Long-form essays, neighborhood guides, and dispatches from the road. Hidden gems, weekend trips, and local roundups across every corner of Florida.
By the time the second weekend of Fantasy Fest rolls around, the dress code on Duval has rearranged itself around a single principle: the more elaborate the costume, the less of it there tends to be. Body paint stops being a novelty somewhere around Wednesday. The cruise ships st
The first sign that something is happening in Crystal River isn't the banners downtown or the tents going up on Citrus Avenue. It's the boat trailers. By the Friday before the festival weekend, every motel lot from US-19 to Kings Bay is stacked with them, and the line for coffee
The turkey legs at Quiet Waters Park weigh roughly as much as a small bowling ball, and by the second weekend of the Florida Renaissance Festival, you will see grown men wearing chainmail under the South Florida sun gnawing on them with the practiced focus of a kid on a popsicle.
By the time you hit the corner of McFarlane and Main Highway on the Saturday of Presidents Day weekend, the festival has already absorbed Coconut Grove whole. Tents stretch from the bayfront up through the village, the smell of arepas competes with kettle corn, and a woman in lin
By Thursday of race week, the Walmart on US-27 has run out of folding chairs, the AM band is bleeding flat-six engine notes from preseason testing, and the long shoulder of Highway 98 is lined with RVs that have been parked there since the previous Saturday. Sebring does not warm
By Wednesday of game week, the LaQuinta parking lots off Salisbury Road already smell like charcoal and bourbon, and the RVs lining the Gate River bend have been there since Sunday. Jacksonville does not stop for the Florida–Georgia Game so much as it dissolves into it — hotel ra
Tampa locals can usually tell Memorial Day weekend is here without checking a calendar. The thump rolls across the bay from the Raymond James parking lots around 3 p.m. Saturday, the rideshare surge pricing on Dale Mabry climbs past 4x by sundown, and someone in your group text s
Magic Kingdom at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday in early December looks, briefly, like a different theme park. The day-guests have been ushered out, the wristbanded crowd is half the size, and Main Street, U.S.A. is lit in cranberry and pine. There is fake snow falling on the cement, the Da
The first time you see a 30-foot king cake float roll past Mel's Drive-In with a Grammy winner playing two hundred yards away, you understand what Universal Orlando figured out decades before its competitors: that a theme park doesn't have to fight for your evening if it just bec
The topiary Goofy goes up before the orchids do. Cast members start staging the giant character frames near Spaceship Earth in late February, and by the time the first outdoor kitchen rolls open its shutters, EPCOT has quietly transformed into something closer to a state fair wit
The Festival of the Arts has always been the Disney festival for people who don't really want to do Disney. It runs through the dead weeks of January and February when the parks are otherwise running on holiday fumes, the crowds are thinner than they will be all year, and the wea
Florida has 175 state parks. These ten are the ones a first-time visitor should actually drive to — for the springs, the shorelines, the live oak hammocks.
