Cool points of interests depend on your interests. I am a geologist, with a sense of geological time scale, so the Holbrook meteor crater is a key point of interest. It is as if this relatively small piece of rock hit us just yesterday, and today another could wipe out the human race in an instant.
But I was first trained as a historian, so I like to visit early settlements (San Antonio is great for this). Otherwise, a quiet place in a forest with wildlife wandering through the camp; national forests work for this.
OTOH, my two youngest sisters will be traveling from theme park to theme park, and my oldest daughter is looking for hotels with ghost stories, my youngest for art museums and galleries (so she would be headed to Taos and Santa Fe). My grandson, I'd be taking to historic railroads.
