Vacation Guides

A warm embrace greets visitors to Atlanta. Top-notch shopping, world-class dining, and major attractions are among the greatest rewards. "The city too busy to hate," Atlanta has become an example of the New South, a fast-paced city proud of its heritage.

There's a mystique about Austin. Even if you've lived for years in this small town turned big city, the reasons why the city functions as it does, and why it seems so different from other U.S. cities, may not be readily apparent.

Grand Bahama, once a mecca for gamblers and golfers in the '60s and '70s, is again coming into its own as modern vacationers discover its miles of gorgeous, largely underutilized beaches

Bermuda is justifiably famous for pink-sand beaches, impossibly blue water, and kelly-green golf courses. But that's only the beginning. Thanks to its colorful past, this small sliver of land also has a surprising number of historic sites...

There's history and culture around every bend in Boston?skyscrapers nestle next to historic hotels while modern marketplaces line the antique cobblestone streets...

Life is good in the California Wine Country. Eating and, above all, drinking are cultivated as high arts. Have you been daydreaming about driving through vineyards, stopping here and there for a wine tasting or a picnic?..

Cancun is a great place to experience 21st-century Mexico...

Cape Cod is a land at sea: More than 500 miles of coast and beaches for every taste. Our guarantee: The salt air will make you hungry...

Wandering through the city's historic district, you would swear it was a movie set...

The gently rolling hills of the Piedmont make up the central third of North Carolina. This region, wedged between the mountains and the coastal plain, gradually rises from 300 to 1,500 feet above sea level...

Cutting-edge architecture, legendary blues, and scrumptious dining? Check. Lavish shopping, world-class museums, and lake views? Check. Glorious parks, major-league baseball, and side-splitting improv? Check...

Dallas and Fort Worth, separated by 30 mi of suburbs, aren't exactly twin cities?they're more like cousins who squabble more than they get along. Their roots are different, yet intertwined...

You can tell from its skyline alone that Denver is a major metropolis, with a major league-baseball stadium in the center of downtown and parking-meter rates that rival even Chicago and New York...

Founded in 1701 as "la Ville d'Etroit"?the City at the Straits?Detroit is one of the Midwest's oldest cities...

Eleuthera and the Exumas are known for their undeveloped beaches, secluded sandy coves, turquoise water, and piney woods with thickets of shady casuarina, sea grapes, mahogany, and coco plums...

The action-packed island of Hilton Head anchors the southern tip of South Carolina's coastline and attracts 2.5 million visitors each year...

Traveling to Hawaii is as close as an American can get to visiting another country while staying within the United States. O'ahu?where Honolulu and Waikiki are?is the third largest Hawaiian island and has 75% of the state's population...

Sprawling, brash, friendly, and prosperous, Houston is arguably Texas's most cosmopolitan city...

Jamaicans define enthusiasm. Whether the topic is ackee or dominoes, politics or Carnival, the spirit of this island comes out in every interaction...

Stunning cobalt-blue Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America, famous for its clarity, deep blue water, and surrounding snowcapped peaks...

Los Angeles is as much a fantasy as it is a physical city. A mecca for face-lifts, film noir, shopping starlets, beach bodies, and mind-numbing traffic, it sprawls across 467 square mi...

When you experience Maui firsthand, it's hard not to gush about the long, perfect beaches, dramatic cliffs, greener-than-green rain forests, and the fragrance of plumeria that hangs over it all...

Think of Miami as a teenager: a young beauty with growing pains, cocky yet confused, quick to embrace the latest fads, exasperating yet lovable. This analogy may help you understand how best to tackle this imperfect paradise.

Minnesotans may be too nice to claim the Twin Cities as the "Minne-Apple," rivaling New York City, but there's a reason the name stuck...

Canada's most diverse metropolis, Montreal, is an island city that favors grace and elegance over order and even prosperity, a city where past and present intrude on each other daily...

Heralded as Music City, U.S.A., and the country-music capital of the world, Tennessee's fast-growing capital city also shines as a leading center of higher education, appropriately known as the Athens of the South...

The Jersey Shore is 127 miles of public beachfront stretching like a pointing finger along the Atlantic Ocean from the Sandy Hook Peninsula in the north to Cape May at the southern tip. There is no one description of what it's like "down the shore."...

Sometime during your visit to New Orleans, find a wrought-iron balcony, an oak-shaded courtyard, or a columned front porch and sit quietly, favorite beverage in hand, at 6 am...

