Housed in the Mansion on Forsyth Park hotel, 700 Kitchen is Savannah’s premier cooking school. It offers courses for individuals and groups in healthy cooking, the art of entertaining, baking and confectionary and regional cuisines. Most classes last two to three hours, and all end with participants eating what they made. Low Country Cuisine teaches such recipes as cheddar-and-chive biscuits, creamy grits, fried green tomatoes, shrimp with red-eye gravy and pecan-praline angel food cake; and Quick and Easy Hors d’Oeuvres, features dishes like caraway-and-fennel crisps, prosciutto-wrapped asparagus with orange-mint dipping sauce and black-bean cakes with shrimp and corn salsa.

This building, constructed around 1820, features interiors that have been unchanged since 1858. Visitors can visit the slave quarters, carriage house and stables. Furniture and decorative objects in the collection are of a high quality; many of them were brought back from the family’s Grand Tour of Europe.

The former residence of Alabama-born artist Ann Vaughn Weaver is today an oasis within paradise. The enchanting gardens are home to colossal works in bronze, stone and wood set into lush surroundings. Between a collection of rare palms and flora and fauna, visitors become a part of the evolution of the artist's work, which embodies nearly four decades of her work.

Art Basel Miami Beach, which started in 2002, has become one of the season’s most important social and cultural events.

NOLA’s Audubon Zoo is an extension of the Audubon Institute and houses over 2000 animals, with gorillas, orangutans and white tigers counted as residents. Notable exhibits include two of the twelve known giant white alligators, and a discovery area, where visitors can get up close and personal with animals. Those looking for a dose of local flavor should head to the Louisiana Swamp exhibit where staffers have recreated a bayou swampland in its entirety.

An active way to see the small downtown area of Charleston is by bike. Indagare members can contact our Bookings Team for assistance planning bike rentals, where bikes and helmets can be delivered to your hotel.

Starting at Royal Poinciana Way and winding north along the Lake Worth Lagoon is a true Palm Beach treasure: the Lake Trail. Henry Flagler built the path in the 1890s for his hotel guests to take quiet morning strolls. Open to the public, the trail is an extremely popular destination for bicyclists, skaters, joggers and moms with strollers. The five-mile-long ribbon of pavement winds past gorgeous lakefront homes and docks, affording a view of the West Palm Beach skyline on the other side of the lagoon. It is best in the early morning and late afternoon, when the sun is not beating down.

Indagare members can contact our bookings department for help chartering a boat for exploring and/or deep sea fishing.

A great way to see the Miami area is to reserve a boat and captain for a day charter. Visitors can discover the city's canals and adjacent seafood restaurants, the downtown skyline from a different perspective and island paradise, Key Biscayne. Seeing Stiltsville, a cluster of houses built on pilings in the middle of the ocean, makes for a fascinating day-trip. Indagare members can contact our Bookings Team for help with trip planning, including customized recommendations and itineraries.

On grounds that were formerly part of the Bonaventure Plantation, this cemetery gained national fame when it appeared on the cover of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The Bird Girl statue has since been moved to the Telfair Museum of Art for safekeeping. Among those buried here are songwriter Johnny Mercer and Pulitzer prize–winning poet Conrad Aiken. Aiken, who regularly visited the graves of his parents here, had his tombstone fashioned in the shape of a bench, so visitors can rest awhile and even raise a glass, as he did, to toast his party-loving mother. The stone is inscribed with the words “Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown,” which he apparently read one day on a ship’s log in town.

No trip to Nashville is complete without at least a brief walk down Honky-Tonk central. Yes, Nashville’s main drag is a tourist trap, but shouldn’t be fully avoided. Snatch up a pair of cowboy boots and a Jack Daniels t-shirt for kicks, and enjoy some truly entertaining people-watching. Many of Nashville’s legendary music venues reside here, like the venerable Tootsie’s and The Stage (featured in Country Strong).

With an outdoor art museum, a sprawling mansion-turned-museum and beautiful gardens, Cheekwood could be an all-day activity. Once home to the Cheek family, who launched Maxwell House Coffee, the estate is now a privately funded botanical garden and museum. The latter houses American and British art, and the outdoor gardens have spectacular hilltop views and a sculpture trail hidden among the foliage.

