Summertime and the living is supposed to be easy, the fish should jump, and the cotton should grow high. You won't find cotton other than the souvenir T-shirt kind in this, our fourth annual rating of 10 top American summer travel destinations, but you will detect a distinctly carefree approach to life. This year, USA WEEKEND elected to pursue that classic summer prerogative -- good, old-fashioned fun. In a country as high-spirited as ours, identifying hot spots for good times was no trouble at all. The trick came in winnowing a massive list of candidates down to 10 high-energy finalists.

Our fourth annual rating of 10 top American summer travel destinations. This year, USA WEEKEND elected to pursue that classic summer prerogative -- good, old-fashioned fun.
Plus, past series':
10 Most Beautiful Places in America A nation blessed with sights -- natural and man-made.
America's 10 Best Historic Landmarks Defining moments and places in the evolution of our democracy.
10 Must-See sites: Understanding of what it means to be American.

We started by asking travel experts, colleagues and anyone with an informed opinion on the serious matter of levity (which turns out to be just about everyone): When you want to kick back, laugh, and be amazed and entertained, where do you go? By cross-referencing their answers, we were able to compile our list of must-see spots, sort of a national heritage trail of fun.

The results are by no means complete, but we hope they'll cause you to crack a smile -- and perhaps inspire you to follow your own bliss, wherever you find it, in this easy-living season of fun in the sun.


1. Las Vegas
Sinatra famously sang about another city that never sleeps, but when money was on the table, it was in Vegas that he and his Rat Pack pals chose to set up shop. There's a reason for that: In this shimmering desert mirage of a metropolis, anything is possible, all the time. Glitz and glamour, show tunes and showgirls, and always the possibility of a big score. Over-the-top hotels spin fantasies of New York, Paris, Egypt and Rome, part of a joker's-wild attitude that has transformed Las Vegas from an arid crossroads to the world's 24-hour playground -- and America's fastest-growing city -- quicker than you can say "Jackpot!" Only here could dancing fountains coexist with Renaissance masterpieces, slot-playing grandmothers with professional high rollers, and quickie marriage chapels with while-u-wait divorce clearinghouses. The Strip promises everything to everyone, and when it delivers it does so in the form of good ol' cash, the lifeblood of the American dream. As another crooner with local ties once said, "Viva Las Vegas."

2. Iowa State Fair
Des Moines.
Arguably the country's most storied summer festival (it has inspired a novel, three movies, and a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical), the Iowa State Fair is also one of the largest and longest-running. Earning a blue ribbon in fun year after year, this American classic celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2004, a run that dates back to the very earliest days of Iowa statehood. For 11 days in August, more than a million exhibitors and guests will pack the historic 400-acre fairgrounds in Des Moines (the campground will become Iowa's 12th-largest city during the fair). Hailing from most states and many foreign countries, folks will take in rodeos, rock concerts, tractor pulls, outhouse races, acres of midway rides and games, and, of course, one of sculptor-in-residence Duffy Lyon's 550-pound Butter Cow sculptures. In addition to her legendary milk-fat bovines, Lyon traditionally carves a second objet d'art in her chosen medium. Past subjects have included Elvis, John Wayne and Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper." Also on the bill is a world-class variety of food-on-a-stick. Among the 20 or so delicacies available in lollipop form: deep-fried Twinkies. All of which adds up to more fun than you can, well, shake a stick at.

3. Times Square
New York City
There's no square there, actually -- more of a bow tie of an intersection where Broadway crosses Seventh Avenue in the heart of Manhattan. Before "The New York Times" built its headquarters nearby in 1904 (and celebrated with a New Year's Eve extravaganza), New Yorkers knew the area as Long Acre Square. By any name, the dynamic neighborhood has crackled with energy since its days as a 19th-century red-light district. Theaters eventually replaced brothels, drawing nightly crowds. By the 1920s, Times Square boasted the country's highest concentration of theaters. It still does. With the throngs came a revolution in advertising, the glowing, multi-story billboards that gave the neighborhood its first public face and earned it the nickname "the Great White Way" for its twinkling lights. Today the broad intersection serves as a meeting place, media hub and cosmopolitan entertainment district. It's where America goes to celebrate; it's the closest thing we have to a national town common. Even if you've never been there, you've been there -- through countless movies and TV shows. Some 500,000 revelers gather every Dec. 31 to watch the famous ball drop, while another half-billion watch the televised festivities from home. But perhaps the happiest event ever recorded there -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- came on Aug. 14, 1945, when photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped his famous shot of a sailor planting a wet one on a pliant nurse to celebrate the end of World War II. Has anyone ever had such fun? It was a pure, uninhibited Times Square moment.

