Long-form essays, neighborhood guides, and dispatches from the road. Hidden gems, weekend trips, and local roundups across every corner of Florida.
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
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