Louisville or New Orleans?

Neither city is a place for a beach trip, and for most visitors to either one, swimming means a hotel pool. Louisville's nearest option is the reservoir lakes out in the Kentucky countryside, which are good for lake bathing and boating.

New Orleans has slightly more to offer. The Mississippi Gulf Coast around Bay St. Louis and Gulfport is well over an hour's drive away, and its water is warm in summer but shallow and murky rather than clear.

Louisville eats and drinks well around one subject, bourbon. Whiskey Row has bars pouring hundreds of labels, and there are a few local dishes worth trying: the hot brown, burgoo and Derby pie. Away from the Southern tradition, the choice thins out quickly.

New Orleans is in another league. It has a whole cuisine of its own, with Creole dining rooms in the French Quarter that have served the same dishes for over a century, po'boy shops in Mid-City, gumbo, étouffée and a calendar set by crawfish and oysters. Both cities treat a drink as part of the meal, but the Sazerac and the Vieux Carré were born in New Orleans, and the cooking around them is much deeper.

Louisville's sights follow its fame. Churchill Downs and the Derby Museum, the Muhammad Ali Center and the Slugger Museum on Whiskey Row fill two or three good days, and Old Louisville's Victorian mansions make a fine afternoon walk.

New Orleans gives you more to explore. The French Quarter is an old colonial town with iron balconies, courtyards, Jackson Square and the Cabildo, where Louisiana passed to the United States. Add the Garden District's antebellum houses, the above-ground tombs and the National WWII Museum. Neither city has a long list of great museums, but New Orleans has far more history in its streets.

Both cities go out in bars rather than clubs, but on very different scales. In Louisville, a night out means the dive bars and patios of Bardstown Road, bourbon bars in NuLu and the chain-bar block at Fourth Street Live. The city only really cuts loose around the Derby.

New Orleans has no legal closing time, and you can carry your drink down the street in a plastic cup, so evenings drift from one bar to the next. Bourbon Street is the loud, neon end of it. Frenchmen Street and the corner bars of the Bywater are where locals go. Watch for pickpockets in the late crowds.

Louisville has the edge here, and more variety in the land itself. Cherokee and Iroquois parks give wooded hills and views over the city, the Falls of the Ohio has fossil beds you can walk out on, and Jefferson Memorial Forest and Bernheim Forest are good for proper woodland hikes. Mammoth Cave is close enough for a day.

New Orleans is flat and wet, and its nature is on the water. Boat and kayak trips run through cypress swamps with alligators and herons, and the Barataria Preserve has boardwalk trails. In summer the heat makes all of it hard going.

Louisville has the better spread of outings, and most of them lead to bourbon or horses. You can tour distilleries around Bardstown and Lawrenceburg, see the white-fenced farms and Keeneland racecourse near Lexington, or visit Shaker Village and Lincoln's birthplace. You need a car and someone who isn't tasting.

From New Orleans, the classic outing is the River Road to the sugar plantations, where the Whitney's account of slavery stays with most visitors. Baton Rouge and the quiet Gulf towns are easy trips too, but the Cajun prairie around Lafayette is about as far as a day allows.

Both cities work well with children, and both are hard going in the hot summer. Louisville is the more relaxed choice, with roller coasters and a water park at Kentucky Kingdom, underground ziplines in the Mega Cavern and the hands-on Science Center, although you need a car to get between them.

New Orleans makes the outings themselves part of the fun: rides on the streetcar and the paddle-steamer, the Audubon Zoo's swamp area, the riverfront aquarium and the parade crowds along St. Charles Avenue. The trade-off is closer watch over where you walk after dark, with Bourbon Street off limits at night.

Louisville is built around the car. It has no rail transit, and Churchill Downs, the Highlands and the big parks are all a drive apart, though light traffic makes the driving easy.

New Orleans is far easier without a car. The French Quarter, the Marigny and the Warehouse District sit close together on flat ground, and the slow green St. Charles streetcar reaches Uptown. Ride-hailing covers the airport and the swamps, and a car is only worth having for day trips.

Louisville's best souvenir is in a bottle. Distillery shops sell bourbons that are hard to find elsewhere, and beyond that there are NuLu's few boutiques and the vintage and record shops of Bardstown Road.

New Orleans has more to browse and more that is its own. Royal Street has antique dealers selling chandeliers and estate jewellery, Magazine Street has miles of independent shops, and the city has its own line in Mardi Gras masks and pralines. Neither city is a place for designer labels.

Overall costs are much alike, but they fall in different places. In Louisville, beds are the bargain outside the racing season, while a hire car or ride-hailing, plus tax and tips on every meal, push up the daily bill.

New Orleans works the other way round. Rooms near the Quarter are the big expense, while po'boys, the streetcar and free music in the streets keep the days cheap. In both cities, the big festival weeks (the Derby in Louisville, Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest in New Orleans) are the ones to avoid on a budget.

For live music, New Orleans is far ahead, as the birthplace of jazz. There are brass bands and zydeco on Frenchmen Street every night, second-line parades on Sundays, and Jazz Fest in spring.

Louisville's strength is the formal season New Orleans largely lacks. The Kentucky Center hosts the orchestra, opera and ballet, Actors Theatre has a long record of staging new American plays, and the bars on Bardstown Road add bluegrass and Americana. It is reliable, but it is rarely the reason for a trip.

Neither city has a bathing or spa tradition, so in both you are left with hotel spas and a slow pace. Louisville's idea of unwinding is a porch in the Highlands or a drive through horse country, and for a real spa break, the old mineral-spring resorts of French Lick and West Baden Springs are about an hour and a half away. New Orleans offers quiet courtyard guesthouses, streetcar rides under the oaks and lazy afternoons in City Park.