Eau Claire — pronounced "Oh Claire", from the French eaux claires, "clear waters" — is a small Wisconsin college town of around 70,000 people, set at the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers in the state's north-west. It was built on lumber: in the 1880s this was the biggest sawmill town on the Chippewa, and the old logging heritage is still what most of its attractions are about. Today it lives off the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, a handful of tech and healthcare employers, and a surprisingly lively music and craft-beer scene that punches above its weight for a city this size.
For visitors the best single stop is Carson Park, a wooded peninsula on Half Moon Lake that holds the Paul Bunyan Logging Camp (an open-air museum of the 19th-century timber industry), the Chippewa Valley Museum, and a minor-league baseball stadium where a teenage Hank Aaron played his first professional season in 1952. Water Street, on the edge of the UWEC campus, is the college-bar strip and the best place for live music. Just up the road in Chippewa Falls, the Leinenkugel Brewing Company has been making beer since 1867 and still runs free tours. Downtown Eau Claire has been quietly reinvented over the last decade around the Pablo Center at the Confluence and the riverside Phoenix Park, home to a summer farmers' market and the Eaux Claires music festival when it runs.