Asheville or West Palm Beach?

This is the widest gap between the two. Asheville is hours from any sea, and swimming there means plunging into waterfall pools in Pisgah, riding Sliding Rock or floating the French Broad, all of it cold even in July.

West Palm Beach has a whole coast of choice: Midtown Beach and Phipps Ocean Park on Palm Beach, the broader sands of Singer Island and Juno, and sheltered lagoon water at Peanut Island. Because the Gulf Stream runs close by, the sea is warm in every month, so a beach day is possible whenever you go.

Asheville is the more interesting place to eat and drink. Its breweries are a reason to visit in themselves, spread across downtown, the South Slope and West Asheville. The kitchens cook from Appalachian farms, with trout, ramps, heirloom corn, barbecue and biscuits.

West Palm Beach is about comfort rather than discovery. You get grilled grouper and stone crab, waterfront terraces on Clematis Street and clubby lunches on Palm Beach, with Cuban and Haitian counters further out. It is good eating, but it lacks the regional identity Asheville builds its evenings around.

Asheville offers more to see. The Biltmore Estate alone fills a day with its Olmsted gardens and Vanderbilt rooms. The downtown of 1920s Art Deco and Beaux-Arts buildings, from the domed City Hall to the Basilica of St Lawrence, rewards a slow walk.

West Palm's strength is a single good museum, the Norton, along with Flagler's Whitehall mansion and the Mediterranean Revival villas of Palm Beach. Its own downtown is mostly modern, so the architecture lies across the lagoon rather than underfoot.

Neither is a late-night city, but Asheville makes for the better evening. You can walk between taprooms, cocktail bars and dives downtown and on the South Slope, and the Haywood Road bars in West Asheville have a looser feel. It is about beer and conversation, mostly winding down by midnight.

West Palm concentrates its nights on a few blocks of Clematis Street and Rosemary Square, with rooftop terraces, sports bars and a couple of dance spots that come alive at weekends. Weeknights and summer are quiet, and anyone wanting proper clubbing ends up driving to Miami.

Asheville is built for the outdoors. The Blue Ridge Parkway, Pisgah National Forest, Mount Mitchell and the Great Smoky Mountains are all within about an hour. The range runs from waterfall strolls to the Art Loeb Trail, Pisgah's bike trails and rafting on the Nantahala, and the seasons change the scenery from spring azaleas to October colour.

West Palm's outdoors is flat and largely aquatic. Its best is the snorkelling under the Blue Heron Bridge, paddling on the lagoon and the Everglades edge at Loxahatchee with its alligators and wading birds. It is rewarding, but summer heat limits it to mornings, and there is no high ground at all.

The two are broadly level, but the outings feel quite different. From Asheville, most trips head into landscape and small mountain towns: Brevard's waterfall country, the Carl Sandburg Home at Flat Rock, Black Mountain, and Cherokee for the region's Native history.

West Palm Beach has one big city on its doorstep. Miami's South Beach, Little Havana and Wynwood are about an hour away by fast train, with Fort Lauderdale, Delray's Morikami Gardens and Boca Raton closer still. The rest of what lies within reach is mostly more coastal towns.

West Palm Beach is the easier family base. Calm lagoon swimming at Peanut Island and guarded beaches cover most days. Lion Country Safari, the zoo, the science centre and aquarium, and the free Manatee Lagoon fill the rest.

Asheville suits active children who like hiking, tubing and zip lines. It has the WNC Nature Center's bears and wolves and the Biltmore farmyard, but no zoo or aquarium, and the nearest big theme park is two hours over the mountains.

Both are car country once you leave the centre, but West Palm Beach copes a little better without one. Its flat downtown has a free trolley, the Lake Trail makes cycling over to Palm Beach pleasant, and fast trains run to Fort Lauderdale and Miami.

Asheville's hilly downtown is walkable, but buses are thin. The Parkway, trailheads and Biltmore really need a car, and the winding mountain roads clog on October weekends.

West Palm Beach is the stronger shopping trip because of Worth Avenue. It brings luxury fashion and jewellery in tiled courtyards and vias, plus designer resale shops, Antique Row on South Dixie Highway and mainstream brands at Rosemary Square.

Asheville has no luxury labels or department stores to speak of. It sells something West Palm lacks entirely, Appalachian craft: pottery, glass, woodwork and weaving from the River Arts District studios and the Folk Art Center, with independent boutiques in the Grove Arcade.

A stay in Asheville comes out cheaper overall. Rooms climb on autumn leaf weekends and a day at Biltmore is costly, but midweek and winter stays are easier on the budget, and the trails, waterfalls and Parkway cost nothing.

West Palm Beach is the dearer of the two, most of all from December to April, when Palm Beach hotels are among the costliest on the coast and restaurants charge for a well-off crowd. Summer rates fall sharply, but you pay for that in heat and storms, and a hire car adds to the bill in either place.

Asheville has the edge for music lovers, mainly because of its roots tradition. There are bluegrass and old-time jams in pubs, buskers downtown, free fiddle and clogging evenings at Shindig on the Green, and the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, which dates from 1928. Touring indie and Americana acts play most nights.

West Palm Beach leans formal and seasonal. The Kravis Center brings Broadway tours, orchestras and the Palm Beach Opera, and Palm Beach Dramaworks stages serious plays, but the calendar thins out in summer and everyday live music is mostly cover bands.

Asheville has the deeper tradition of rest. It grew as a mountain health resort, and that history lives on in retreats, yoga studios, hillside resort spas and the riverside mineral tubs at Hot Springs, about forty minutes away.

West Palm Beach offers relaxation of a sunnier, simpler kind. You have oceanfront resort spas, the slow, manicured calm of Palm Beach and early walks along the lagoon promenades, though there is no bathing or spa culture of its own.