4. Cedar Point Amusement Park Resort
Sandusky, Ohio
The American pursuit of happiness got a big boost in 1870, when a fun-loving entrepreneur started ferry service from Sandusky, Ohio, to a forested Lake Erie peninsula called Cedar Point. Picnic groves and a white-sand beach were the original attractions, soon to be complemented by band concerts, bowling alleys and a swanky dining hall. When the Switchback Railway opened in 1892, the good times really started rolling. The Point's first roller coaster propelled daredevils down a wooden track at the delirious speed of 10 mph. Ahh, the sweet innocence of yesteryear. Today, Cedar Point Amusement Park boasts the planet's largest collection of roller coasters. Among its 16 screamers: Top Thrill Dragster, a steel behemoth that towers 420 feet in the air and whistles down a vertical drop at 120 mph. Big and fast? Consider this: When a coaster called Millennium Force opened at the Point a mere four years ago, it so dwarfed anything in existence that stunned thrill mavens coined the word "giga-coaster" to describe it. Dragster is 110 feet taller and more than 25% faster than Millennium Force. There's more to fun than sheer brain-numbing speed, of course. The 364-acre Cedar Point offers the sort of variety that makes 3 million visitors giddy with excitement every year: 68 rides; four theaters; the opulent 1905 Hotel Breakers, with its four-story rotunda; miniature golf courses; a petting zoo; and arcades. Not to mention a famous white-sand beach.

5. Provincetown, Cape Cod
Massachusetts
Situated at the sandy tip of a cock-armed peninsula, where Cape Cod is said to turn back to admire itself, Provincetown exhibits all the eccentricities of an island in the sun. Over the years this bohemian outpost has been many things to many people. For 17th-century English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, it was a place so rich in cod that he named the whole cape for them. For the Pilgrims, it was a safe anchorage after two horrid months at sea. For generations of painters, it's been a colony blessed with some of the purest light in North America. Writers from Eugene O'Neill to Norman Mailer have found inspiration in the village's beauty -- and diversion in her saloons and bistros. Gays and lesbians love P'town for its open-mindedness. Tourists delight in colorful street life that puts the fun in funky. Gourmands can eat from one bustling end of Commercial Street to the other. Naturalists exult in the miles of dunes, undeveloped save for a 130-year-old lighthouse and a handful of weathered cottages, that form Provincetown's pristine share of the 43,604-acre Cape Cod National Seashore. But forget the high-flown stuff of history. For most contemporary visitors, this unique place represents something earthy and real: the perfect little beach town, almost brazenly endowed with wraparound water, abundant in-town services and New England's most unforgettable sunsets.

6. Guadalupe River tubing
Texas Hill Country
In the rolling Hill Country of south-central Texas, the first warm days of spring trigger an annual migration that has no equal in nature. Thousands upon thousands of brightly plumed bipeds leap into the Guadalupe River, their derrieres firmly ensconced in inflatable air bladders. We're talking river tubing, of course, an activity that's as big in central Texas as 10-gallon hats and hand-tooled lizard-skin cowboy boots -- and a far sight more comfortable. No one is quite sure who cast the first truck-tire inner tube upon the cool, spring-fed waters of the Guadalupe, but legend has it that the local practice inspired the famous water parks of New Braunfels, which conveniently hugs a river bend between Austin and San Antonio. One thing is certain: On any given summer day, hundreds of practitioners can be found bobbing along in no particular hurry, lassoed as often as not to trailing tubes bearing coolers of liquid refreshment. Over the years, dozens of outfitters have sprung up to service the pilgrims. Float veterans say it's all about camaraderie. As current and whim dictate, tubers form groups, break apart, paddle ashore for barbecues, swim, sing, and catch rays and Z's. But mostly they just savor the sensation of having no particular place to go, no particular time by which they have to get there, and lots of great scenery and good fellowship to soak up along the way.

