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 blind goes up somewhere west of Edmonton and the window fills with fir trees running past at speed. Then the trees drop away and the eastern wall of the Rockies stands there in the early light, pink at the top, close enough to feel rude. Coffee in hand, half the dome car still asleep, nobody says anything for a while. That is the moment people pay for on VIA Rail‘s Canadian, and it arrives on the fourth morning, without warning, whether you were awake for it or not.
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The whistle sounds before you see the smoke. Then the smoke comes, curling up over farmland that Amish families have worked for generations, and a locomotive built for a different century pulls slowly into view. This is Strasburg, Pennsylvania, home to the oldest continuously operating railroad in the country, chartered in 1832. What happens over the following days is where the real trip lives.
A word of honesty before anything else: Strasburg Rail Road is not an overnight sleeper train. The signature excursion is a 45-minute, nine-mile round trip through 2,500 acres of Lancaster County farmland, out to Paradise, Pennsylvania, and back. There are no berths, no sleeping cars, nothing resembling the Orient Express. What Strasburg offers instead is something quieter and, in its own way, harder to replicate: a working piece of American railroading history, still running on steam, still passing through the same Amish countryside it always has. Built around three days, this is everything worth knowing before you go.
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Some lakes ask to be admired. Lake Tahoe asks to be entered. Its water holds a clarity so complete that sunlight travels fifty, sometimes seventy feet down before it surrenders, casting the shallows in a turquoise that belongs more to the Caribbean than the Sierra, and the depths in a blue so dark it reads as bottomless. Granite peaks rise around the entire basin, holding their snow into June, framing the water like something meant to be approached slowly and left reluctantly. There is a stillness that settles over the surface in late afternoon, just before the light turns gold, that no photograph quite manages to hold onto. It has to be stood in.
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The smell arrives before the skyline does: salt and low tide off Casco Bay, then a thread of woodsmoke drifting off a hearth two blocks in, then something baking that has already pulled a line onto the sidewalk before eight in the morning. Portland, Maine photographs like a postcard, cobblestone streets, brick warehouses, lighthouses strung along the coast, but the reputation it has actually built over the last two decades comes from what’s happening inside those old buildings.
Bon Appétit named it Restaurant City of the Year in 2018, and the city has only grown more serious about food since, packing more James Beard pedigree per block than almost anywhere else in the country into a downtown small enough to cross on foot. It moves easily between a three-dollar morning bun and a hundred-dollar tasting menu without ever feeling like it’s performing for either one. Give it a long weekend, three or four days if a day trip north is on the table, and arrive hungry.
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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.
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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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