Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, and the Baltics are built for summer. No heat problem, thinner crowds, and days that don’t end. Here’s the case.
Stories That Inspire the Way You Travel
I've been traveling since before I could walk. Literally. So when I write about a place, it's not from a brochure. It's from a terrace, a back road, a kitchen table, or a train I took because the timing was right. Some pieces are practical — the timing that matters, the question to ask before you book. Some are just stories I couldn't stop thinking about long enough to keep to myself. Pour yourself a coffee. Or wine. Probably wine.
Pull up a chair. This is where the stories live.
Let’s be honest about something. The advice to “avoid Europe in July and August” is useful for exactly the people who don’t need it. If you have school-aged children, a school calendar, or a job that shuts down in summer, you don’t have the luxury of going in September. July is July. August is August. […]
The United States has a geography problem in the way people talk about it. The good stuff, in the popular imagination, lives on the edges. New York. Miami. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Everything in between is flyover country — a term that says more about the traveler than the terrain. The terrain is spectacular. Between […]
There is a particular kind of traveler — and I suspect you know one, or are one — who will spend months planning a trip to the south of France and drive past some of the most beautiful coastline in the world without stopping. The Northeast has a proximity problem. It’s too close to feel […]
I know the South. Born in Maryland, grew up in Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, and Atlanta. Spent most of my summers in Charleston. Family scattered across Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee and the Carolinas meant long drives to see them, which I didn’t mind because it usually meant stopping at a yet-to-be-discovered barbecue spot. I’ve also lived […]
I have a confession that might surprise you, given what I do for a living. Some of the trips I think about most often weren’t to Portugal or Japan or the Amalfi Coast. They were within the United States. A long weekend somewhere I could drive to. A flight so short the ice in my […]
I’m home. Ten days in Portugal with Collette, twenty new acquaintances, and absolutely nothing on my to-do list. No restaurant reservations to confirm. No driving routes to second-guess. No backup hotels bookmarked in case something didn’t feel right. For the first time in longer than I can remember, my only job was to show up. […]
“We’re thinking about a group tour.” It’s one of the more common ways a conversation with me begins, and it’s always a good starting point. Just not quite a complete one. Because group tour covers an enormous amount of ground — from a fifty-person motorcoach rolling through five countries in eight days to twenty travelers […]
Portugal looks small on a map. It is not small. That’s the first thing worth knowing before you start planning. The country is roughly the size of Indiana, which sounds manageable until you realize that the drive from the southern coast to the northern wine regions takes the better part of a day, and that’s […]
Portugal and I have history. Not the tourist kind. Not the “took a river cruise and loved the pastéis de nata” kind. I mean I just keep coming back, the way you return to a place that keeps showing you something new. Slow mornings in Lisbon cafés where nobody is in a hurry because the […]
