Zakynthos rewards everyone who comes — whether you have three days or a full week. I went to Zakynthos in June, rented a car the day we arrived, and spent every day trying to see as much of the island as possible. I was pregnant at the time — which sounds like an odd detail…
If you do one thing in Chicago, make it the architecture river cruise. Gliding along the Chicago River while the city’s skyscrapers rise on both sides — with a guide explaining how Chicago basically invented the modern skyscraper after the Great Fire of 1871 — is the single best way to understand this city, and…
Montserrat is the day trip we’d tell anyone with a spare day in Barcelona to take. An hour from the city, a jagged wall of rounded rock pinnacles rises straight out of the Catalan countryside — the “serrated mountain” that gives the place its name — and tucked into a ledge halfway up sits a…
There’s no single “best” time to visit the Azores — it depends on what you want from the trip. These nine green islands sit in the middle of the Atlantic, where the weather is mild all year but can change in an hour, and each season has a different draw: whales in spring, hydrangeas and…
The Azores sit alone in the middle of the North Atlantic, surrounded by deep, plankton-rich water that draws an extraordinary number of whales and dolphins — more than two dozen cetacean species have been recorded around the islands. That makes this little Portuguese archipelago one of the Atlantic’s best-known whale-watching destinations, and one of the…
São Miguel doesn’t look like the rest of Europe — and that’s exactly the point. The largest island in the Azores sits alone in the middle of the Atlantic, a thousand miles from Lisbon, and it’s built almost entirely of volcanoes: green craters filled with twin lakes, valleys that steam and bubble, waterfalls in subtropical…
Athens caught us off guard. We arrived expecting a day of ruins before catching a ferry, and ended up wishing we’d given it longer. The city is louder, grittier, and far more alive than its postcard image suggests — a place where a 2,500-year-old temple sits above a neighborhood of rooftop bars, street art, and…
Three days in Rome is not enough to see everything — and that’s exactly the right way to think about it. The city has 3,000 years of history stacked on top of itself, and the travelers who try to tick off every ruin, basilica, and museum in 72 hours leave exhausted and remember none of…
New York doesn’t do subtle. The skyline is as dramatic as the photos, the food is genuinely as good as the reputation, and the particular compressed energy that makes the city feel like it’s running at a frequency other places can’t reach is completely real. What catches most first-time visitors off-guard isn’t the scale or…
Five days in New York sounds like a lot until you realize what you’re working with: five boroughs, 470 subway stations, and a list of “must-sees” that would take three weeks to finish properly. The classic first-timer mistake is trying to do everything and ending up exhausted, overcharged, and disappointed by the things that actually…