7. Audubon Zoo
New Orleans
The timeless fun of a day at the zoo takes an exciting regional twist at Audubon Park, where unique habitats include the Louisiana Swamp Exhibit. The Spanish-moss-draped environment re-creates a gator-infested marsh, complete with fat catfish; giant, ratlike nutria; and extremely rare white alligators. Also at home in the zoo, located within the Crescent City's vast Frederick Law Olmsted-designed urban oasis: Bengal tigers, Malayan sun bears, Komodo dragons and a baby rhino named Satchmo.
After gawking at the wildlife, hop aboard the St. Charles Avenue streetcar (the nation's oldest continuously operating line) for a swaying ride toward the legendary nightlife of the French Quarter. Cradle of jazz, indulgent host of Mardi Gras, capital of creole cooking and take-out margaritas -- the Big Easy has been teaching the rest of America to swing ever since the original Satchmo, native son Louis Armstrong, honed his chops as a riverboat musician on the mighty Mississippi. "Let the good times roll," natives say, a sentiment that sounds even better, sassier, in the old patois, rolling off the tongue like a Bourbon Street hurricane on a steamy summer night -- "Laissez les bons temps rouler." Part French, part Spanish, part Caribbean, shaped by African traditions, old-line gentry, and waves of Irish and Italian immigration, New Orleans serves up a cultural gumbo spiced with good music, good food and good spirits. It's the sort of improbable place a poet would have to invent if it didn't already exist, except no one could dream up New Orleans.

8. Disneyland
Anaheim, Calif.
"When I started on Disneyland," Walt Disney once recalled, "my wife used to say, 'But why do you want to build an amusement park? They're so dirty.' I told her that was just the point -- mine wouldn't be." Indeed, the 85-acre enchanted kingdom he opened in 1955 wouldn't really be an amusement park at all, but something altogether more stylish and immersive. Fusing elements of idealized small-town America, Old World gardens and storybook exoticism, Disneyland spins a colorful fantasy in three dimensions. Amid fairy-tale castles, spinning teacups and flying elephants, and man-made landscapes so exquisitely detailed that it can be hard to tell where reality yields to illusion, visitors of every age discover their inner children. After nearly half a century, Disneyland remains the Happiest Place on Earth.

9. National Air and Space Museum
Chantilly, Va.
By congressional mandate, it is the mission of Washington's National Air and Space Museum to "memorialize the national development of aviation and space flight." To which 9 million happy visitors a year might add: "And to inspire wonder, quicken pulses and make spirits soar." Imagination takes flight as guests peer inside a space capsule, get a feel for weightlessness during an IMAX film and size up a spectacular collection of historic aircraft. With the opening of the vast Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport in Washington's Virginia suburbs last year, the museum now has room to really stretch its wings. The 82 flying machines on view at the center's Aviation Hangar include the only successful supersonic airplane ever built (the Concorde), the fastest plane (an SR-71 Blackbird recon plane) and the first airliner with a pressurized cabin (the Boeing 307 Stratoliner). The James S. McDonnell Space Hangar at the Udvar-Hazy Center, dedicated to space exploration, houses the Gemini VII and Mercury 15B spacecraft and the shuttle Enterprise, and this fall will begin adding other spacecraft and artifacts. When it comes to focused fun, the sky truly is the limit at Udvar-Hazy.

10. Telluride, Colo.
No one's quite sure how the name came about. It could derive from the element tellurium, which, ironically, was never present in the town's rich zinc, copper, gold and silver deposits. More colorfully, some folks say it comes from the traditional send-off given to the hard-charging 19th-century fortune hunters who populated the boomtown -- and established its reputation as a fun-loving hideaway: "To-hell-you-ride!" One thing everyone agrees on is that beautiful Telluride knows how to party. Nestled in a remote box canyon in the San Juan Mountains toward the southern end of the Rockies, the city came into being as a mining outpost in the 1870s. A hundred years later, it turned over a new leaf as a champagne powder ski resort. Now a scenic gondola connects the ski area's chic Mountain Village resort with the original, largely preserved Victorian town below (the whole hamlet enjoys National Landmark status), and fun rages from sunup to well after sundown, 365 days a year. Off the slopes, visitors hike, bike, snowshoe, camp, fish, kayak, golf, ice-skate and rock-climb, depending on the season. But what really sets good-time Telluride apart from other well-heeled mountain retreats are its festivals. The town-wide party season kicks off in June with an internationally renowned balloon rally, when hundreds of the humongous contraptions take to the air at sunrise. After that, multi-day fests come fast and furious throughout summer and fall. Among the top draws: Bluegrass, Wild West, Wine, Jazz and Mushroom. By the time the world-class Telluride Film Festival pulls up stakes in September, fresh powder typically blankets the peaks. That's the way they like it in Telluride: Every season flows seamlessly into the next, with never any doldrums between.

USA Travel