The wind shows up before the mountains do. It comes off the Southern Patagonian Ice Field with nothing to slow it down, flattens the tall grass across the steppe, and leans on the car door hard enough that you have to push back. Then the clouds pull apart for a minute and the towers appear, three gray granite spires standing over Torres del Paine National Park, close enough that you forget how cold your hands are.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
Naples in January is the reason people put up with Naples in August. Mid-seventies, no humidity, the Gulf flat and green, and a sunset every evening that empties the restaurants onto the sand for ten minutes.
That’s when the biggest resort on that stretch of beach reopens under a new name.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The sun hits Poipu Beach before it hits almost anywhere else in Hawaii. Kauai’s south shore sits in what locals call the island’s dry side, sheltered from the trade wind clouds that dump rain on the north shore most afternoons, which means the town built around this stretch of coastline gets reliable, golden weather that the rest of the island only gets in bursts.
Add a coral reef close enough to shore that beginners can snorkel it, a blowhole that fires seawater fifty feet in the air off a lava shelf, and a two-mile cliff trail that ends at a beach where Hawaiian monk seals actually nap in the sand, and the case for Poipu makes itself before you’ve unpacked a bag.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The Blanco River runs low and green past Wimberley Square on a Friday afternoon, cypress roots gripping the bank like they’ve been holding on since before the town had a name. Ninety minutes south of Austin, an hour past the last billboard for anything, the Texas Hill Country stops performing for tourists and just starts being itself. Wimberley and San Marcos sit close enough together to share a weekend without either one feeling like an afterthought, one built for slowing down, the other for cooling off. Together they make one of the easiest escapes in the state, a five-hour drive from Dallas that rewards every mile of it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The sand at Daytona Beach is packed hard enough to drive a car on, which tells you almost everything about the place before you even unpack. This is a beach town built on speed and salt air in equal measure, twenty-three miles of white shoreline running alongside a boardwalk that still smells like fried dough and sunscreen the way it has for a hundred years. It’s louder than the quiet barrier islands further south, and that’s the whole point.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Most wine regions announce themselves. Walla Walla doesn’t bother. Set in the southeastern corner of Washington State, four hours from Seattle, surrounded by wheat fields and framed by the Blue Mountains, it is the American wine destination that the people who know about it have quietly kept to themselves for thirty years. The wineries here — more than 140 of them — produce Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah that belong in any serious conversation about what this country can grow.
The restaurants are better than you would think. The town itself, compact and walkable and genuinely beautiful, is the kind of place that turns a wine trip into something you talk about for years. It rewards discovery. Go find it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Coury Hospitality has been quietly building one of the more interesting collections of hotels in North Texas — Hotel Vin in Grapevine, The Ricardo Marriott in Westlake, and the newly rebranded Hotel Mockingbird in Dallas. All three have something going on right now worth knowing about, and none of it reads like the usual hotel programming calendar.
Here’s what’s happening and when.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Santa Fe is eight hours by car from Dallas — I-40 west through Amarillo, then north on I-25 past Albuquerque and up into the high desert until the city appears in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at 7,000 feet. You can also fly into Albuquerque and rent a car for the one-hour drive north, or fly direct into Santa Fe’s small airport. Either way, this is one of the most rewarding food and travel weekends available to anyone living in North Texas, and it has been hiding in plain sight for years.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
