Things to Do in Columbus

Franklin Park Conservatory

Steam slaps your face the instant you shove through the glass. Inside the Pacific Island Water Garden breadfruit trees drip condensation onto your shirt and parrots shriek from banana palms. Outside the domes the city's quietest secret waits. Community garden plots out back. Retirees grow heirloom tomatoes that wreck supermarket fruit for life.

North Market

Follow your nose. Past Vietnamese grandmas folding fresh bánh cuốn. Through cinnamon clouds from Jeni's testers. To the Polish sausage guy slapping mustard with his ladle since 1988. Saturday brings accordion music and the thunk of cleavers on wood. Students nurse $2 coffees and trade hangover stories.

Ohio Statehouse underground tour

Under the stained-glass rotunda limestone tunnels bounce the click of your guide's heels. Far above, senators' gavels thud like distant drums. Decades of cigar smoke still haunt the old Democratic cloakroom wallpaper. Touch the 1861 ironwork. Ohio boys later melted it into Civil War rifles.

Olentangy Trail cycling

Pedal south from Worthington. Catch river mud and diesel off the CSX trains that still roll beside you. Great blue herons flap between sycamore limbs. The trail slices through three microclimates. Swampy wetlands near Clinton-Como where frogs outring your bell. Open prairie thick with queen anne's lace. Downtown where office workers lunch on sun-warmed limestone.

German Village replica

In Schiller Park half-timbered houses creak while Ohio plays dress-up. Costumed interpreters speak Pennsylvania Dutch that sounds nothing like German. The brick-oven bread is real. Crackling crust, rye that tingles your tongue. Kids dart between herb beds. Rub lemon balm. Smell Columbus before the breweries arrived.

Short North for gallery walks and cocktail bars that stay open past midnight

German Village if you like walking brick streets to breakfast joints

Downtown proper for convention access and rooftop bar views

Clintonville for the city's best thrift stores and dive bars

Campus area during football season if you enjoy chaos and scarlet everything

Olde Towne East for Victorian architecture that's still affordable