Rome rewards two kinds of traveler: the one who wants to stand inside 2,000 years of history at the Colosseum and the Vatican, and the one who’d rather find the quiet keyhole on a hill that frames St. Peter’s dome perfectly, or the church with three cities stacked beneath it. The good news is you…
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…
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…
Amsterdam’s reputation for being expensive is partly earned, partly lazy shorthand. You can blow your budget on canal-side restaurants and tourist-trap museums — or you can eat well at market stalls and walk some of the world’s most beautiful streets for free. Here’s exactly what we spent. Our actual spending — 3 days, 2 adults…
The bridge views never get old — even at 2.5 years old, our son stopped running every time we crossed one. When I told people we were taking our 2.5-year-old to Amsterdam, most looked at me like I’d said something ambitious. Canal edges, cobblestones, steep staircases — they had a point. But three days later:…