Umbria is the region next to Tuscany that gets none of the attention, and the locals are quietly fine with that. Same hill towns, same cypress trees, same food culture, roughly half the visitors and noticeably lower prices. It’s also the only Italian region with no coastline and no border with another country, which is […]
Umbria: Tuscany’s Quieter Neighbour, and What to See There Read More »
New Mexico is the state Americans forget exists and Europeans have never heard of. It has a 400-year-old capital city where building codes require adobe, a national park made of white gypsum dunes, and pueblos that have been continuously inhabited for a thousand years. It’s also cheap, empty and about four hours’ drive from top
Santa Fe and White Sands: New Mexico Without the Rush Read More »
Travel insurance is the thing everyone buys in a rush on the last screen of a booking flow, for £22, without reading anything. Then something goes wrong and they discover the policy covers roughly none of it. Here’s what actually matters, in order. Medical cover is the only part that can bankrupt you Everything else
Travel Insurance: The Three Things That Actually Matter Read More »
Turin gets skipped. People fly into Milan, head for Lake Como or Venice, and never consider the city an hour and a half west that has 18km of covered arcades, the best Egyptian museum outside Cairo, and the place where chocolate and hazelnut were first combined into a paste. Yes. Nutella starts here. We’ll come
Turin: The Italian City Everyone Drives Past Read More »
Most people bolt Grand Teton onto a Yellowstone trip and give it a day. That’s backwards. Yellowstone has the geysers and the crowds; Grand Teton has mountains that come straight up out of a flat valley with no foothills in the way, which is why every photograph of it looks slightly unreal. They’re 50km apart
Grand Teton and Jackson Hole: Don’t Treat It as the Warm-Up Read More »
San Sebastián has more Michelin stars per head than almost anywhere on Earth. It also has a bar culture where you can eat brilliantly for €3 a plate while standing up. Both of those things are true at once and the second one is why you should go. The Basques call it Donostia. You’ll see
San Sebastian: How a Pintxo Crawl Actually Works Read More »
Death Valley holds the highest air temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth: 56.7°C, in July 1913. It regularly clears 50°C in summer. It is also, for about five months of the year, one of the most comfortable and least crowded national parks in America. Which is the whole article, really. Everything here depends on when
Death Valley: When to Go and What to Skip Read More »
The Alhambra sells around 8,500 tickets a day and they go months in advance. That’s the single fact that determines whether your Granada trip works, and it’s the one most people find out about a week before they fly. So: book the Alhambra first, then plan everything else around the slot you get. Everything below
Granada and the Alhambra: Book This First, Plan the Rest After Read More »
Five villages, one train line, and a decision that people agonise over far more than they need to. Here’s the short version: they’re 5 to 20 minutes apart by train, you’ll see all of them regardless, and the only thing your choice really changes is what your evenings look like. That said, the evenings are
Which Cinque Terre Village Should You Actually Stay In? Read More »
Yosemite Valley is about 11 square kilometres. The park is 3,000. Roughly 90% of visitors go to that 11, which tells you both what’s worth seeing and why it feels the way it does in July. There’s a lot of advice out there about beating the crowds. Most of it boils down to two things:
Yosemite for First-Timers: When to Arrive and Where to Go Read More »
