(FORTUNE Magazine) – There is nothing worse than boarding a plane in the middle of a monotonous business trip--rental car, meeting, hotel bar, repeat--and passing those airline-sponsored advertisements for the more glamorous possibilities of travel: a jazzy guy catches air on the slopes in Colorado; the romantic lights of Paris flicker and reflect in the Seine. And you? It's Tuesday, and you're on your way to Kansas City. Again.

Cheer up. Business travel can be a great way to steal a look at the country and enrich your knowledge of the wide world of commerce, especially when you find yourself with some company time to kill or are bold enough to take a half-day off. In that spirit, we've made a list of five great side trips from major American business cities. Our only two criteria: These destinations had to be able to show you cool stuff about business, and they had to feel more like fun than like homework.

So get out there. Even in an age of teleconferencing and remote access, there is still no substitute for seeing something for yourself. It is, after all, why we go on business trips in the first place.

NeW YORK CITY SIDE TRIP

STEINWAY & SONS FACTORY

THIS PIANO-MAKING FACTORY in Queens, N.Y., is simply a jewel. Its 2½-hour tour is a master class in the kind of quality and attention to detail that is so often sacrificed in other businesses. It's also a snap to get to if you're in the city on business: Steinway is a $2 subway ride on the N or W train to Ditmars Boulevard or a five-minute cab ride from LaGuardia Airport. (The tours are free and run every Monday and Tuesday at 9:15 A.M. A description is available at www.steinway.com; call 718-721-2600 to reserve a space.)

Steinway pianos are put together by hand, and each one takes about a year to construct. A baby grand costs $38,900 and a concert grand $99,900. (Competitors like Yamaha make many of their pianos in less than a month, for far less money--one reason Steinway owns only 3% of the total piano market but thoroughly dominates the high-end segment.) The knowledgeable tour guides lead you through each step of the painstaking process, and the result is a much more intimate understanding of a product than you get at just about any other factory tour. Each floor is an open, loftlike space populated by different workstations: Here, a man arranges the planks of the soundboard by the color and angle of the grain so that the finished product gives the impression of having been cut whole from a single giant tree; there, a woman meticulously strings fiber bushing through a pivot.

The tours are usually in the morning so that visitors can catch the "bending of the rim." Like the addition of the third pedal, this is a Steinway innovation that has been copied everywhere. Before 1880 the rim of the piano--the billowing front of it--was made of three pieces. Steinway introduced 20- to 24-foot-long planks of maple, which are strong and pliant enough to be bent into a triple-curving shape. It takes eight large men to bend the wood around a giant steel piano-shaped frame and lock it in place with a vise, where it stays for 24 hours.

At the end of the tour you go into a soundproof room to watch a piano being tuned by hand; if you're lucky, one of the tuners will play Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" for you. By then, you'll understand not only how a piano works and is built but also the level of commitment required to do precise, high-quality work. That in itself is worth the trip for anyone in any field.

All the obsession over spare-no-expense quality can, of course, come off as a little haughty and out of touch with the market-driven realities of the modern world. That's part of the point. "We do whatever it takes to make the best pianos, and then put a price on them," says Leo Spellman, senior director of communications. "Other companies find the greatest profit-value opportunity. That's inherently a compromise."

LAS VEGAS SIDE TRIP

THE HOOVER DAM

ONLY 40 MINUTES AWAY from the glitter of the Strip is one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 20th century. Built in the 1930s, the Hoover Dam is bigger than the largest of the pyramids at Giza. It may also have their longevity: Many engineers think that when the rest of American civilization is gone--when California has sunk into the sea and forests cover Manhattan--the Hoover Dam will remain standing just as it is today, the last monument to its time.

And how it stands! It is a kind of architectural Disneyland. Astride the towering, fjordlike walls of Black Canyon, it rises up 726 feet and weighs 6.6 million tons. The art deco design gives it a triumphant, magisterial look: Above the dam, the intake towers stand like giant sentries guarding Lake Mead reservoir. Below, the Colorado--the steepest and most ferocious of America's rivers--behaves politely, like a wild animal tamed. Imagine how the dam must have looked to the men and women of the Depression! Most would have never seen a structure so large in their lives. Even more amazing, it went up in just three years. One hundred and twelve men died during its construction.

