Nashville or Wilmington?

Nashville is hundreds of kilometres from the sea. Its swimming means the small roped-off areas at Percy Priest Lake and Old Hickory Lake, and locals spend hot weekends on pontoon boats rather than on sand.

Wilmington has a real choice of beaches. Wrightsville is wide and polished with a fishing pier, Carolina Beach has a boardwalk, and Kure is quieter. The sea is warm from late May into October. Each beach is a short drive from the city, and rip currents mean you should swim near the lifeguards.

Nashville has its own signature dish in hot chicken, a whole cafeteria tradition in meat-and-three, and chef-led kitchens in East Nashville and Germantown. Nolensville Pike adds international cooking that Wilmington largely lacks.

Wilmington eats from the coast: local shrimp, flounder and oysters, shrimp and grits, and vinegar-sauced whole-hog barbecue, with craft breweries in the north end of downtown. It is good for a few days, but the range is narrower and the beach towns lean on fried platters.

Nashville has the longer list of sights. Its museums tell the story of country and African American music, the Ryman is worth a daytime tour, and the Parthenon replica, the Frist's Art Deco galleries and the Hermitage add art and history. The streets themselves are mostly modern, though.

Wilmington works the other way round. Its few museums and the Battleship North Carolina fill a short visit, but its large historic district of antebellum houses and churches under live oaks is more attractive to walk through than anything in downtown Nashville.

Nashville's night out is on a different scale. Lower Broadway runs for several blocks of multi-storey honky-tonks with a band on every floor, and at weekends the whole strip carries on as one party until the small hours. If you want to avoid the hen and stag groups, East Nashville's dive bars and cocktail lounges and Midtown's student crowd give you other kinds of night out.

Wilmington is a smaller, easier version of that calmer side. Pubs, bars and rooftop terraces on and around Front Street fill with university students on weekend nights, and in summer Wrightsville and Carolina Beach add laid-back beach bars. Out of season, though, weeknights are quiet, while Broadway keeps going night after night all year. In neither city is the evening about DJs or dance clubs.

Wilmington's outdoors are on the water. You can kayak to undeveloped Masonboro Island, surf and paddleboard off Wrightsville, and find wild Venus flytraps in the pine savanna of Carolina Beach State Park. The ground is flat, though, and the marshes bring biting insects in summer.

Nashville's green spaces are gentler. Radnor Lake and the Warner Parks have wooded trails on low hills, the Harpeth suits an easy canoe trip, and the Natchez Trace Parkway is good for cycling. It has more for walkers, but less that you can't find elsewhere.

Both lists are made up of small towns rather than big destinations. Nashville's is more varied. Franklin's Main Street and Civil War battlefields are half an hour away, Leiper's Fork has galleries, the whiskey distilleries around Lynchburg are about an hour and a half away, and Chattanooga's Lookout Mountain is at the edge of a day out.

From Wilmington, the best outing is to riverside Southport and the ferry to car-free Bald Head Island, passing the Fort Fisher earthworks on the way. New Bern and Beaufort are about two hours north.

Nashville has good outings for children, all of them inside the city: the zoo at Grassmere, the Adventure Science Center with its planetarium, the Lane Motor Museum's odd cars and the Parthenon in Centennial Park. They are spread across a city built for the car, though, so a family day means a lot of driving from one to the next. Lower Broadway, the heart of downtown, is loud and built for adult drinking.

Wilmington is the easier choice, at least in summer. Children can spend whole days on the beaches, and Carolina Beach has an old-fashioned boardwalk with rides and arcades. The aquarium at Fort Fisher and the battleship's walk-through decks cover rainy days, and rental houses near the sand suit a family stay.

You'll want a car in both cities. Each has a small core you can walk and a bus network visitors rarely use.

What differs is the kind of driving. In Nashville, it means interstate traffic between the Opry, the Hermitage and neighbourhoods like 12 South, and the downtown streets are clogged with party vehicles. In Wilmington, the flat riverwalk links downtown, and the driving is mostly the 15km or more to the beaches, plus hunting for a parking space on summer weekends.

Nashville has a theme worth shopping for. Boot and hat stores line Lower Broadway, the guitar shops are among the best anywhere, and Hatch Show Print sells its letterpress concert posters. For quieter browsing, try the boutiques of 12 South and East Nashville.

Wilmington's shopping is pleasant but low-key. It runs to antique dealers, bookshops and galleries along Front Street and in the Cotton Exchange, plus surf wear in the beach towns.

Wilmington is the gentler on the wallet, especially outside summer, when city hotel rooms are reasonable and seafood and barbecue are fair value. Beachfront rentals in high season and the hire car you can't avoid push costs up.

Nashville's downtown hotels are expensive, above all at weekends when groups fill them, and ride-hailing across the spread-out city adds up. The honky-tonks charge no cover, though, so the music that most visitors come for costs little.

Live music is the main reason most people come to Nashville, and the city has far more of it. The Grand Ole Opry plays several nights a week, touring artists of every genre fill the Ryman's pews, and in small rooms songwriters play their own hits on acoustic guitars. There is also bluegrass near the Gulch and the symphony in the Schermerhorn, and the Tennessee Performing Arts Center stages ballet, opera and touring musicals.

Wilmington has an active scene for a city its size. Thalian Hall, a restored 19th-century opera house, stages theatre and music, outdoor stages by Greenfield Lake and the riverfront host touring bands in the warmer months, and long-running jazz and blues festivals are part of the calendar. You would fit these around a beach trip rather than plan the trip around them.

Neither city has a bathing or spa tradition, so wellness in both means day spas and hotel spas. The difference is the mood. Wilmington moves slowly, its waterfront evenings are calm, and outside summer weekends it is easy to switch off. Nashville's downtown is built for noise and late nights, and real quiet means staying out in leafy Belmont or Hillsboro.