Palm Beach is an easy call from Dallas — direct flight into Palm Beach International, three hours in the air, and you land somewhere that moves at a different pace entirely. Eau Resort & Spa sits in Manalapan, a small town on the barrier island just south of Palm Beach, fifteen minutes from Worth Avenue and the crowds but on seven private acres of Atlantic coastline where the beach is seaweed-free and the only noise is the water.
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The case for a staycation is simple: you live twenty minutes from one of the best boutique hotels in Texas, and you’ve never actually stayed there. Hotel ZaZa has been on the Uptown Dallas skyline at 2332 Leonard Street since 2000, pulling in a two-time Michelin Key recognition for 2024 and 2025, and it remains the most personality-forward hotel in the city. The rooms alone justify the trip. Everything else is a bonus.
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The water at Juanillo Beach is the turquoise that doesn’t look real until you’re standing in it. Calm, shallow, warm — the waves here are gentle enough that kids wade out without a second thought and you can actually hear the person next to you. Cap Cana sits on the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic, ten minutes from Punta Cana International Airport, inside a gated community that occupies one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the Caribbean. Most of the travelers who fly into this part of the island end up at the resorts in Bávaro. The ones who find Cap Cana tend not to tell anyone about it.
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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.
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San Juan is the most underrated city in the American travel universe. It is an hour and a half from Miami by air, requires no passport, runs on US dollars, and delivers a food scene that Michelin recognized in 2023 as the only one in the Caribbean worth the guide’s attention. The cobblestone streets of Old San Juan date to the 16th century. The beach at Condado is a ten-minute walk from a tasting menu worth flying across the country for. Thursday nights at La Placita de Santurce are the best outdoor bar experience in the Caribbean. Most Americans still think of it as a cruise ship stop. They are wrong, and the people who have figured that out would like to keep it that way.
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There is a version of this country that you cannot see from a highway or a plane window. The Colorado River from inside Glenwood Canyon, where the walls rise 1,300 feet on both sides and the train tracks run so close to the water that you could almost reach out and touch it. The red sandstone formations of the Utah desert, layered and ancient, lit differently at every hour of the day. The Book Cliffs stretching across the horizon east of Moab, a geological formation so long and flat that from the train window it looks like the edge of something. These are views that were built for rail travel and that nothing else quite delivers.
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There is a moment, usually right after the ferry rounds Brant Point and the harbor comes into full view, when Nantucket stops looking like a place you read about and starts looking real. The old gray-shingled buildings. The white clapboard. A lighthouse so modest it seems almost shy. You understand immediately why people come back every summer for thirty years running and can never quite explain why.
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Everyone knows Aspen. Everyone knows Vail. You book the flight, you rent the gear, you pay the resort prices, and you come home having seen the version of Colorado that was designed to be seen — groomed, expensive, and full of people doing exactly what you’re doing.
The Colorado worth knowing is the other one. The one where a town of 400 people has a winery that outperforms Napa at altitude. Where a Victorian saloon still has the bullet hole from when Doc Holliday was a regular. Where a chef-trained café changes its entire menu every week because the farm down the road harvested something new. Where you pull off the highway not because a sign told you to, but because the canyon suddenly opened up and you had no choice but to stop the car.
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