at several establishments in and around town.

    The Dahlonega Plateau wine region has developed over the past two decades into one of the most interesting wine-producing areas in the southeastern United States. The relatively high elevation, cool nights, and well-drained soils support the cultivation of varieties including Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Viognier, and various Italian and Spanish varieties that thrive in similar climatic conditions elsewhere in the world. Wineries including Wolf Mountain Vineyards, Montaluce Winery, and Kaya Vineyard and Winery offer tastings and tours in settings of considerable scenic beauty, with mountain views that make a wine trail afternoon a particularly civilized Georgia experience.
    The Chattooga River, forming part of the Georgia-South Carolina border in the far northeastern corner of the state, is one of the finest and most celebrated whitewater rivers in the eastern United States. Designated a Wild and Scenic River, the Chattooga was made famous by James Dickey’s novel Deliverance and the subsequent 1972 film, and its combination of pristine wilderness setting, powerful rapids, and dramatic scenery continues to draw whitewater enthusiasts from across the country. Section IV of the river, running from the Earl’s Ford access to Lake Tugalo, contains the most challenging and most spectacular whitewater, including the famous Five Falls sequence that requires careful navigation and solid paddling skills.

    PLAINS AND THE SOUTHWEST GEORGIA COUNTRYSIDE
    An hour and a half south of Atlanta, the landscape flattens into the red clay countryside of southwestern Georgia, a region of small towns, pecan orchards, and peanut farms that is best known as the birthplace of the thirty-ninth president of the United States. Plains, Georgia, population approximately five hundred, is a tiny town that punches enormously above its weight in American historical significance as the hometown and current residence of Jimmy Carter.
    The Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains encompasses the high school where Carter was educated and which serves as the main visitors’ center, the Carter family farm at Archery where Carter grew up, the old Plains railroad depot that served as Carter’s campaign headquarters in 1976, and the Plains United Methodist Church where Carter taught Sunday school for decades. The church remains an active congregation, and Carter himself continued to teach Sunday school there well into his nineties, drawing visitors from around the world to attend his classes. The town itself is engagingly genuine, with a grain of self-awareness about its improbable place on the tourist map.

    Andersonville National Historic Site, thirty miles north of Plains, is one of the most sobering and historically important places in Georgia. The site preserves the remains of Camp Sumter, the Confederate military prison that operated during the Civil War from 1864 to 1865. In fourteen months of operation, nearly thirteen thousand of the forty-five thousand Union prisoners held there died of disease, malnutrition, and exposure in conditions of appalling squalor. The National Prisoner of War Museum on the site addresses not only Andersonville but the history of American prisoners of war in all conflicts, and the experience of visiting the site, walking the ground where so many men suffered and died, is appropriately solemn and deeply affecting.

    Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, northwest of Plains, is a private resort and horticultural attraction covering nearly thirteen thousand acres of pine and hardwood forest, lakes, gardens, and recreational facilities. The azalea gardens bloom in extraordinary profusion each spring, drawing visitors from across the Southeast to witness one of the finest wildflower spectacles in the region. The Day Butterfly Center, a large glass-enclosed tropical conservatory housing thousands of free-flying butterflies, is a particular delight for children and adults alike. The resort’s facilities include golf courses, a beach on Robin Lake, cycling trails, and comfortable lodge accommodation.

    ATHENS: THE CLASSIC CITY
    Home to the University of Georgia, the oldest state-chartered university in the United States, Athens occupies a special place in Georgia’s cultural landscape. The city has an intellectual vitality, a creative restlessness, and a musical legacy that are completely disproportionate to its modest size. Athens is, above all, one of the most important cities in the history of American popular music. The bands that emerged from Athens in the late 1970s and 1980s, including R.E.M. and the B-52s, helped define the sound of alternative American rock and continue to cast a long shadow over the city’s cultural identity.

    The music scene that produced those bands continues to thrive in Athens, which supports an extraordinary number of live music venues for a city of its size. The 40 Watt Club, one of the legendary small venues of American indie rock, has been presenting live music since 1979 and continues to book artists of national significance alongside emerging local acts. Georgia Theatre, a beautifully restored old movie theater with a rooftop terrace, is the city’s premiere mid-sized venue. On any given weekend evening, Athens offers more live music options per capita than almost any other American city.

    The Georgia Museum of Art on the university campus houses an excellent collection with particular strength in American painting, and the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, also on campus, is a beautiful and extensively planted garden that is free to the public and particularly lovely in spring and autumn. The historic downtown commercial district, centered on College Avenue, is thick with independent restaurants, bars, record stores, bookshops, and clothing boutiques that give Athens the walkable, human-scaled character of a town where people spend time outdoors and in conversation.

    MACON: SOUL OF GEORGIA MUSIC
    Macon, midway between Atlanta and Savannah along the fall line where the Piedmont meets the coastal plain, is the most underappreciated music city in Georgia and one of the most underappreciated in the country. It was in Macon that Otis Redding and Little Richard were discovered, and it was in Macon that Phil Walden founded Capricorn Records in the late 1960s, the label that signed the Allman Brothers Band and helped create the Southern rock genre.
    The Allman Brothers Band Museum at the Big House is the former communal residence of the band, a large Tudor Revival home where the musicians and their extended family lived together during the years of the band’s greatest fame and creativity. The museum is an affectionate and thoroughly researched tribute to the band’s music and history, housing instruments, photographs, original artwork, and memorabilia in the rooms where the music was made.

    The Otis Redding Foundation and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame museum celebrate Macon’s extraordinary musical legacy in a city that also claims Little Richard, who was born there, and James Brown, who was born in nearby Barnwell, South Carolina but is deeply associated with the Augusta area just to the east. Macon’s Douglass Theatre, a beautifully restored 1921 African American theater where Little Richard and other artists performed during the era of segregation, continues to present live entertainment and serves as a museum of the city’s African American cultural history.

    Macon is also notable for its remarkable collection of antebellum architecture. The Hay House, a palatial Italianate mansion completed in 1859, is one of the finest examples of antebellum domestic architecture in the South. Its interior, with elaborate plaster cornices, marble fireplaces, and an indoor plumbing system decades ahead of its time, reflects the extraordinary wealth of the cotton economy in the years immediately preceding the Civil War.
    Each spring Macon hosts the International Cherry Blossom Festival, celebrating the more than three hundred thousand Yoshino cherry trees planted throughout the city. When the trees bloom, typically in mid-to-late March, the entire city is briefly transformed into a confection of pink and white that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors and makes Macon one of the most beautiful cities in the South for a few glorious weeks.

    PRACTICAL TRAVEL INFORMATION
    Georgia is served primarily by Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world’s busiest passenger airport and a hub for Delta Air Lines with connections to virtually every major city in the world. Savannah-Hilton Head International Airport serves the coastal region with flights to major eastern hubs. Brunswick Golden Isles Airport provides limited regional service to the Golden Isles.

    Amtrak’s Crescent line passes through Atlanta on its route between New York and New Orleans, stopping also at Gainesville in the north Georgia mountains and Toccoa near the South Carolina border. The Palmetto and Silver services connect Savannah to the Northeast corridor. Within Atlanta, the MARTA rail system connects the airport to downtown, midtown, and several outlying neighborhoods, making car-free travel feasible within the city itself. Beyond Atlanta, a car is essentially necessary for exploring Georgia’s diverse regions.
    Georgia’s climate ranges from subtropical in the south and along the coast to temperate mountain conditions in the north. Summers throughout most of the state are hot and humid, with temperatures regularly exceeding ninety degrees Fahrenheit from June through September. Spring and autumn are the preferred seasons for most visitors, offering mild temperatures, lower humidity, and spectacular natural displays of flowering trees and fall foliage. Winters in Georgia are mild by national standards, with snow rare in most of the state below the mountain counties, making Georgia a viable winter destination for those seeking relief from harsher northern climates.

    The state’s cuisine is one of its great pleasures and one of its most distinctive regional features. Georgia cooking at its finest is a celebration of local ingredients prepared with skill and tradition. Vidalia onions, grown in the sandy soil of southeastern Georgia, are the sweetest in the world and appear in everything from onion rings to jam. Georgia peaches, though no longer the dominant crop they once were, remain extraordinary when purchased directly from roadside stands during the June and July harvest. Boiled peanuts, sold from roadside kettles throughout rural Georgia, are an acquired taste that rewards patience and open-mindedness. Sea island shrimp, stone crab claws from the coastal waters, and the freshwater catfish of the inland rivers and lakes are seafood and fish of exceptional quality.

