Columbia

Lia and I got to Columbia a day before the wedding we’d flown in for, with nothing to do but wander, and wandering turned out to be the whole point of the place. Missouri’s fifth-largest city has no single skyline-defining feature — no river, no mountain — just three universities stacked on top of each other and a downtown grid, known simply as the District, that has learned to entertain a permanently rotating population of eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds without losing its own character. We liked it more with every block.

The District and Mizzou

The University of Missouri’s columns — six freestanding Ionic pillars, all that remains of the original Academic Hall after an 1892 fire — stand at the center of Francis Quadrangle like ruins that refuse to finish falling, and they’ve become the unofficial symbol of the whole town. We walked the quad at golden hour, past students studying on the grass, then dropped downhill into the District for dinner at Shakespeare’s Pizza, a Columbia institution since 1973 whose thin, oily, slightly charred pies are argued over with the seriousness locals usually reserve for football. Ninth Street and Broadway were loud with bar crowds by the time we left, a college-town Friday running exactly on schedule.

The Katy Trail and wine country

The next morning, hungover on Shakespeare’s alone, we rented bikes and rolled onto the Katy Trail, the 240-mile rail-trail that traces the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad along the Missouri River. Columbia sits near the trail’s midpoint, and a short spur south of town drops you into the rolling hills around Rocheport, where limestone bluffs shadow the river and Les Bourgeois Vineyards pours wine from a deck cantilevered right over the valley. We rode maybe fifteen miles round trip, ate cheese on that deck as the sun dropped, and agreed it was the best unplanned afternoon of the whole trip.

Parks and a quieter Columbia

Away from campus, Columbia keeps a surprising amount of green space — Rock Bridge Memorial State Park, just south of the city, hides a natural limestone bridge and a cave system you can hike straight through without a permit. We spent a humid morning there, boots soaked from creek crossings, grateful for tree cover the campus quads didn’t offer. It reminded us that Columbia, for all its bar-and-brick-street bustle, is still very much a Missouri farm town wearing a university on top.

Getting There

Columbia Regional Airport offers limited direct flights, mostly to Chicago and Dallas, but most visitors drive: Columbia sits almost exactly halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City on I-70, about two hours from each. The drive itself, rolling farmland broken by the occasional grain silo, is a fair introduction to mid-Missouri before you even arrive. Once in town, the District and Mizzou campus are entirely walkable, though a bike is the better way to reach the Katy Trail.