2 Best Sights in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Overlooking Lake Michigan, this well-conceived children's museum epitomizes the concept of hands-on learning. Playing on Wisconsin's agricultural economy, the museum lets kids learn the basics of commerce in an exhibit where they pick and sell play apples. Other perennial favorites are the BodyWorks exhibit, with its amusingly graphic mock-ups of bodily functions; nimble kids can crawl through a huge heart to see how blood flows from one chamber to another. Toddler play spaces are well protected from the general flow of traffic.

Inside this enormous park are more than 3,000 wild animals and birds—including several endangered species—plus educational programs, narrated tram tours, and miniature-train rides. Japanese snow monkeys occupy their own island, and the grizzly bears are reliably entertaining. The hands-on children's area focuses on dairy animals (this is Wisconsin, after all), but there are many other critters to pet and hold.