    CLOSING THOUGHTS
    Georgia is a state that demands engagement on multiple levels simultaneously. It is impossible to travel through Georgia honestly without confronting the full complexity of Southern history, including the beauty and the horror, the grace and the cruelty, the music born from suffering and the architecture built by enslaved hands. The civil rights memorials of Atlanta and the plantation houses of the Piedmont are not separate Georgias but the same Georgia seen from different angles, and the traveler who engages with both comes away with something more valuable than a pleasant vacation.

    But Georgia also delivers, in abundance, the simpler pleasures that draw travelers to any destination: the remarkable beauty of a sunrise over Cumberland Island’s unmarked beach, the pleasure of a perfect peach eaten in an orchard in July, the satisfaction of reaching a mountain waterfall after a morning’s hike through hardwood forest, and the warmth of welcome that genuine Southern hospitality, at its best and most authentic, extends to the traveler who arrives with curiosity and respect.
    Georgia is the American South in its fullest expression, neither sentimentalized nor demonized, but real, complex, beautiful, troubled, and endlessly fascinating. It is a place worth knowing deeply, and the depth of knowing is available to anyone willing to spend the time.

  • North Carolina: A State of Endless Discovery

    From the Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks, America’s Tar Heel State Has Something for Every Traveler.
    Few states in America offer the sheer geographic and cultural diversity of North Carolina. Stretching nearly 500 miles from the rugged peaks of the Appalachian Mountains in the west to the sandy barrier islands of the Atlantic coast in the east, North Carolina is a destination that defies easy categorization. It is a place where a hiker can stand atop the highest peak east of the Mississippi River in the morning and, with enough driving, watch the sun sink into the ocean by evening. It is a state shaped by Cherokee heritage, colonial history, Revolutionary War battles, Civil War echoes, and a modern identity built on craft beer, world-class barbecue, and a thriving arts scene. Whether you are an outdoor adventurer, a history enthusiast, a foodie, a beach lover, or a city explorer, North Carolina has a corner made for you.

    The Regions of North Carolina
    To truly understand North Carolina as a travel destination, it helps to think of the state in three broad geographic regions: the Mountains in the west, the Piedmont in the middle, and the Coastal Plain and Outer Banks in the east. Each region has its own distinct personality, landscape, and appeal.

    THE MOUNTAINS
    The western tip of North Carolina is dominated by the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains, a landscape of ancient peaks, cascading waterfalls, dense hardwood forests, and winding mountain roads. This is one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth, and its age shows in the soft, rounded silhouettes of the ridgelines and the extraordinary biodiversity found within its forests.
    Asheville is the undisputed capital of mountain life in North Carolina and one of the most talked-about cities in the American South. Nestled in a valley at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers, Asheville has earned a reputation as a bohemian, arts-forward city with a genuinely vibrant downtown. The River Arts District, a former industrial corridor along the French Broad River, has been transformed into a sprawling creative neighborhood where working artists open their studios to the public and galleries sit alongside coffee shops and breweries. Asheville is also widely regarded as one of the best craft beer cities in the country, with dozens of breweries ranging from large operations like Sierra Nevada’s East Coast campus to tiny neighborhood taprooms tucked into historic buildings.

    No visit to Asheville is complete without a tour of the Biltmore Estate, the largest privately owned home in the United States. Built by George Vanderbilt and completed in 1895, the French Renaissance chateau sits on 8,000 acres of land designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the same landscape architect responsible for New York’s Central Park. The estate includes the 250-room mansion, a winery, formal gardens, hiking and biking trails, and multiple restaurants and hotels. It is a genuinely jaw-dropping place, equal parts monument to Gilded Age excess and tribute to American craftsmanship.