More important than how it looked, though, is what it did. The Hoover Dam truly "made the desert bloom," altering forever the fate of the West. Before it, the mighty Colorado--which changed course regularly, caused widespread flooding, and was thick with silt--had been unusable. Now, water and electricity the dam provided irrigated orange groves and powered cities.

The Bureau of Reclamation, which began building the dam in 1931 and still runs it today, offers tours every 15 minutes or so. They take about an hour and include a short movie, a trip 500 feet down into the dam to the generator room, a museum, and a nice overlook ($10 for adults; call 866-291-8687 or visit www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam). If you've visited before, you might be disappointed at first: Before 9/11, the tour inside the dam was more extensive. (You got to see the diversion tunnels that were built to redirect the river during construction, and there was a great view looking up from the platform at the bottom of the dam.) Still, today's version is unquestionably worth the trip when you consider that many similar projects in Europe are not open to the public at all.

On a sunny day--which is pretty much always--the site is packed with visitors strolling across the dam's wide walkways in their fanny packs and WORLD'S BEST GRANDPA T-shirts, snapping pictures of the epic Black Canyon landscape and of the dam itself. One piece of advice: Don't imagine that you'll be able to capture the scene in one easy snapshot. It won't fit. Perhaps the most overheard line at the dam is "Hon, does your camera have a panoramic function?"

AUSTIN SIDE TRIP

CATTLE AUCTION

GOING TO A CATTLE AUCTION in Texas is something like attending a rural rap concert. The fast-talking auctioneer presides over the small auditorium like a talented emcee--"Now, here's a nice pretty young thing, boys. She's too much! I've got 800 here, 810 now, 20, 30, 40. Mike says 850 here. Oooh, boys, she's got too much red on her now for that, boys, 900 now, 910 here, 20 here, 30 here"--the audience engages in the ritualistic call-and- response, and the pace never slackens.

Of course, most people don't go to cattle auctions, because they think they don't like them. But unless you're a vegetarian, you need to see this: Annual beef sales in the U.S. total nearly $60 billion, and the average American consumes more than 66 pounds of the stuff each year. From a commercial point of view, it's a fascinating look at a huge industry that simply can never be automated.

From the outside, the Lockhart Auction house, about a 40-minute drive from Austin, doesn't seem like much. But inside on Thursdays at 11:30, it's bustling with big guys in hats (cowboy or trucker), boots (dirty, old), and Wrangler jeans (part of the dress code). The ranchers affect a down-home style, but they're trafficking in serious money, as indicated by the parking lot out front filled with pricey, decked-out trucks. Between 700 and 1,000 cattle are sold every week in Lockhart, producing gross daily revenue of $650,000 to $700,000, of which the auction house takes a 3.5% cut.

It goes down like this: The cattle are kept in a maze of pens out back until their number is called. They are weighed, announced, and then paraded out in front of the packed auditorium. The auctioneer charges toward a sale, occasionally veering into scat rap--"hadeladdaladda"--until a buyer is determined. There is a brief silence, punctuated by a few spits of chewing tobacco, and the process begins again. Like a fashion show, but with cows. (Admission is free; call 512-398-3476 for information.)

One great thing about visiting a cattle auction is that you can do it easily from most major cities in the Midwest. There are lots of them, and they're pretty much all alike; the best way to find one is through your state's department of agriculture website. I picked Lockhart largely because the town also happens to be the Official Barbecue Capital of Texas. If you go there too, here's how to complete your understanding of America's food economy: After a few hours at the auction, leave the ranchers to their bovines and head for Smitty's (208 South Commerce Street, 512-398-9344). Order juicy beef brisket on brown paper with no sauce and no fork.

