Panama City Beach or St. Louis?

Panama City Beach is built around its shoreline: some 43km of fine quartz sand, green water on calm days, a jetty-sheltered lagoon for small children and boat trips to the empty sands of Shell Island. Summer sea swimming is easy, though rip currents mean the flags must be watched.

St. Louis sits on working rivers with strong currents, far from any coast. Cooling off there means a pool or a long drive to an Ozark lake, so anyone wanting sand and sea should look south.

St. Louis eats better and with more character. Toasted ravioli, cracker-thin Provel pizza, gooey butter cake and serious rib barbecue are all its own, and The Hill's family trattorias, the Bosnian bakeries of Bevo Mill and the Soulard Market add depth.

Panama City Beach is about Gulf seafood, grouper, shrimp and local oysters eaten on dockside decks, which is pleasant after a day on the sand. Beyond that, chains and themed restaurants along Front Beach Road dominate.

Here the two are far apart. The Panama City Beach strip is mostly post-war condo towers, and the small Man in the Sea Museum and the older streets of St. Andrews across the bay are about all there is.

St. Louis has the Gateway Arch with its museum of westward expansion, the Old Courthouse of the Dred Scott case, free collections in Forest Park, the Cathedral Basilica's mosaics and the Wainwright Building, an early landmark of the skyscraper. It is easily worth two or three full days.

St. Louis gives more choice after dark, though it is split into separate pockets: corner taverns and blues bars in Soulard, bigger dance bars on Washington Avenue, the late-night Grove and the student Delmar Loop, often with a taxi in between.

Panama City Beach is simpler: decks over the sand, tiki huts and sports bars around Pier Park, lively on summer evenings and loud during March spring break. Out of season most of the town is quiet by mid-evening.

Both offer gentle rather than dramatic landscapes, but of very different kinds. Panama City Beach's outdoors is coastal and largely on the water: white dunes and pine flatwoods at St. Andrews State Park, a rare dune lake at Camp Helen, dolphin trips, paddleboarding on the bay and diving on offshore wrecks.

St. Louis looks inland, to the big woods and lakes of Forest Park, river bluffs and caves at Castlewood within an hour, the Ozark boulder fields further south and the Katy Trail for cyclists. In winter, bald eagles along the bluffs near Alton make a reason to go out in the cold.

St. Louis has the richer range. Cahokia Mounds, the UNESCO-listed remains of a great pre-Columbian city, is only twenty minutes away, and French colonial Ste. Genevieve, the German wine towns of Hermann and Augusta, and Mark Twain's Hannibal fill further days.

From Panama City Beach the best outing is along Scenic Highway 30A to the pastel planned towns of Seaside and Rosemary Beach, with the old oyster port of Apalachicola further east. From either base, every trip needs a car.

Both work well for children, in different ways. Panama City Beach is a classic beach vacation: shallow summer water, the safe lagoon for first snorkels, a water park, a marine park with dolphin shows and go-karts along the strip, with spring break the week to avoid.

St. Louis trades the sea for indoor adventure. The City Museum's tunnels and rooftop slides, the free zoo and science centre in Forest Park, the Magic House and the tram pods up the Arch keep children busy whatever the weather, though the attractions are spread out.

Neither city is easy without a car, but St. Louis is less hard. MetroLink links the airport with the Central West End, Forest Park and downtown, and those districts are walkable on their own, with uncongested roads for the rest.

Panama City Beach is a 43km ribbon along one road, served by a slow, sparse trolley-bus and patchy pavements. Summer traffic on Front Beach Road can crawl, and walking means strolling on the sand between beach accesses.

Neither city is worth the trip for shopping, and what each sells is entirely different. Panama City Beach is good for what a week on the sand needs: swimwear, boards, sunglasses and familiar American brands, all in one place at Pier Park, plus cheap, cheerful souvenirs from the strip's oversized beachwear barns. For anything with more personality you have to drive along 30A.

St. Louis is the better place to find something you could not buy at home. Its strengths are secondhand and independent: vintage clothes and old vinyl on Cherokee Street, shops for the student crowd around the Loop, galleries in the Central West End and spices from the Soulard Market. The big fashion labels are out in suburban malls, so it suits an afternoon of browsing rather than a shopping spree.

The two cost much the same overall, but the savings fall in different places. At Panama City Beach, a condo kitchen cuts meal costs and rates fall sharply outside summer and spring break, making long winter stays the cheapest option.

In St. Louis, hotels are cheaper than in coastal cities and the zoo, art museum, history museum and science centre are all free. In both places a hire car is close to essential, and that adds to the bill.

St. Louis is in another league. The Saint Louis Symphony, founded in 1880, plays in the ornate Powell Hall, the Fox Theatre hosts touring Broadway shows, the Muny stages musicals outdoors in Forest Park and the Opera Theatre runs an early-summer festival. The city of Chuck Berry also has a National Blues Museum and blues bars playing through the week.

At Panama City Beach, live performance means cover bands on bar decks and summer concerts at the shopping centre, with a modest season at the restored theatre across the bay.

Panama City Beach is the better place to slow down, and the setting does most of the work. From autumn to spring the sand empties, long walks by the water at sunset are easy and the town's pace drops a great deal. A few resort spas and the odd yoga session on the beach add to it. Summer and spring break are different: loud and crowded.

St. Louis has day spas, hotel spas and yoga studios in Clayton and the Central West End, but none of them is worth the journey. Its most restful hours are an unhurried morning in Forest Park or in the Japanese garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden.