Long-form essays, neighborhood guides, and dispatches from the road. Hidden gems, weekend trips, and local roundups across every corner of Florida.
The Florida State Fair lives in a strange pocket of the calendar: too early for spring break crowds, too late for the holidays, planted in those flat February weeks when Tampa weather finally cooperates and the rest of the country is still scraping windshields. Drive east on I-4
Tortuga has always been the festival that confuses people who don't live here. A three-day country bill on a barrier-island beach in South Florida, framed by palms and the kind of teal water that doesn't belong in a Stagecoach photo, with sea turtles as the through-line. The Rock
By the third afternoon, the bass from the Main Stage is doing something to the asphalt on Biscayne Boulevard that you can feel through your shoes a block away. The kids in chrome cowboy hats are sitting on planters drinking electrolyte water. Someone's argument with a rideshare d
The week before the Daytona 500, the speed limit on International Speedway Boulevard becomes theoretical. Haulers stage at the tunnel entrance, the infield fills with motorhomes that arrived Tuesday for a Sunday race, and the Hampton Inns from Ormond Beach to Port Orange post rat
The first weekend in May, downtown West Palm Beach develops a peculiar acoustic geography. Stand on Olive Avenue near Banyan and you can hear a country headliner from the south end of the festival grounds bleeding into a hip-hop set a quarter-mile north, with the Intracoastal swa
The Florida Strawberry Festival is the rare Florida event where the marketing materials undersell the reality. Plant City sits on a sand ridge that drains just right for winter strawberries, and for eleven days every year the town hosts what is essentially a working agricultural
The tell is the rolling suitcases on Collins Avenue. By the third week of February, the South Beach sidewalks are clogged not with spring breakers but with chefs in clogs, sommeliers wheeling cases of grower champagne, and publicists murmuring into headsets outside the Loews. Loc
The tell isn't the fair itself. It's the week before, when the Design District's gallery staff start sleeping at their installations and the Edition Hotel's lobby becomes a de facto European art-world reunion. By the time Thursday's VIP preview rolls around, the city has already
By the second weekend, Main Street smells like exhaust, beer, and sunscreen in roughly that order, and the conversation at every red light is the same: someone is telling someone else what their bike weighs. Daytona Bike Week is not a festival so much as a 10-day occupation of a
By mid-January, the pirate flags start showing up on porches in South Tampa, the bead inventory at every party store doubles, and the conversation at neighborhood bars shifts to a single question: which house has the bathroom this year. Gasparilla is less a festival than a citywi
Quesabirria, consomé, and the Jacksonville kitchens that actually nail the slow-braised beef — ranked by a local food editor, not by Google.