Columbia sits in the middle of Missouri, halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City on Interstate 70, and it is very much a college town: the University of Missouri (Mizzou) has around 30,000 students, and two smaller liberal arts colleges — Stephens and Columbia College — add a few thousand more. In a state best known for its big cities and its rural counties, Columbia is the educated, politically quirky in-between, with a vocal independent bookstore scene, a respectable live music scene, and more coffee shops per capita than anywhere else in the state.
The heart of the city is downtown, bordered on the south by the Mizzou campus. The streets around Broadway and Ninth are lined with locally owned restaurants, bars, and the legendary Shakespeare's Pizza, which has been feeding generations of students since 1973. The campus itself is worth a walk: the Francis Quadrangle, with its six Ionic columns — all that remains of the original Academic Hall, which burned in 1892 — is one of the more atmospheric open spaces on any American campus. Mizzou is home to the Missouri School of Journalism, the oldest in the world, founded in 1908, and the True/False Film Festival every February draws some of the best documentary work of the year.
Outside term time the city empties out noticeably, but the surrounding countryside makes up for it. The MKT Trail, a rails-to-trails path, runs out of town and joins the longer Katy Trail, which follows the Missouri River for 240 miles — excellent, flat cycling through bluffs, farmland, and small river towns. Rock Bridge Memorial State Park, just south of the city, has limestone caves and sinkholes worth an afternoon's hike.
Columbia is a stopover more often than a destination, but it is a surprisingly pleasant one, and a useful base for exploring central Missouri wine country and the Katy Trail.