    Beyond Asheville, the mountain region rewards exploration. The Blue Ridge Parkway, often called America’s Favorite Drive, winds along the spine of the Appalachians for 469 miles from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Cherokee, North Carolina. The parkway was designed to be experienced slowly, with frequent overlooks, picnic areas, and trailheads. The North Carolina portion offers some of the most spectacular scenery on the entire route, including views from Waterrock Knob, the winding descent into the Linville Gorge area, and the iconic Linn Cove Viaduct, an engineering marvel that curves around the rocky flank of Grandfather Mountain without disturbing a single tree root.
    Great Smoky Mountains National Park straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee and receives more visitors than any other national park in the country. The North Carolina side of the park, accessible through the gateway town of Cherokee, offers a slightly less crowded experience than the Tennessee entrance at Gatlinburg. Key attractions on the North Carolina side include the Oconaluftee Visitor Center, the Mountain Farm Museum, and access to trails that climb into some of the quietest corners of the park. The town of Cherokee itself is the capital of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and offers cultural experiences including the Museum of the Cherokee People, the outdoor drama Unto These Hills, and Harrah’s Cherokee Casino.

    Waterfall enthusiasts will find the North Carolina mountains to be a paradise. Highlands and Cashiers, two small resort communities in the southwestern corner of the state, sit in one of the wettest spots east of the Pacific Northwest, and the rainfall shows in the form of dozens of accessible waterfalls. Dry Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, and Glen Falls are among the most visited. Nearby, the Gorges State Park protects a rugged, steep terrain carved by rivers plunging rapidly toward the piedmont. The Nantahala Outdoor Center, located in the Nantahala Gorge near Bryson City, is one of the premier whitewater rafting destinations in the eastern United States, drawing paddlers from across the country to run the swift, cool waters of the Nantahala River.
    The mountain town of Boone, home to Appalachian State University, has a lively energy and serves as a gateway to the High Country. Nearby Banner Elk and Beech Mountain attract skiers in winter to Ski Beech and Sugar Mountain resorts. Valle Crucis, a small community just outside Boone, is home to the original Mast General Store, a landmark retailer that has been selling everything from cast-iron cookware to candy by the pound since 1883.

    THE PIEDMONT
    The Piedmont is the broad, gently rolling central plateau of North Carolina, and it is home to the state’s largest cities, most of its universities, and much of its economic and cultural life. The Research Triangle area, anchored by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, is one of the most dynamic metropolitan regions in the South, driven by the presence of Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University, as well as the Research Triangle Park, a massive research and technology campus that has attracted major corporations and biotech firms for decades.
    Raleigh, the state capital, is a city that has grown rapidly in recent years while maintaining a surprisingly livable, walkable downtown. The North Carolina Museum of Art is one of the finest art museums in the Southeast, with a permanent collection spanning 5,000 years of human creativity and a remarkable outdoor park with large-scale sculpture installations. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the largest natural history museum in the Southeast, is free to visit and draws families from across the region with its impressive collection of fossils, live animals, and interactive exhibits. The city’s food scene has exploded in quality and variety, with a concentration of excellent restaurants in neighborhoods like Glenwood South and downtown.

    Durham, once known primarily for tobacco manufacturing, has reinvented itself as one of the most culturally interesting cities in the American South. The American Tobacco Campus, a redeveloped historic factory complex, anchors a thriving neighborhood of restaurants, bars, offices, and event spaces. The Durham Performing Arts Center regularly ranks among the top-grossing theaters in the country and hosts major Broadway touring productions and concerts. The 21c Museum Hotel, part of a national chain of art-hotel hybrids, brings high-quality contemporary art to unexpected spaces throughout the building. Durham is also home to the Duke Lemur Center, the world’s largest sanctuary for rare and endangered prosimian primates, which offers public tours that are endearing and genuinely eye-opening.

    Chapel Hill, home to the University of North Carolina, is a classic college town with excellent restaurants, independent bookstores, and a music scene with genuine historical significance. The Cat’s Cradle, a beloved music venue in neighboring Carrboro, has been launching and hosting important acts for decades. The Morehead Planetarium on the UNC campus was the original training facility for NASA astronauts, a fact that surprises most visitors.

