Tag Archives: Travel

Walla Walla, Washington: The Wine Country Trip You Haven’t Taken Yet

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 on Any Budget: Where to Stay, What to Eat, and What to Do

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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The Rathskeller in Fredericksburg is Worth the Drive from Dallas

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 Pocono Mountains Are Calling: Here’s Everything You Need to Know

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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The Best Train Trip in America Right Now Runs Through the Rocky Mountains and Utah’s Red Rocks

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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Come for the Lobster Roll, Stay for Everything Else: A Nantucket Guide

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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Experience Santa Fe for a Week or Just a Few Days

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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Five Colorado Towns Worth Every Mile of the Detour

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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