Long-form essays, neighborhood guides, and dispatches from the road. Hidden gems, weekend trips, and local roundups across every corner of Florida.
Florida's coastline runs roughly 1,350 miles, which is more than California's, and yet the popular imagination compresses it to about six places: Miami Beach, Key West, Destin, Clearwater, Daytona, and whatever stretch of the Panhandle is currently on a billboard in Atlanta. The
Floridians don't measure the year in seasons. We measure it in humidity percentages, hurricane cones, and how long the line is at Versailles in Little Havana. The calendar that matters here has almost nothing to do with the one printed on your fridge — January and July are functi
Miami exports a particular kind of fatigue. It is not the heat or the traffic exactly, it is the sense that every block is performing for someone — a camera, a doorman, a developer's rendering. The antidote is usually thirty miles in any direction that isn't Brickell. South Flori
Most visitors plan a Florida trip around the coast and never look inland. That is a mistake. The state sits on the largest concentration of artesian springs on earth — more than a thousand of them, most clustered in a band running from the Panhandle down through Ocala National Fo
By mid-October, the cranes start arriving on Seventeenth Street. Flatbeds line up along SE 17th Causeway like they're waiting for a parade, and the dockmasters at Bahia Mar begin the slow choreography of staging a floating city. Locals who live along the New River know what's com
The first night of Nights of Lights always gives itself away before you turn onto St. George Street. You see it from the Bridge of Lions: the entire Plaza de la Constitución glowing the color of a beeswax candle, the Bridge's own towers strung in the same warm white, the Matanzas
By the second week of September, the Universal Orlando Resort starts running on two clocks. There is the daytime park — families with strollers, the Hogwarts Express on a normal cadence, churros at three in the afternoon — and there is the version that materializes after the hous
By the last Saturday in June, downtown St. Pete has rearranged itself. The northbound lanes of Bayshore Drive are coned off before sunrise, the bars along Central pull their patio gates open early, and the waterfront parks fill with sound checks that carry across the harbor to th
By the time the parade steps off, 7th Avenue has already done a full costume change. The wrought-iron balconies above the cigar shops are draped in flags that were not there at sunrise, the brick pavers are tacky with spilled horchata and sunscreen, and the bouncers outside the h
By the second Thursday, the Hard Rock concourses smell like sunscreen and grilled corn, and the line for the practice courts is longer than the line for any stadium match before quarterfinals. That is the tell. The Miami Open is not really a stadium tournament, no matter what the
The first sign Food & Wine season has arrived at EPCOT isn't a banner or a press release — it's the smell of grilled lamb drifting from the Australia booth somewhere near the bridge between Mexico and Norway, hitting you before you've even cleared the tap-stiles. Annual passh
By the time the sound check finishes on Southwest Eighth Street, the smell of lechon has already worked its way three blocks north into the residential grid of Little Havana. That is the tell. Calle Ocho is not a festival that announces itself with banners — it announces itself w