Halloween in Salem
Halloween is my favorite holiday. I’m so sad when it’s over, and I wait each year for it to return! I don’t dress up. And I don’t trick-or-treat. But I still love it. And I love the people watching. The pets. The revelry. The changing leaves. The excitement around my hometown. I’m from Salem, Massachusetts, […]
Checking Back In
Giving an old building a second life as a grand hotel is a tale nearly as old as the concept itself. In 1822, Giuseppe Dal Niel took a floor of Palazzo Dandolo, a fifteenth-century Gothic palace on the Venetian waterfront, and began letting rooms to travelers. Two centuries later, the Danieli still carries his name […]
Two Nights in Tokaj: A Byproduct of Patience
Rumor has it, Tokaj wine, the king of wines, was discovered by accident. One autumn in 1566, when Ottoman forces laid siege to Tokaj Castle and picking was impossible, the farmers returned to their vineyards three weeks later to find the grapes covered in a fungus. They made wine from them anyway, and lo-and-behold, the […]
The Season After the Season
By October the meltemi, the dry northerly wind that scours the Greek islands through July and August, has usually eased, and the Aegean is still warm enough to swim. By November, Marrakech afternoons sit in the low 70s and the last warm light settles over La Mamounia’s gardens. Making the case for going once the […]
The Oil That Won’t Wait
For a few weeks after pressing, new olive oil is green, peppery and alive with the unmistakable scent of cut grass. Its peak is brief; the only way to taste it at its best is to go to it. There is a moment, usually in a stone-floored mill with the machinery still turning, when someone […]
You Can Go Home Again. Just Not on a Surfboard
In 1998, I moved to Portstewart, Northern Ireland, a beautiful seaside town near the Giant’s Causeway, Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, and some of the most dramatic scenery in the world. I moved there for the man who was my fiancé at the time, and because we were young and could not afford to do anything else, […]
Where to America, When You’re Not In America
That’s the thing about American food culture overseas: it rarely arrives as a general idea. It lands as something oddly specific — a Connecticut lobster shack, a Texas honky-tonk, a Route 66 diner — preserved with the fervor of someone who left and never quite got over it. Sometimes an expat recreates the diner they […]
The America That Time Forgot
Overseas, America’s image is often shaped by its politics, its Hollywood stars, its celebrity culture and its appetite for supersized consumerism — loud, fast, and relentlessly modern. It’s easy to forget that this is also a country of staggering natural beauty, of small towns that – for varying reasons – dodged globalization, and of places […]
Your New Itinerary Is Inherited
25% of travelers now being their search with a vibe, or a feeling, rather than a destination – and for a growing number of us, that feeling comes with history. It’s the beach where your father taught you to surf, the town your mother used to visit with her own parents, the kids’ club where […]
The British Are Coming. This Time, They Made Reservations
This summer, nobody could have predicted quite how well-received Scotland’s Tartan Army would be – The Dubliner, an Irish pub in Boston that has pulled pints under that name for years, spent two weeks running as the unofficial headquarters for the dark blues. A few blocks over, The Haven, Jamaica Plain’s actual Scottish bar, shipped in […]