Some would say there are at least 10,000 reasons to visit Minnesota, and now aviation and history enthusiasts can add one more: Rand Tower Hotel recently opened in a historic downtown Minneapolis skyscraper with a one-of-a-kind aviation theme that makes a great home base for exploring the area.

Women’s History Month may be drawing to a close, but these hometowns and museum collections highlighting history's most famous female pilots are worth a visit any time of year.

Our motorized catamaran headed back toward Clearwater Marine Aquarium’s dock after cruising for 90 minutes through Florida’s Clearwater Bay, where we learned about what lives underwater in this Gulf Coast community while watching field scientists cast a net and collect data on live sea creatures before returning them to the water.

While many people picture luxurious resorts, high-end shopping, and fine dining when they think of Scottsdale, Arizona, my trips there over the past decade have centered mostly on outdoor fun. My visits have been in the spring, fall, and winter—skipping what can be the Sonoran Desert’s unbearable triple-digit summers.

In a vacation first for our family, my husband’s must-do list included shopping when we made our first visit to the Quad Cities region, a collection of communities straddling the Mississippi River and the Iowa-Illinois border.

Chad Huntington was on the opening day crew in 1999 when the first water taxi launched into the newly constructed Bricktown Canal in downtown Oklahoma City. He loved telling the city’s narrative in his role as executive director of another nearby fledgling district, Automobile Alley, and figured a part-time gig navigating and narrating a sightseeing boat would be the perfect extension of his passion.

The sequel to the 1986 classic movie Top Gun has had several release dates scrubbed, first moving the film from July 2019 to summer 2020 so production could work out complex flight scenes and then a series of delays in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Paramount Pictures recently announced a new theatrical debut date for the long-awaited Top Gun: Maverick—May 27, 2022. That allows plenty of time to plan a trip to San Diego to explore iconic filming sites from the original blockbuster that starred Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards as naval aviators and boosted sales of bomber jackets and Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses.

Fly to Memorial Field in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and spend a weekend in the city’s historic downtown, where you can have a national park experience like none other in the country.

Looking for a remote but active vacation? A recently built lodge surrounded by an outdoor activity nirvana deep in New Mexico’s ranching country could be the place.