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
Every neighborhood should be so lucky as to have its history hold the best corner. In Deep Ellum, that corner is 2551 Elm Street, where the Knights of Pythias Temple has stood since 1916, designed by William Sidney Pittman, Texas’ first Black architect and son-in-law of Booker T. Washington. It was the first commercial building in Dallas built by, for, and with the money of Black citizens, and for more than two decades it served as the social heart of Black Dallas — its top-floor ballroom hosting dances, graduations, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, its lectern held by the likes of George Washington Carver, while out on the street below, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly were turning Deep Ellum into the blues capital of the Southwest.
Today the building carries its architect’s name as The Kimpton Pittman Hotel, and it remains the best argument in town that a building can change jobs without losing its soul.
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The fog is still sitting on the water at seven in the morning, and the pier disappears into it about halfway out. A man in waders walks the tide line with a bucket, looking for clams the way people here have for a hundred years. By ten the fog burns off, the pier reappears all 1,200 feet of it, and the smell of butter and clam broth starts drifting up Pomeroy Avenue.
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Picture this. The sun is dropping fast over the Pacific, going from gold to copper to something close to red, and you’re sitting on a cliffside terrace with a cold drink, watching the light hit a 200-foot rock arch rising straight out of the sea. Below you, two oceans meet — the Pacific on one side, the Sea of Cortez on the other — and the line where they collide is visible from where you’re sitting. Pelicans work the thermals. A whale surfaces maybe a quarter mile out, exhales a plume of white mist, and slides back under. The waiter arrives with something involving good tequila and fresh lime. You are at the edge of the Baja California peninsula, and this is a Tuesday.
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About four hours south of Dallas, in a bend of the Texas Hill Country where limestone cliffs and centuries-old cypress trees hang over cold, clear water, the Guadalupe River has been the answer to a Texas summer for as long as anyone can remember. The stretch between Gruene and New Braunfels is the most popular tubing corridor in the state — a million people float it annually — and the 4th of July weekend is when that number becomes very real, very quickly. Book everything in advance. Show up early. Then get in the water and forget you were ever hot.
There is something about cold water in July that resets everything. The Guadalupe runs spring-fed out of the Hill Country limestone and stays genuinely cold regardless of what the air temperature does, and the moment you slide off the bank and into the current, the afternoon reorganizes itself around the only thing that matters: getting downstream slowly, under the cypress trees, past the rope swings and the limestone banks, with no particular plan and nowhere to be. The river moves at its own pace and takes you with it.
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There is a particular kind of restaurant that Dallas doesn’t have enough of — the kind where the building itself is the first course. The Rathskeller in Fredericksburg is that restaurant. Fredericksburg sits about four hours southwest of Dallas in the Texas Hill Country, a small German-settled town of 12,000 people surrounded by vineyards, peach orchards, and limestone hills that turn gold in the afternoon light.
You walk down a flight of limestone steps off Main Street, duck through a low doorway, and find yourself in the basement of a building that was already old when Teddy Roosevelt was president. The walls are 1880s Hill Country limestone. The ceiling is low. The light is warm. The food is better than a room like this has any obligation to produce.
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The first time you drive into the Pocono Mountains, something happens around the point where the highway narrows and the trees take over both sides of the road. The noise just stops. I have made this drive more times than I can count and it still happens every single time. What I tell first-timers is this: do not overthink it. The Poconos are not trying to be anything other than what they are — mountains, rivers, waterfalls, and a pace of life that reminds you what a weekend is actually supposed to feel like. The dining has become genuinely good over the years, the lodging runs from a historic lodge with 5,500 acres to a budget resort on a lake, and the outdoor options will fill every hour you have and then some. Go with a loose plan and a full tank of gas. The region will take care of the rest.
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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.
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