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Places to go in Columbus.

Columbus, Pine Mountain, the Chattahoochee Valley. 4 places worth the drive in this corner of Georgia.

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F.D. Roosevelt State Park Forests

F.D. Roosevelt State Park

Pine Mountain, GA · Columbus

Georgia's largest state park sprawls across the Pine Mountain ridge, where FDR drove up from Warm Springs to picnic at Dowdell's Knob and look out over the valley he loved. The view from the Knob still opens the same way, 1,395 feet up at the range's high point, and a bronze Roosevelt sits at the overlook beside the stone grill the CCC built for him. The Pine Mountain Trail runs 23 miles through hardwood and pine to wildflower-edged streams, and the spring-fed Liberty Bell Pool, also CCC stonework, still cools swimmers all summer.

Little White House Attractions

Little White House

Warm Springs, GA · Columbus

Franklin Roosevelt built this modest pine cottage in 1932 and returned to it again and again to ease his polio in the nearby warm mineral springs, and it is where he died of a stroke on April 12, 1945. The rooms sit just as he left them, down to the Unfinished Portrait he was sitting for that morning, and the museum walks you through his Warm Springs years before the path leads to the small white house in the pines.

National Infantry Museum Attractions

National Infantry Museum

Columbus, GA · Columbus

Just outside the gates of Fort Moore, 190,000 square feet trace the American foot soldier from the Revolution to today, with a World War II Company Street of seven restored barracks and General Patton's old headquarters that you can walk right into. The Last 100 Yards ramp builds across eight pivotal battles in cast figures and sound, and outside, soil gathered from eight battlefields lies beneath Inouye Field where new soldiers take their oath. Admission is free, which is part of why readers keep voting it the best free museum in the country.

Lunchbox Museum Attractions

Lunchbox Museum

Columbus, GA · Columbus

Allen Woodall bought his first lunch boxes, a Green Hornet and a Dick Tracy, at an Atlanta fairgrounds in 1985, and the obsession that followed now fills these walls with more than 3,500 metal lunch boxes and matching thermoses, the largest such collection in the world. Rows of Roy Rogers, the Beatles, Disney characters and Saturday-morning cartoons climb floor to ceiling, a tin-litho timeline of American childhood from the 1950s through the school cafeterias of the 1980s. It anchors the Columbus Collective Museums inside a restored 1946 warehouse, where you can handle some of the boxes rather than just look.