    Charlotte is North Carolina’s largest city and one of the fastest-growing urban centers in the United States. It is the country’s second-largest banking center after New York City, home to the headquarters of Bank of America and a major East Coast hub for Wells Fargo. For visitors, Charlotte offers the NASCAR Hall of Fame, which is a genuinely compelling museum even for those with only passing interest in motorsports, presenting the sport’s history with impressive production values and interactive exhibits. The Levine Museum of the New South tells the story of the American South since the Civil War with nuance and depth. The city’s NoDa neighborhood, named for North Davidson Street, is a converted mill district packed with galleries, bars, music venues, and independent shops. The Whitewater Center, located on the Catawba River just west of the city, is an extraordinary outdoor recreation facility with man-made whitewater channels, mountain bike trails, climbing walls, and zip lines.

    Winston-Salem carries a rich artistic heritage rooted partly in the legacy of the Reynolda Estate, built by tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds. Reynolda House, the family’s 1917 home, is now a museum of American art with an impressive collection, and the surrounding gardens and grounds have been developed into Reynolda Village, a charming complex of shops and restaurants. The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the vibrant arts scene cultivated by the University of North Carolina School of the Arts give the city a creative energy that surprises many first-time visitors. Old Salem, a meticulously preserved Moravian settlement in the heart of the city, offers a living history experience that transports visitors back to the 18th century.
    Greensboro played a pivotal role in American history as the site of the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in, one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement. The International Civil Rights Center and Museum, housed in the original Woolworth’s building, presents this history with power and care. The original lunch counter is preserved exactly as it was. The city also has a thriving arts scene and is home to several colleges and universities.

    The town of High Point, located in the Piedmont Triad, is the furniture capital of the world, hosting the High Point Market twice a year, the largest furnishings industry trade show on the planet. Visitors with an interest in interior design and home furnishings will find the many showrooms and design-oriented attractions fascinating.

    THE OUTER BANKS AND COASTAL PLAIN
    Eastern North Carolina is a world apart from the mountains and cities of the western and central parts of the state. Here the land flattens into wide coastal plains, the rivers slow and broaden into blackwater streams and vast sounds, and eventually the mainland gives way to the Outer Banks, a chain of narrow barrier islands stretching more than 100 miles along the Atlantic coast.

    The Outer Banks are one of the most distinctive coastal landscapes in America. These thin ribbons of sand, separated from the mainland by broad sounds and accessible primarily by bridge or ferry, have a wild, elemental quality unlike the developed beach resorts found elsewhere along the East Coast. Communities like Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head, and Avon each have their own character, but the prevailing mood throughout the Outer Banks is one of wind, open sky, and proximity to the natural forces of ocean and weather.
    Kill Devil Hills is the site where Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful powered airplane flights on December 17, 1903. The Wright Brothers National Memorial preserves this historic ground and tells the story of the brothers’ methodical, determined path to solving the problem of heavier-than-air flight. The museum is thoughtfully designed, and standing on the actual spot where those flights took place carries a genuine emotional weight.

    Cape Hatteras National Seashore protects the southern half of the Outer Banks in a remarkable stretch of undeveloped barrier island beach. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, at 198 feet the tallest brick lighthouse in America, stands as an iconic symbol of the Outer Banks and can be climbed by visitors during the summer season. The Graveyard of the Atlantic, the treacherous stretch of ocean near the cape where shifting sandbars and violent storms have wrecked more than 1,000 ships over the centuries, gives the region a haunting historical resonance. The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras Village explores this history and the lives of the people who lived and worked on this exposed coast.
    Ocracoke Island, accessible only by ferry, is one of the most magical places in North Carolina. This small, isolated community has a long history of fishing and seafaring, and a languid, time-out-of-mind atmosphere that attracts visitors looking to genuinely escape. The island’s village center, a cluster of historic homes, inns, restaurants, and shops arranged around Silver Lake harbor, is easily explored on foot or by bicycle. Blackbeard the pirate, one of history’s most notorious maritime outlaws, met his end in the waters off Ocracoke in 1718, and the island’s connection to this swashbuckling history adds a colorful dimension to any visit.