An incongruous mix of glitzy casinos and quiet, shady lanes; trendy, up-to-date resorts and tiny settlements that recall a distant, simpler age; land development unrivaled elsewhere in the Bahamas and vast stretches of untrammeled territory...

New York City is a quick-change artist, famous for transforming overnight?so what's packed and popular this month may be passe by the time you arrive...

Straddling north and south Florida, Orlando is the gateway for many visitors, primarily because it's close to all things Disney...

This golden stretch of Atlantic coast resists categorization, and for good reason. The territory from Palm Beach south to Boca Raton defines old-world glamour and new-age sophistication.

Many millions of years ago, the Southern Desert was the bottom of a vast sea. By 10 million years ago, the waters had receded and the climate was hospitable to prehistoric mastodons, zebras, and camels...

"On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." W.C. Fields may have been joking when he wrote his epitaph, but if he were here today, he would eat his words. They no longer roll up the sidewalks at night in Philadelphia...

The Valley of the Sun, otherwise known as metro Phoenix (i.e., Phoenix and all its suburbs, including Tempe and Scottsdale), is named for its 325-plus days of sunshine each year...

Sunrise and sunset are both worth waiting for when you're in Puerto Rico. The pinks and yellows that hang in the early-morning sky are just as compelling as the sinewy reds and purples that blend into the twilight...

Throughout the region, from the Riviera Nayarit to the Costalegre, long, flat beaches invite walking, and reefs and offshore breaks draw divers, snorkelers, and surfers...

San Diego is a vacationer's paradise, complete with idyllic year-round temperatures and 70 mi of pristine coastline...

San Francisco makes it wonderfully easy to tap into the Good Life. Between the hot arts scene, the tempting boutiques, the awesome bay views, and all those stellar, locally focused restaurants and wine bars, it's the perfect place to indulge yourself...

With its crisp, clear air and bright, sunny weather, Santa Fe couldn't be more welcoming or more unique...

Seattle isn't just a city?it's a feat of environmental engineering...

There's a whole lot more to SeaWorld than Shamu, the "stage name" used for its mammoth killer-whale mascots. Sure, you can be splashed by the whales, stroke a stingray, see manatees face-to-snout, learn to love an eel, and be spat at by a walrus...

The largest of the USVI, St. Croix is 40 mi (64 km) south of St. Thomas. Plantation ruins, reminiscent of the days when St. Croix was a great producer of sugar, dot the island...

Only three miles from St. Thomas but still a world apart, St. John is the least developed of the U.S. Virgin Islands...

St. Louis is known as the Gateway to the West. This was certainly the case for Lewis and Clark, who stopped here for provisions during their famous expedition...

St. Maarten/St. Martin is virtually unique among Caribbean destinations...

Because it's the transportation hub of the Virgin Islands, most visitors land on hilly St. Thomas even if they don't linger...

Tucked like a jewel in a tiny valley caught between azure sky and gunmetal mountains is Telluride, once so inaccessible that it was a favorite hideout for desperadoes such as Butch Cassidy, who robbed his first bank here in 1889...

The attitude of the Abacos might best be expressed by the sign posted in the window of a Hope Town shop: "If you're looking for wal-mart?it's 200 miles to the right."...

Being a Conch is a condition of the heart, and foreclosure on the soul. Many throughout the Florida Keys wear that label proudly, yet there's anything but a shared lifestyle here...

The quiet, simpler way of life on the Bahamas Out Islands, sometimes referred to as the Family Islands, is startlingly different from Nassau's and Freeport's fast-paced glitz and glitter...

"Toronto is like New York, as run by the Swiss," actor Peter Ustinov is rumored to have said...

For nearly 20 years Universal and Disney have been going head to head. When one park adds a resort hotel, the other follows. When a hot new attraction is unveiled at Disney, you can bet on the arrival of hot new attraction at Universal...

Vancouver is a young city, even by North American standards, but what it lacks in history, it makes up for with natural beauty and multicultural vitality...

There are two types of Disney visitors. The first types just show up, trusting the theme park's reputation to guide them along. The second do some research, make dining reservations in advance, and decide which rides are must-sees ahead of time...

Washington is a city of vistas?a marriage of geometry and art. Unlike other large cities, it isn't dominated by skyscrapers. The result: the world's first planned capital is also one of its most beautiful...