BOSTON SIDE TRIP

LOWELL TEXTILE FACTORIES

IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE it now, but there was once a time when industry was full of idealism. That time --and its inevitable end--are best glimpsed in Lowell, Mass., the first planned industrial town in the U.S. and the only one where the factories were staffed exclusively by young women. Lowell doesn't produce textiles anymore, but it has been preserved and restored--complete with glass-bottomed-boat tours of the canal ($8) and extensive museums featuring every possible iteration of the loom. It's a kind of industrial Williamsburg (Lowell National Historical Park, www.nps.gov/lowe).

The idealism at work in Lowell was a direct reaction to the ills of European industry: the horrible working conditions, the exploitation of a permanent lower class, the constant labor struggles. Lowell's founders were determined to make industry "good" in America, and their solution was to staff the factories with "mill girls." These young women left homes on the farm to live in boarding houses, work 14-hour days (by lamplight in winter), and make $14 a month. The experiment worked for a while. Its undoing was, of course, competition.

In the early 1830s, management reduced wages twice in quick succession and Lowell saw its first protests. "We will show this mushroom aristocracy of New England that our rights cannot be trampled with impunity!" the girls' literary magazine, the Lowell Offering, exclaimed. But it was no use. By the 1840s the disgruntled mill girls were simply replaced by immigrants--Irish, French Canadian, Greek, Portuguese, anyone desperate enough for the low-paying, onerous work. Then steam power replaced the water-powered system on which Lowell was based. Before the Civil War, Lowell had been the largest industrial center in America; by 1930 it had ground to a virtual halt. Textiles had moved south.

Visiting Lowell today is like taking a walking tour of the Industrial Revolution. The smokestacks tower over the city, the machinery still clangs along at a dangerous-looking pace, and the well-preserved brick architecture is appropriately imposing. The picturesque museum and working mills at Boott Mills ($6) are enough in themselves to justify the 40-minute drive from Boston. Also, the sandwiches at Olive That & More (167 Market Street; 978-275-1931) are pretty darn good.

But ultimately it's what's left of the mill girls' voices that hits home the hardest--from their first polite bleats of complaint ("I like the factory less than my native dell," one wrote home in a letter) to their final, defeated frustration over an existence orchestrated "to the obedience of that dingdong of a bell--just as though we were so many living machines." The loss of idealism--the young girls' and young America's--is a sad story, and Lowell tells it beautifully.

SEATTLE SIDE TRIP

THE BOEING FACTORY

IF YOU VISIT the Boeing plant in Everett, Wash., 40 minutes outside Seattle, you will not leave knowing much more than you do now about how the hell a winged bus weighing 870,000 fully loaded pounds can get off the ground, much less fly over oceans. What you will leave with is an awestruck appreciation of the magnitude of the task. Like the tour at Hoover Dam, this has the visual wow factor, bigtime. (For information and reservations, call 800-464-1476. Tours run every half-hour in summer, every hour in winter.)

The tour ($10 for reservations; $5 for walk-ins) begins with a short movie, then a bus ride around the 1,000-acre campus--past epic-sized hangars, testing runways, and a painting facility that looks bigger than the Superdome. It all feels faintly illegal, as if you've busted past security without taking off your shoes or showing anyone your boarding pass.

The factory itself is cavernous, and visitors are allowed to see it only from a midlevel balcony. The building rings with the sounds of whirring machines and the faint beat of blues rock being pumped from a workstation below. Hefty machinists in T-shirts that say things like REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT look like ants as they ride across the 100-acre floor on company-issued tricycles. Look, there's a new 747 being built for China Airlines! According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this is the biggest building in the world! Did you hear that Air France is putting in first-class seats that cost $50,000 a pop? Holy cow!

Boeing shuffles nearly 100,000 people a year through the building, so the tour is tailored to a mass audience, replete with cheesy tour-guide standup ("Remember, folks, if it's not Boeing, I'm not going!"). But you'll learn some stunning facts, and you'll figure out how to distinguish a 777 from a 767. It isn't high-level aerodynamics, but it's really big, very cool, and definitely worth seeing. ■

FEEDBACK gdavid@fortunemail.com

THE BOEING FACTORY