At seven in the morning, before the humidity kicks in, the class at Okinawa Karate Kaikan is in full swing. Barefoot on wooden tiles, students line up with a row of levers made of smoothed stones called chiishi, waiting on the wall for strength exercises after the forms. The sensei, a woman in her 60s, pauses to explain something to a group of Australians who obviously arrived at seven in the morning expecting crane kicks.
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Castelsardo is a striking medieval hilltop town sitting on a dramatic volcanic overlook on Sardinia’s northern coast, on the Gulf of Asinara. Officially recognized as one of the Borghi più belli d’Italia (Most Beautiful Villages of Italy), it perfectly blends ancient maritime history, colorful coastal architecture, and living artisanal traditions, making it a near-perfect destination for travelers seeking an authentic Sardinian experience. Most visit for only a night or two on the way to other
… Florida’s bedrock formed millions of years ago from the compressed skeletons of prehistoric marine life. Limestone has one trait that changes everything: it dissolves. Rainwater picks up carbon dioxide from the air and from decaying leaves as it falls, turning into a mild carbonic acid. That acidic water seeps through cracks in the limestone for years, slowly widening them into a honeycomb of underground channels, sinkholes, and caves. Geologists call this karst topography, and Florida
… The slogan appears on San Diego’s city seal and tourism buses. It didn’t start as a compliment. It started as damage control. In 1972, San Diego was supposed to host the Republican National Convention, President Nixon’s self-declared “lucky city.” Then a lobbyist left behind a memo tying a $400,000 convention donation from ITT to a dropped antitrust case, with the line “please destroy this” scrawled at the bottom. The story landed in a thousand newspapers
Phoenix runs on a kind of negotiated truce with its regional climate: get up early, plan around the heat rather than against it, and the desert will hand over a genuinely good life in return. Ignore the terms, however, and it will not warn you twice. Summer 2026 just tied for the 2nd hottest on record at Phoenix Sky Harbor. Average daily temp: 97.0°, same as 2023. Only 2024 was hotter at 98.9°. On August
… On Christmas Day, most of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District goes dark. The neon signs stay lit for show, but the doors are locked, the kitchens are cold, and the sidewalks along King Street belong to whoever is out walking off a family dinner. Tai Tung, on South King Street, does not close. Current owner Gordon Chan’s great-grandfather opened the place in 1935, and Christmas has quietly overtaken Mother’s Day as the restaurant’s busiest day of the …
At nine in the morning, a crowd gathers under the Old Town Hall tower with its necks craned and its phones already raised, waiting for a skeleton to ring a bell. This happens every hour, on the hour, from eight until eleven at night, and it never stops working as a piece of theater: the figure of Death tips an hourglass and pulls a cord, two shuttered windows open above the clock face, and twelve …
You’re standing at the trailhead in Patagonia, boarding a felucca on the Nile, or wandering through a medina at dusk with a bag already too heavy and a hotel check-in still an hour away. The last thing on your mind should be whether you brought the right camera. But it matters because when a moment reveals itself halfway around the world, you won’t get a second chance to photograph it with better gear. Today’s flagship …
At Stourhead, in Wiltshire, the path around the lake was designed to be walked in one direction only. Round a bend past the grotto and the Pantheon appears across the water at the exact angle Henry Hoare II intended when he began digging the lake in 1741, damming a small stream until it held still enough to double every temple on its banks. Hoare had a painting in mind while he worked, a Claude Lorrain …
Above the entrance to Fort Lovrijenac, someone carved a warning in Latin five centuries ago: Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro: Freedom is not well sold for all the gold in the world. The Republic of Ragusa, as Dubrovnik was then known, meant it literally. This was a city-state that paid tribute to the Ottomans, flattered Venice, and played every regional power off every other one for four centuries rather than surrender its …
The line outside the Clark County Marriage License Bureau on a Tuesday morning included a bride in flip-flops, a groom still holding a Big Gulp, and a photographer double-checking a permit for a rooftop shoot three blocks away. Inside, the whole transaction took maybe fifteen minutes: government ID, $102, no waiting period, no blood test, and a license valid anywhere in Nevada. Nobody in that line looked stressed. That is, more or less, the entire …
A bicycle bell went off behind me on Prinsengracht before I’d finished reading the historical plaque. Distracted, I stepped out in front of a bike. My mistake caused the bike to swerve violently to prevent a collision that seemed inevitable. But by the time I turned around the cyclist was already gone, with no angry words. It’s the way a city moves when it has been arranging itself around bikes for longer than most countries …
The wind off the North Sea does not consult anyone before it changes direction, and at Cruden Bay it can shift three times over a single approach shot. A caddie there once told me, without much ceremony, that the course had been designed by Old Tom Morris and was being finished by the weather, and that the weather was still not done with its work. You learn to play around it, or you don’t play …
This is Sulphur Springs, in the town of Soufrière on Saint Lucia’s southwestern coast. It advertises itself, not inaccurately, as the world’s only drive-in volcano. You do not hike to it. You park next to it. The crater sits inside the Qualibou caldera, a volcanic system that formed tens of thousands of years ago and last stirred in 1766, a steam-driven blast that coated the surrounding countryside in ash. Nothing has erupted since, but the …