    Wilmington, on the Cape Fear coast south of the Outer Banks, is one of North Carolina’s most beautiful and historic cities. Its downtown, lined with antebellum architecture and perched along the Cape Fear River, has been thoughtfully preserved and is filled with restaurants, boutiques, and museums. The Battleship North Carolina, a World War II-era battleship moored across the river from downtown, is open for self-guided tours and is a fascinating and sobering window into naval history. Nearby, the beaches of Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach, and Kure Beach offer excellent swimming, surfing, and fishing in a setting that feels more laid-back than the Outer Banks but no less appealing.
    The Crystal Coast, anchored by Beaufort and Morehead City, is a quieter stretch of the North Carolina shore. Beaufort, one of the oldest towns in the state, has a charming waterfront district and a strong maritime heritage. Wild horses have roamed the marshes and beaches of the Rachel Carson Reserve near Beaufort for centuries, descendants of horses that arrived on Spanish ships in the 1500s. Boat tours offering glimpses of these horses are a beloved local experience.

    North Carolina’s Food and Drink Culture
    Any serious travel article about North Carolina must devote real attention to the food, because eating well in this state is not a side activity but a central pleasure of the visit.
    North Carolina barbecue is among the most passionately contested culinary traditions in the country. The state has two major styles: Eastern-style, which uses the whole hog and sauces the meat with a thin, vinegar-and-pepper mixture, and Lexington-style (also called Piedmont or Western-style), which uses only the pork shoulder and adds a touch of ketchup to the sauce. Purists on both sides hold their position with conviction, but the sensible traveler simply eats both. Legendary pits like Skylight Inn in Ayden, B’s Barbecue in Greenville, and Lexington Barbecue in Lexington have been smoking pork low and slow for generations, and a meal at any of them is a genuine cultural experience.
    The seafood along the North Carolina coast is exceptional. Fresh shrimp, blue crabs, oysters from the sounds, and locally caught fish anchor menus from Wilmington to the Outer Banks. The North Carolina shrimp and grits tradition, in which plump, sweet local shrimp are paired with stone-ground grits, often enriched with butter and cheese, is a dish worth seeking out at any coastal restaurant worth its salt.

    The Cheerwine, a locally beloved cherry-flavored soft drink produced in Salisbury since 1917, is as much a cultural artifact as a beverage, and drinking one cold from a glass bottle is a small but genuine pleasure. Cheerwine floats, made with vanilla ice cream, appear on menus across the state.
    The craft brewing scene, mentioned earlier in reference to Asheville, extends throughout the state. Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, and even smaller cities like Wilmington and Fayetteville have thriving local brewing communities. North Carolina consistently ranks among the top craft beer states in the country by number of breweries and overall quality.
    The state has also developed a noteworthy wine industry centered in the Yadkin Valley, a wine appellation in the Piedmont region where vineyards take advantage of well-drained soils and a moderate climate. Childress Vineyards, RagApple Lassie, and Shelton Vineyards are among the better-known producers, and the region now supports a well-developed wine trail with tasting rooms and events throughout the year.

    History and Culture
    North Carolina’s history is long, layered, and often surprising. Long before European contact, the land was home to Cherokee, Catawba, Tuscarora, and dozens of other Native American peoples. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who remained in the mountains when most of their nation was forcibly relocated on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, maintain a sovereign tribal nation in the mountains of western North Carolina and are an important part of the state’s living cultural fabric.
    The colony of Roanoke, established on the North Carolina coast in the 1580s, was the first English attempt at a permanent settlement in America. Its mysterious disappearance, leaving behind only the carved word “Croatoan” on a post, has captivated historians and storytellers for centuries. The Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island preserves the site of this Lost Colony and presents the available historical evidence with care. The outdoor drama The Lost Colony has been performed here every summer since 1937, making it the longest-running outdoor drama in American history.

    North Carolina was the site of the first declaration of independence from British rule in America. The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, allegedly signed in Charlotte in May 1775, predated the national Declaration of Independence by over a year, a fact that North Carolinians take considerable pride in, even if historians continue to debate the precise details.
    The state’s Civil War history is complex and sobering. North Carolina supplied more soldiers to the Confederate army than any other state and suffered more casualties than any other Confederate state. The battlefields, museums, and historic sites related to this period offer important context for understanding both the causes and the consequences of the conflict.
    The literary and musical heritage of North Carolina is remarkable for a state of its size. Thomas Wolfe, one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, was born and raised in Asheville, and his childhood home on Spruce Street is preserved as a museum. O. Henry, the master of the short story with the twist ending, was born in Greensboro. The bluegrass and old-time music traditions of the mountain counties are living arts practiced at community gatherings and festivals throughout the year. The Doc Watson Music Festival, held annually in Wilkesboro in honor of the legendary flat-picking guitarist who was a native son of North Carolina, draws musicians and fans from across the world.

