Atlanta or New Orleans?

Neither city is a beach destination, and in both, swimming in town means a hotel pool. The difference is what you drive to. From Atlanta, about an hour takes you to the sandy swimming areas of Lake Lanier or Lake Allatoona, which are relaxed local lake days. From New Orleans, a drive of well over an hour takes you to real salt water at Bay St. Louis and Gulfport, though it is shallow and brownish rather than clear.

New Orleans has the stronger food culture because its cuisine is entirely its own. Gumbo, étouffée, crawfish boils in spring and chargrilled oysters in the cooler months are part of the place, and the Sazerac and the Vieux Carré were invented there. Most of it is within walking distance in the Quarter, Mid-City and the Bywater.

Atlanta offers more variety. You get Southern cooking in meat-and-three cafeterias and west-side soul food kitchens, and also Korean, Vietnamese and Ethiopian food along Buford Highway, but you will need a car to get to much of it. New Orleans is the better trip for depth, and Atlanta suits people who want different cuisines from one day to the next.

New Orleans has the old townscape that Atlanta lost when it burned in 1864. The French Quarter's iron balconies and courtyards, Jackson Square with the Cabildo, the Garden District mansions and the above-ground tombs are all good for wandering, and the National WWII Museum is a serious collection.

Atlanta's sights are mostly indoors and more recent, but they carry great weight. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, the civil rights centre and the High Museum together make two or three days of focused sightseeing. They are not a district to explore on foot.

New Orleans has the better nights out, partly because of how the city works: bars never close, you can carry a drink along the street, and you can walk from Frenchmen Street to a Bywater dive without needing a ride. Bourbon Street is the loud, neon end of it, with pickpockets to watch for.

Atlanta's nightlife is built around clubs rather than bars. It has the big hip-hop rooms the city is famous for, a large LGBTQ scene in Midtown and bottle service in Buckhead. Each area is a separate pocket, though, so a night out usually means picking one district and staying there.

Atlanta has the better outdoors. Its tall tree canopy, the BeltLine trail and Piedmont Park are close by in town, and within half an hour you can climb the granite of Stone Mountain or float the Chattahoochee. Two hours north, the Blue Ridge foothills give you proper hiking.

New Orleans's landscape is all water and flat ground. Its strengths are boat and kayak trips through cypress swamps with alligators and herons, the Barataria Preserve boardwalks and the old live oaks of City Park. Both are hard going in high summer.

The two cities are evenly matched here, and in both a car does most of the work. From Atlanta you drive to small towns: Athens for college-town music, Dahlonega's gold-rush square and wineries, the pre-Civil War houses of Madison, or Chattanooga's aquarium and Lookout Mountain. From New Orleans the main outing is the River Road plantations, where the Whitney tells the story of the people enslaved there. You can also make a slower day of it in Gulf towns like Ocean Springs, or a long one out to the Cajun dance halls around Lafayette.

Atlanta is the easier city with children, and the bigger one for them. The Georgia Aquarium's whale sharks and belugas, Zoo Atlanta, the Fernbank dinosaurs, the children's museum and the Center for Puppetry Arts all fit in town, with Six Flags and Stone Mountain's cable car on the edges. The cost is a lot of driving and heavy traffic.

New Orleans has a solid but shorter list: Audubon Zoo's swamp exhibit, the riverfront aquarium and City Park's carousel and storybook garden. Streetcars, paddle steamers and the St. Charles Avenue parades add some magic. Parents need to plan evenings carefully around Bourbon Street and some of the streets after dark.

New Orleans is much easier to get around without a car. The French Quarter, the Marigny and the Warehouse District sit in a flat band along the river that you can walk, and the green St. Charles streetcars run on to the Garden District and Uptown. They are slow, but you can reach most of the city's sights without driving.

Atlanta only really works without a car along the single MARTA rail corridor from the airport to Buckhead, plus the BeltLine's Eastside Trail. Buford Highway, Stone Mountain and anything out of town mean renting a car or using a ride-hailing app, and you will meet notorious rush-hour traffic on the way.

The two are close, but they reward different shoppers. Atlanta is the place for brand names, with the big malls facing each other on Peachtree Road, designer boutiques in Buckhead Village and vintage shops in Little Five Points. New Orleans sells things you can only buy there: antique chandeliers and estate jewellery on Royal Street, miles of independent shops along Magazine Street, pralines and hot sauce at the French Market, and Carnival masks.

Overall costs are similar, but the money goes in different places. In Atlanta, rooms are fairly cheap away from Buckhead, while car hire, parking and steep entry charges at the family attractions add up. In New Orleans, rooms near the Quarter are the main expense and climb sharply around Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, but daily life is cheap: po'boys, the streetcar and free music on the street. The civil rights sites in Atlanta are free too.

New Orleans is the music city. Traditional jazz, brass bands, zydeco and funk play every night of the year on Frenchmen Street and in Tremé bars. Sunday second-line parades move through the neighbourhoods, and Jazz Fest is one of the big dates of the American music calendar.

Atlanta is stronger on formal arts. It has a full symphony, opera, ballet and the Alliance Theatre at the Woodruff Arts Center, and major hip-hop and R&B tours fill its arenas. Pick Atlanta for a season of concerts and theatre, and New Orleans for music you come across without booking.

Neither is a place to come just to unwind, but Atlanta has the one real draw. The Korean-style bathhouses in the north-eastern suburbs, with hot and cold pools, sauna rooms and lounging halls, make a genuine half-day of rest. New Orleans has only hotel day spas. What it offers instead is a slower pace: quiet courtyard mornings and lazy streetcar rides under the oaks.