Long-form essays, neighborhood guides, and dispatches from the road. Hidden gems, weekend trips, and local roundups across every corner of Florida.
Walk south on Howard Avenue around seven on a Thursday and you can read the entire social calendar of South Tampa off the sidewalk chalkboards. A wine bar two doors down from a Cuban sandwich counter, a tattoo parlor next to a pilates studio, a line of valet cones blooming at dus
The first thing you notice in Brickell is the wind. It rolls in off Biscayne Bay, threads between the glass towers along Brickell Avenue, and turns every street corner into a small weather system. The second thing you notice is that almost no one walks with their head down. Peopl
The lions don't roar. They sit, weathered green and a little uneven, at the center of a fountain that's seen nearly a century of Jacksonville weddings, prom photos, and Sunday afternoons. Cast from the same Florentine molds as their relatives in Loggia dei Lanzi, the three bronze
Pizza in Florida has always been a transplant's art. The state's pizzaiolos came from Brooklyn, from Naples by way of Buenos Aires, from Detroit, from Havana, and the result is a peninsula where you can eat a wood-fired Margherita in a converted Ybor cigar factory at lunch and a
Walk into any Florida brewery on a Saturday afternoon and you can usually guess the region within a minute. Tampa pours a hazy double IPA the color of orange juice into a thirteen-ounce snifter. Jacksonville hands you a pint of English bitter and asks if you want to start a tab.
The orange blossoms come in late February, and for about three weeks the side streets between Park Avenue and Lake Osceola smell like someone spilled a perfume counter into the humidity. That is the moment a lot of Orlando residents remember why Winter Park exists. The rest of th
Florida has more first-magnitude springs than any other place on Earth — about a third of the world's total — and most of them sit within a three-hour drive of Orlando. The water comes out of the limestone at a constant 72 degrees, which means a January swim feels balmy and an Au
Drive Highway 98 between Apalachicola and Carrabelle in October and you will pass pickup trucks selling oysters out of coolers, hand-painted signs for mullet smoked that morning, and shrimp boats unloading at docks where the restaurant kitchen is fifty feet from the boat. This is
Florida has 175 state parks, and a good number of them are better than the national parks people fly across the country to see. The catch is that nothing about the state's geography reads as obvious from a map. A first-time visitor lands in Orlando expecting beaches, drives an ho
Drive into Crystal River on a January morning when the air is colder than the water and you'll see the steam first — a low fog hanging over Kings Bay where 72-degree spring water meets cold gulf air. Then the backs start surfacing, slow gray curves breaking the mist. By 8 a.m. th
Drive an hour outside any major Florida metro and the landscape changes faster than you'd expect. The pine flatwoods give way to brackish marsh, the strip malls thin into citrus groves, and the radio fades to a Spanish-language station you've never heard of. Florida rewards short
The Florida tourism board has spent decades pointing visitors at roughly six places. Miami Beach, Clearwater, Destin, Key West, Daytona, and whichever stretch of the 30A corridor is trending on Instagram that quarter. The result is predictable: in March, a two-bedroom rental in S