What the birds believed
Seabirds have been diving at the pool for years. They're searching for two marlin, swimming in the clear water. Except those marlin are ceramic - hand tiled....
The bar named for the birth year of Alexandre Dumas
You take the fast ferry from Fromentine. Thirty minutes later, you step off somewhere that runs on bicycle time. Île d'Yeu sits 20 kilometers off the Vendée...
The bathroom is a hundred meters away
The bathroom is a hundred meters away. That's not a complaint – it's an intentional part of what makes this stay special. You see, you're not staying in a...
No good story started with a salad
The bathroom tiles were made from clay pulled out of an Etruscan pit, twenty minutes down the road. This former monastery in Umbria, Italy is entirely...
The elephant at the foot of your bed
Before dawn, the bamboo stops moving. Then something large shifts outside the curved glass of your room, and you realize it isn't wind. As you rustle in bed,...
Wine in the "Other" Dolomites
My wife and I were somewhere in the grass with a bottle of Georgian wine when I realized my monkey mind had finally shut off. That's what happens when you...
The grocery carts are still in the aisles
This is a city frozen in time, and in such a strange time at that. On April 27, 1986, the buses arrived and 49,360 people walked out of their city with a...
A Bali that's quickly disappearing...
The wood in your bungalow is 150 years old. You can feel it in the floorboards - a warmth no synthetic surface replicates. Overhead, the carved teak rafters...
Dinner above the well
Walk twenty minutes east from Chania's Venetian Harbour in Crete and the tourists disappear. The seafront promenade thins out. The souvenir shops stop. You...
Still in the Estonian Wetlands
The water rose because of beavers. They built their dams in the wetlands west of Tallinn, flooded a former forest, and killed many of the trees. Now the...
The Alps out Every Window
The kitchen is open. You can see the fire from your table. The man cooking is the same man who, thirty-five years ago, walked into Ljubljana and started...
An LA Firehouse turns Japanese
The legend above the door still reads "Engine Co. No. 17." It's been there since 1927, cast into the Beaux Arts façade of a building that spent more than...
The architect who came home
The air wells in traditional Penang shophouses are open to the sky. Not decorative — functional, necessary, the way the building breathes. Stand beneath one...
At the end of the Silk Road...
The orchards arrive before the buildings do. Driving in, you pass through elm trees and apricot groves so dense they block the mountains for a moment — then...
The camp built from a 90-year-old photograph
Somewhere above the Colca Valley, before the road drops into the canyon proper, the sky does something you don't expect. It widens. The mountains pull back...
The house that took seven years to wake up
As an American, riads are a paradox to me. Often the more lavish the stay, the more nondescript the exterior and downright difficult it is to even find the...
White Desert
Patrick Woodhead skied to the South Pole and came back a changed person. Not in the vague, motivational-poster sense. In the specific, practical sense that...
Chateau d'Urtubie
The Count Still Greets Every Guest There's a detail about Château d'Urtubie that I keep returning to, and it's this: the man who built it did so in 1341,...
The Side Door: 11 Rooms
The Mountain Knows When to Let You Go Most people stop in Chiang Mai. There's plenty of reason to: the old city, the temples, the night markets, the food...
