A jogger breezes across Lexington Green on a Saturday morning, and a woman walks her dog past Captain John Parker’s statue, the colonial farmer and tradesman who ordered his 77 fellow colonials to stand and not fire unless fired upon.  The Revolutionary War battlefields are mostly quiet now, tucked back…

Zas Cave is halfway up the west face of Mount Zas, a dark tunnel in the side of the mountain that goes back 500 feet or so, and it is already five degrees cooler the instant you duck inside. Legend has it that the infant Zeus was hidden here by…

Williams, Arizona bills itself as the “the gateway to the Grand Canyon,” and for good reason: here, just as would be sightseers have for decades, you can board the Grand Canyon Railway and ride to the canyon’s South Rim. But before we go any further, let’s clear up a few…

If you pick the wrong time to climb the “999 steps” of the Palamidi Fortress, those first 857 are the most difficult. In fact, there are not 999 steps; there are 857, and even for the physically fit, especially beneath the midday summer sun, the climb is strenuous. The best…

Hallstatt, Austria, has made an entire identity around being too idyllic to be real. However, its reputation is well-deserved and, for a reputation, strangely problematic, which is why the place is worth knowing for what it is rather than simply being photogenic. Humans have harvested salt from the hill above…

It is noon on Castle Hill, and the shot fires from a small battery near the old fortress walls. It has been going off at noon since 1860, when a Scottish resident,  Sir Thomas Coventry, reportedly sick of his wife’s habit of serving lunch late, asked the city if he…

The sign at Gouverneto Monastery described a thirty-five-minute walk down into a gorge. Almost casually, it informed me that the monastery we were looking for had been abandoned for roughly four hundred years. The walk descended a series of cut stone steps, switchbacking down a cliff on the Akrotiri peninsula.…

A man selling roasted sweet potatoes wheeled his cart directly into six lanes of moving traffic, set up between two idling buses, and kept working as though he were standing in a quiet kitchen. Around him, cars braided past each other with no visible signaling system beyond the horn, which…

Animal tourism’s worst offenses don’t come with an abuse sign per se. They come with an opportunity sign. Ride an elephant. Cuddle a tiger cub. Swim with a dolphin. Drink the world’s most expensive coffee. Such operations often use the word “sanctuary,” which in most countries literally means nothing and…

The island of Madeira is about 500 miles southwest of mainland Portugal, and 320 miles west of Morocco, closer in latitude to Casablanca than to Lisbon’s cafe tables. One of only two inhabited islands in the archipelago also includes the smaller Porto Santo; the other islands, the uninhabited Desertas and…

Somewhere ?between Waterbury and Stowe, a section of Vermont Route 100 holds up traffic every October. You round a hill, and it clicks: forty cars have pulled onto the shoulder, their hazards flashing, doors open, figures standing in the road with phones held aloft, trained on a hillside of sugar…

Chiang Mai has a charm that feels like Bangkok yet unlike it. The inhabitants of both cities share the same warm, mild disposition characteristic of Thai people, the same reflexive smile visitors often misread as shyness, and locals will tell you is closer to patience. Chiang Mai is small enough…