The narrow, arched room below the Medici Chapels Museum in Florence has some suspiciously virtuosic doodles on the walls. “The hand is very fast, showing great confidence, it makes you think,” Francesca De Luca, the museum’s director, said as she contemplated a muscular nude by the entrance. She pointed out the legs in another sketch…
We are inside a glass box of a gondola, part of the longest passenger cable car in the world, flying silently along on a nearly five-mile ride, and some 50 stories above a sapphire sea just off the coast of Phu Quoc Island in southern Vietnam. On this bright March afternoon, hundreds of colorful wooden…
My paddle slips gently through calm ocean water as the kayak glides toward the mouth of Morro Bay Harbor. I approach a sandbar covered in resting cormorants, as sea otters float in nearby kelp, inky-eyed pups nestled on their mothers’ chests. On this windless morning, the marine layer paints the world in a gentle watercolor…
Even with traffic on the 405, it probably would have taken at most three hours for Victoria Pardo Uzitas to drive from her home in San Diego to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles to see a performance of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Instead, she and her teenage daughter crossed the border to Tijuana, flew to…
The loss of Lahaina remains a wound felt across all of Maui. Two months after destructive wildfires killed at least 97 people and razed thousands of acres of the island’s western side, Maui is fully open to visitors. Tourists are bustling along streets on the north coast, sunbathing on Kihei beaches and admiring the dazzling…
Ennismore, the hotelier whose portfolio includes boutique brands such as Delano and Mondrian, offers a membership program more akin to a WeWork than a hotel brand. The chain’s Dis-Loyalty program offers no elite status tiers and no points to earn. Instead, for $18 per month (or $216 annually), guests receive 50 percent off stays at…
“The likelihood of this sort of event occurring is extremely rare,” said Dawn Davies, the night sky program manager with the Hill Country Alliance. An amateur astronomer and a NASA eclipse ambassador, Ms. Davies is leading the alliance’s efforts to organize and support eclipse events in the area. Though Saturday provided a test run, she…
As the war between Hamas and Israel intensifies in the Middle East, tensions are spilling over into Europe, where demonstrations and terrorist attacks are causing disruptions for locals and visitors alike. Last week, monuments and government buildings across Europe were lit up in blue and white — a show of solidarity with Israel after the…
As we climbed the slope toward one of the world’s most momentous archaeological sites in a gusty December drizzle, a futuristic shape loomed into view. It was the swooping white canopy erected over the main excavation at Gobekli Tepe, a group of Neolithic structures up to 11,400 years old in southeastern Turkey. Their unearthing in…
Scott Christensen was standing on a mountain looking down into Yellowstone National Park late last month when he spotted a fresh track from a grizzly bear in the mud, about two inches in front of his foot. He wasn’t scared, but rather relieved and gratified. The bear, as well as other wildlife, including the thousands…