This hands-on museum features eight areas, including those that encourage dress-up, interactive play on a “pirate ship,” and an art room. It’s appropriate for and appeals to children ranging in age from 2-10.

The historic Colony Theatre has undergone a multi-year renovation to restore and update it to its former glory. Miami New Drama, the theater company that will oversee the Colony, will perform innovative plays produced exclusively for the theater.

Dedicated to the long history of country music, the Country Music Hall of Fame opened in 1961 in Nashville, a location selected for its crucial role in the industry’s development. The original museum was located on Music Row, but the current one is just off Broadway in downtown Nashville.

The late Trammell Crow, who passed away in 2009, was one of Dallas’s best-known real estate developers. He and his wife, Margaret, shared a lifelong fascination with Asian art and together took numerous trips to China (the first in 1976, when few Westerners were issued visas to the country), Japan, Nepal, India, Cambodia and Tibet. From the impressive collection they amassed, more than 300 pieces are on display on three floors in a building opposite the Nasher Sculpture Center; among the highlights are jade ornaments from China, Japanese scrolls and a 28-foot-high sandstone façade from an 18th-century Indian residence. At once extremely personal and museum-quality, the Crow collection is a must-see for anyone interested in Asian art. Admission is free.

The downtown Dallas Arts District, whose centerpiece is an ultramodern performance center designed by Sir Norman Foster, has given buzz a new meaning. During the preliminary planning the city fought hard—and raised unprecedented funds—for the 68-acre complex, whose completion required some three decades. Then came the long-awaited opening, with a week-long series of celebrations and a flurry of reviews, both positive and negative. Now is the—perhaps most important— postopening period, when the new neighborhood must establish itself in a city more famous for football and corporate headquarters than for Shakespeare and Puccini.

The good news is that from an architectural standpoint, the additions to such Art District heavy-hitters as the I.M. Pei–designed Meyerson Symphony Hall and Renzo Piano’s graceful Nasher Sculpture Center are ambitious and innovative.

The Winspear Opera House (2403 Flora St) created by Foster + Partners, centers on 60-foot-tall glass walled lobby positioned under a steel aluminum-slatted drum intended to deflect the sun and create a cooler microclimate around the house. The bright-red drum rises above the solar canopy like a mod top hat lends a playful touch of color to the district. Inside, the state-of-the-art performance hall has some of the best acoustics in the country; even the stage curtain received special artistic treatment: mixed-media artist Guillermo Kuitca designed an abstraction of the seating plan that was reproduced on the fabric.

Across the street, the Wyly Theatre (2400 Flora St) is much smaller and more contained but no less stunning. Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus’s sleek theater is clad in aluminum poles of varying sizes, giving the façade an almost fluid texture—like a rippling curtain frozen in space. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote that these new buildings “sit comfortably alongside older structures like I.M. Pei’s concert hall and Edward Larrabee Barnes’s art museum, extending the conversation across generations as well as contrasting architectural philosophies.”

Part of the downtown Arts District, the city’s major art institution, the Dallas Museum of Art, contains everything from ancient Mediterranean artifacts to contemporary art, although some collections are stronger than others (which has led to criticisms of lack of focus). In 2005 three prominent local families bequeathed to the museum more than 800 works of modern and contemporary art, significantly improving its holdings. Don’t miss the large Ancient American Art section, which displays ceramics from the Southwestern U.S., Mexico and Guatemala, gold from Panama, Colombia and Peru, and textiles and ceramics from Peru. Also worth visiting is the contemporary wing, which has several smaller galleries showcasing often-changing exhibits. The large windows of the soaring atrium—where jazz concerts are performed every Thursday evening at 6 and 8 P.M.—are adorned with colorful oversized glass flowers by Dale Chihuly, giving the whole space a charming Alice in Wonderland feeling. Closed Monday.

Built around 1828, the Edmonston-Alston House is one of the oldest buildings on the Battery and features great views of the harbor. Many of Charleston’s grandest houses were, in fact, just one of multiple residences owned by wealthy landowners—the in-town homes allowed residents to take advantage of the city's cultural offerings and social gatherings and provided respite from malaria-ridden swamps.