    Outdoor Recreation
    For outdoor enthusiasts, North Carolina is a virtually inexhaustible playground. Hiking options range from easy, family-friendly nature walks to demanding multi-day backpacking routes. The Mountains-to-Sea Trail, when complete, will stretch nearly 1,200 miles from Clingmans Dome on the Tennessee border to the Outer Banks, crossing virtually every terrain type the state has to offer. Already, hundreds of miles of the trail are open and hikeable.
    Rock climbing has found a passionate community in North Carolina, with areas like Pilot Mountain State Park, Stone Mountain State Park, and Rumbling Bald on Lake Lure offering excellent routes for climbers of all skill levels. Hanging Rock State Park in the Sauratown Mountains and Crowders Mountain State Park near Charlotte are popular destinations for day hikers close to the Piedmont cities.

    Paddlers will find rivers and lakes throughout the state suited to everything from leisurely flatwater canoe trips to serious technical whitewater. The Nantahala and Ocoee rivers in the west, the Eno River near Durham, and the coastal blackwater rivers of the eastern plain all offer memorable paddling experiences.
    Fishing is a serious pursuit in North Carolina, and the state’s coastal waters, mountain streams, and Piedmont lakes support remarkably diverse fishing opportunities. Mountain trout streams, particularly in Cherokee and Macon counties, are legendary among fly fishers. The Gulf Stream runs relatively close to the coast near Cape Hatteras, making this one of the premier offshore fishing locations on the East Coast, with blue marlin, sailfish, tuna, and mahi-mahi all accessible to charter boat anglers.

    Practical Travel Information
    North Carolina’s climate varies significantly by region. The mountains experience genuine four-season weather, with cold, sometimes snowy winters and cool, comfortable summers. Fall foliage in the Blue Ridge typically peaks between mid-October and early November and is among the most spectacular in the eastern United States. The Piedmont has a more moderate climate with hot summers and mild winters. The coast is warm and humid in summer, pleasant in spring and fall, and mild in winter, though it is vulnerable to hurricanes during the Atlantic storm season, which runs from June through November.

    The state is well served by several airports. Charlotte Douglas International Airport is a major hub for American Airlines and offers direct flights from dozens of domestic and international destinations. Raleigh-Durham International Airport serves the Triangle region with a broad selection of routes. Asheville Regional Airport, while smaller, has seen significant expansion of its service in recent years and now connects the mountain region to many major cities.
    Driving remains the most practical way to explore North Carolina’s full range of destinations, as public transportation between regions is limited. The state’s highway network is generally well maintained, and the scenic roads, including the Blue Ridge Parkway and the many two-lane byways that wind through the mountains, are among the great driving pleasures in American travel.

    Accommodation options run the full spectrum from luxury resorts and boutique hotels to family-friendly beach rentals and rustic mountain cabins. The Outer Banks, in particular, has a long tradition of large vacation rental homes capable of accommodating extended families or groups of friends. The mountain region has a wonderful collection of historic inns and bed-and-breakfasts, many of them in Victorian-era homes with wraparound porches and mountain views.

    Conclusion
    North Carolina resists the kind of easy summary that makes for a clean advertising slogan, and that is precisely what makes it so rewarding to explore. It is a state where the past and the present exist in genuine conversation, where the land itself shifts from ancient mountains to coastal marshes over the space of a few hours’ drive, and where the people take quiet pride in a culture built from Cherokee heritage, colonial history, agricultural tradition, and an increasingly sophisticated urban sensibility.
    To visit North Carolina once is to understand why so many people who come as tourists decide to stay. The mountains draw you in with their beauty and hold you with their calm. The cities reward repeated exploration with new discoveries in food, art, and music. The coast, with its wild, wind-swept beauty and its long history of storms and shipwrecks and resilient communities, has a pull that does not easily let go. Come for a week and you will wish you had planned for two. Come for two and you will already be thinking about when you can return.

    North Carolina — First in Flight, First in Freedom, and, for a growing number of travelers, first on the list of places they want to go back to.