The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum, Hannibal, Missouri

The antics of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have delighted children and adults alike since the first book recording their exploits, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” was published in 1876. The writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, give readers a glimpse of his childhood growing up along the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri.

Today, Hannibal commemorates the life of its most famous resident at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum. Manager of Marketing and Community Relations Megan Rapp said that each year the museum attracts visitors from all 50 states and between 20 and 40 foreign countries.

World Bird Sanctuary, Valley Park, Missouri

Second in popularity only to gardening, birding is one of America’s favorite outdoor hobbies. Located in Valley Park, Missouri, 25 minutes west of downtown St. Louis, the World Bird Sanctuary is a place to support this fascination.

The World Bird Sanctuary cares for birds and a small variety of other animals from the Midwest and around the world.

The Sanctuary is responsible for bringing the peregrine falcon back to Missouri, releasing more than 500 barn owls and educating the 60 to 70 thousand people who visit the facility every year.

Many of the birds currently in the care of the World Bird Sanctuary will be released after propagation or rehabilitation. All of the species in the Sanctuary’s care — ranging from the bald eagle to the domestic rat — total about 350 animals. The project adheres to a strong mission statement: To preserve the earth’s biological diversity and to secure the future of threatened bird species in their natural environment.

In 1977, a small group of bird enthusiasts, headed by Walter C. Crawford Jr., formed the Raptor Rehabilitation and Propagation Project. In 1982, Crawford left his job at the St. Louis Zoo and took on the project full time, giving it the name it has today.

Spook Cave, McGregor, Iowa

Somewhere in northeastern Iowa, amid cornfields and far-reaching horizons, the land changes its mind. It ripples out from the upper Mississippi River, shaping bluffs into tree-covered billows and casting shadows over the once sun-baked land. Spook Cave and nearby McGregor, Iowa, nestle into the nooks of this rocky region, comfortably situated in the Effigy Bluffs.

Spook Cave, an adolescent cave at 150 million years old, has a claim to fame as the subject of local folklore. In the same rising bluff as the cave, serene terraced Beulah Falls pour from the forested hillside, just a stone’s throw from the cave entrance. These falls, however, once diverted attention from the neighboring hidden water-carved cave within the hill’s limestone walls, hiding the secret caverns from potential adventurers and spelunkers.

Skyview Drive-In, Belleville, Illinois

Tonight the theater has attracted a full house, or lot rather. Rows of cars of all sizes, makes and models are parked with their occupants inside watching an over-size screen with rapt attention. Above the sounds of the movie being streamed over the FM radio station, the laughter of children, the murmurs of adults, the crackle of wrappers being opened and the nocturnal cacophony of crickets provide a quiet soundtrack. It’s just another night at the Skyview Drive-In in Belleville, Illinois.

Skyview has been a fixture of Belleville, a town about 45 minutes outside of St. Louis, since the late 1940s, said Steve Bloomer, a co-owner of the theater and the third generation of his family to work there.

In a time when fast food is the meal of choice and exercise takes a back seat to video games, the YouZeum seeks to make a difference. By educating the young and old alike about the importance of health and wellness, this one-of-a-kind health science center is determined to change the lives of its visitors.

Located in Columbia, Missouri, the YouZeum is the state’s only health science center. Upon opening in May 2008, the YouZeum began its journey to change the lives of visitors for the better, making them more aware of the importance of nutrition, exercise and an overall healthy lifestyle.

Katie Harris, handling YouZeum publicity, explained that the YouZeum has an important purpose.

The zoo is pretty cool, and for that matter, so are the art museums, the insert-theme-here festivals and the walking tours. But if I really want to see something worth remembering, I’m heading to the heart of a city — it's downtown.

It’s been a few years since I’ve taken part in a family vacation, but even when we were in prime tourist form and hitting up destinations all over the Midwest, I remember very few trips to the world’s largest peanut or the world’s most boring historical exhibit.

Maybe it was because we spent a lot of time visiting family, but it seemed that we always managed to find our way to where the locals were hanging out and away from the tourist traps. In fact, some of my best memories have been made in the places where I was brushing shoulders with the locals — seeing their private businesses and eating something other than the $8 theme park burger. I have snippets of memories that put me on street benches shoving homemade ice cream in my mouth, looking in tiny shop windows or marveling at ancient courthouses. You’d think the advertised attractions — the walk-through aquariums and the faces carved into bluffs — would be the things to stick in my mind, but oddly that’s not the case. It’s the everyday things, done just a little bit differently than what I’m used to, that my memory bank yanks out each time I reminisce about a Williams family vacation.

I understand that the point of a tourist site is to see something you don’t see every day. It’s a bit of knowledge or history concentrated into one spot and presented in a way that draws people in. But isn’t it also kind of cool to see something that you do see every day (like the local bank or courthouse), only somebody else’s version of that something? Nearly every city has a downtown, and it seems that this is the point from which the city grew. The oldest buildings, courthouses, brick streets, churches — they’re usually all there, interspersed with a couple of modern additions as well. I love a freshly built shopping center or a modern museum that pays tribute to some element of U.S. history just as much as the next person, but on the other hand, I feel almost like I’m in my own home when I know I’m truly in the middle of someone else’s.

Villisca Ax Murder House, Villisca, Iowa

On the morning of June 11, 1912, the small town of Villisca, Iowa, awoke to find the Moore family and two overnight guests, the Stillenger girls, brutally murdered in their sleep. Known today as the Villisca Ax Murder House, the site of the murders attracts ghosts and ghost hunters alike.

Since the murders, the house has had more than a dozen residents living in it, but by 1994, it was in danger of being destroyed. Darwin and Martha Linn, the owners of the local Olson-Linn Museum, decided to buy the historic home rather than see it demolished.

“I was drawn to it,” Darwin Linn said. “I have a museum uptown, and I was looking for a hook. I have saved too many pieces of history to see it torn down.”

Nestled just off the main drag of a charming historic village in central Missouri lies a white building that looks more like a church than a theater. Since 1961, the Arrow Rock Lyceum Theatre, Missouri's oldest professional regional theater, has been producing shows that people travel many miles to see. Throughout the theater's 48 seasons and more that 330 productions, the theater has grown, changed and struggled through hardships.

Originally built in 1872 as the Arrow Rock Baptist Church, the building was left vacant as the population of Arrow Rock dwindled and churches joined together. The owners proposed the church be made into a theater, and in 1961, the first season opened with the Oscar Wilde play “The Importance of Being Earnest” on a small, 9-by-20-foot stage.