Long-form essays, neighborhood guides, and dispatches from the road. Hidden gems, weekend trips, and local roundups across every corner of Florida.
Tampa's drinking scene tilts low-slung and brick-walled, which means the city's best sunset hours often slip past unnoticed inside dim rooms. The good news for anyone who wants a drink with a sky over it: a handful of terraces, patios, and bar-forward dining rooms across Ybor Cit
Miami doesn't make dating easy. The city runs on spectacle — bottle service, valet lines, rooftop DJs you can hear three blocks away — and that's exactly the kind of energy that flattens a conversation before the appetizers land. The places that actually work for a date tend to b
St. Petersburg treats weekend mornings as a sport. The sidewalks along Central Avenue fill before 10 a.m., the patios on Beach Drive get a steady breeze off Tampa Bay, and the line at any espresso bar between MLK and 4th Street tells you exactly which neighborhood has figured out
Drive east on Colonial from downtown Orlando and somewhere around Mills Avenue the signage changes. English gives way to Vietnamese, the strip-mall vernacular shifts from chain pharmacies to family-run grocers, and the parking lots fill with people carrying takeout boxes of pho t
Walk west from the downtown waterfront on Central Avenue and somewhere around 16th Street the city changes register. The buildings drop to one and two stories, the awnings start advertising vinyl and vintage Levi's, and a four-story mural of a heron or a stag or a woman with butt
Cross the Fuller Warren Bridge from downtown and the skyline thins out fast. Within a mile you're under live oaks, the streets curve to follow the river, and the houses get older and stranger — Prairie School, Tudor Revival, a few Mediterranean piles with tile roofs that have bee
The roosters get you first. They strut across 7th Avenue at noon like they own the place, descendants of birds that escaped cockfighting pits a century ago, and the city long ago gave up trying to remove them. They are protected now, technically, and they will hold up traffic on
The clack of dominos on the patio at Maximo Gomez Park is the soundtrack most people remember, but the detail that tells you where you actually are is smaller: the brass-plated star on the sidewalk outside a botanica, naming an exiled Cuban actress most of Miami has never heard o
The first sign Oktoberfest has arrived in Jacksonville Beach isn't the beer — it's the smell. Walk west from the Sea Walk Pavilion on a Friday afternoon in mid-October and you'll catch grilled bratwurst and sauerkraut riding the same Atlantic breeze that, twelve hours earlier, wa
By the time the second weekend of Fantasy Fest rolls around, the dress code on Duval has rearranged itself around a single principle: the more elaborate the costume, the less of it there tends to be. Body paint stops being a novelty somewhere around Wednesday. The cruise ships st
The first sign that something is happening in Crystal River isn't the banners downtown or the tents going up on Citrus Avenue. It's the boat trailers. By the Friday before the festival weekend, every motel lot from US-19 to Kings Bay is stacked with them, and the line for coffee
The turkey legs at Quiet Waters Park weigh roughly as much as a small bowling ball, and by the second weekend of the Florida Renaissance Festival, you will see grown men wearing chainmail under the South Florida sun gnawing on them with the practiced focus of a kid on a popsicle.