Category Destinations

Florida makes vacations. We are exceptionally good at it. We make hotel nights, beach weekends, cruise departures, fishing trips, theme-park days and increasingly elaborate frozen drinks. We manufacture reasons for people in Ohio to stare out the window in February…

Florida has spent an extraordinary amount of money helping us drive toward water. Bridges carry us across bays. Causeways deliver us to islands. Six-lane roads funnel traffic toward beaches, parking garages and waterfront restaurants. We can cross an entire coastal…

Florida makes considerably more sense at three miles an hour. That is admittedly inconvenient in a state that spent much of the last century perfecting the art of driving six miles to get somewhere you can see from where you…

Florida sunshine has an excellent marketing department. Florida rain is responsible for operations. A summer morning may begin beneath a flawless blue sky and collapse by midafternoon into thunder, dark clouds, sideways rain, and a parking lot filling with water…

Florida is often described through its beaches, springs, swamps, and palm-lined roads. But some of the state’s most beautiful landscapes were shaped deliberately. Gardeners, botanists, artists, collectors, and wealthy dreamers imported plants, carved paths through hammocks, designed reflecting pools, planted…

Florida’s major destinations are designed to keep visitors moving. Small towns invite the opposite. They reward the person willing to park once, walk without urgency, enter a local museum, inspect old houses, order lunch from somewhere without a national advertising…

People often speak of Old Florida as though it disappeared beneath highways, condominiums, theme parks, and shopping centers. Much of it did. But not all. Old Florida survives along working waterfronts, spring-fed rivers, brick streets, fishing piers, historic forts, courthouse…