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.

My appreciation for historic downtowns grows each time I experience a different one. This summer I spent a large amount of time working in downtown St. Joseph, Missouri, where the looping, mismatched streets display church spires, old theaters and loft apartments inside battered brick buildings. My hometown is close to Marceline, Missouri — the boyhood home of Walt Disney and a small town that boasts one really impressive and historic downtown Main Street.

Often, when I go on trips with my family or friends, we’ll find our way downtown in search of food. Simply asking, “Where do the locals go for a good meal?” produces a great little hole-in-the-wall bar, family-owned Italian restaurant or out-of-this-world ice cream shop. Many times that leads to an interesting conversation with a waitress or bartender, and every time it ends in stepping out the restaurant door and taking a stroll under the awnings to look in the windows, note the architecture and observe the nightlife.

I know there are a lot of different reasons to travel, and people pick destinations based on a lot of different factors. Here’s something to consider for your next vacation: Do you think you might be missing out on a big piece of humanity by only going to the advertised destinations? By only seeing what brochures and travel agents tell you are important? Sometimes it’s not the big picture or even the new and shiny picture that’s the most interesting, but the real picture.

So my suggestion is to go a little deeper — navigate the one-ways and let your teeth rattle through the rare brick side streets. Find the hole-in-the-wall places, the park with the 200-year-old trees and the five white-haired men in the Wednesday morning coffee club who can tell you everything about the town. Observe the art and the architecture, and store it all away in your memory bank to bookend the three days you spent elbow-to-elbow with other tourists watching the advertised spectacle that inspired your trip in the first place.