Travel in county Mason

One of our very best packing tips is to fill your closet (and suitcase) with reliable staples you can rewear again and again. Of course, those essentials will vary slightly by season. When building a winter travel capsule wardrobe, timeless basics and layering pieces are key. Instead of panic-buying trendy outfits you'll wear once before every vacation, focus on adding a few high-quality pieces to your wardrobe that pair effortlessly with your existing favorites and will last for years to come.

As I gazed out the window of the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner, watching the California coastline unfold before me, I couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement. My girlfriends and I were on our way to Santa Barbara for a long-awaited weekend getaway, and the journey itself was already setting the perfect mood.

While there are countless ways to cook eggs, chefs currently seem fixated on the most hedonistic option: hard boiling and then coating them in a layer of ground meat before breading and frying them. Known as Scotch eggs, the treats are said to have been pioneered by the London epicurean shop Fortnum & Mason in 1738, after which they quickly became a fixture of British pub cuisine. The chef Ed Szymanski, 31, of Lord’s in New York recalls the Scotch eggs he encountered growing up in London as both ubiquitous and “quite bad.” His version features Madras-style spiced lamb in place of the usual pork sausage. “It’s like a supercharged croquette with an egg in the middle,” he says. In Seattle, the chef Sean Arakaki, 30, is also seeking to elevate the flavors of his childhood. Born and raised in Hawaii, he grew up eating loco moco: a hamburger patty served over gravy-drenched white rice with a sunny-side-up egg. At Itsumono, his restaurant in Seattle’s Japantown, his loco moco Scotch egg arrives atop rice and gravy with a side of macaroni salad. “You cut through the crumb to get to a runny yolk,” he says. For his Portland, Ore., food cart Tokyo Sando, the owner Taiki Nakajima, 36, makes a rendition with ajitama — soy-marinated boiled eggs — enveloped in a gyoza-inspired mix of ground pork and chicken with ginger and soy. Encrusted with panko and deep-fried, the eggs are sandwiched between slices of Japanese bread with mayo, roasted black garlic and cabbage. And in Mumbai, India, the chef Hussain Shahzad, 37, of O Pedro wraps his version in chile- and vinegar-laced ground lamb, drizzling on vindaloo sauce when the egg comes out of the fryer. “It’s not a monotonous dish,” he says. “You get crisp crust, juiciness from the meat and the runny yolk … playing on the palate at the same time. There are so many layers to it.” —

‘Unspoilt’ is a word you’ll repeatedly hear if you ask visitors to describe Tobago — an island of roughly 60,000 people that sits near the southernmost end of the Caribbean archipelago, just north of its big sister, Trinidad. Connected millennia ago to the South American mainland, Tobago is gifted with a distinctive mix of continental and Caribbean island ecology. It’s now home to beautiful beaches, colourful coral reefs, 10,000 acres of protected rainforest — the oldest such reserve in the Western Hemisphere — and over 260 species of birds. 

America’s coastal areas don’t have a monopoly on great beaches . . . or groovy beach towns.