My 2-hour flight turned into a 6-hour travel fiasco, and it made me realize there's one item I'll never travel without again

Answering the decades-long call of Native American tribes and environmentalists alike, President Joe Biden earlier this week created a new national monument buffering parts of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Meaning “where tribes roam” to the Havasupai people and “our ancestral footprints” in the Hopi language, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni covers 917,618 acres across three distinct sites north and south of the natural wonder. Home to wildlife like bison, elk, mule deer, desert bighorn sheep, and rare cactus species, the protected area encompasses plateaus, canyons, Colorado River tributaries, and countless culturally and spiritually significant sites for the Indigenous peoples of the Southwest.

I was one of three adults who led a backpacking trip to the Colorado Rockies this past June with six teenage Boy Scouts from Troop 876 of Savannah, Ga. After seven nights camping, our tenth night — June 26 — was to be aboard a redeye to Kennedy Airport, followed by a morning flight to Savannah, both on JetBlue Airways. But our Denver departure was delayed over two hours and we missed the connection. We waited for three hours in line, only to politely be told the next flight available was five days later, even after we offered to fly to Atlanta, Charleston, S.C., or Jacksonville, Fla., instead. JetBlue would not provide a hotel. So we opted for a refund (plus $12 meal vouchers), rented two cars and drove 14 hours home, racking up about $1,200 in travel expenses. But when our refunds from JetBlue came through, they totaled $261 for nine of us, only 18 percent of the original cost. A customer service representative later explained to me by phone that we had been reimbursed for only the New York to Savannah leg. We believe JetBlue should have gotten us on an earlier flight on a different airline or at least reimbursed us for the nine fares and fees totaling $1,458, and perhaps chipped in for the expenses to get home. Can you help?

You pass so close to towering red rock canyons in southern Utah that you expect to hear scraping or see sparks as you glide by. They loom so dramatically over you that you stare without blinking. And if you’re on board the train Rocky Mountaineer, you have glass domed and sided coaches to take it all in, all of the majestic landscape on the Rockies to Red Rocks journey between Moab, Utah and Denver.

I felt an instant pang of regret on my most recent Target shopping spree. 

Marguerite Humeau lives 4,500 miles and a world away from where she’s building her latest artwork. The French-born, London-based creator had never experienced “such vastness” before she stepped onto the wide-open landscapes that define the San Luis Valley, a high alpine desert in southern Colorado, in early 2022. “The valley opens up and you have nothing else—the sky and the horizon and the fields,” she says. “It’s transforming.”

Watching weary day hikes start the long uphill hike from Phantom Ranch, a ranger station at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Jeff Schwartz has learned to look for telltale warning signs.

Formula One driver Valtteri Bottas challenged me to a gravel race last year in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Okay, it wasn’t a direct challenge. But I knew the Alfa Romeo driver would be competing in the 2022 STB GRVL event. Ergo, if I signed up for the same race distance, we’d compete against one another. Obviously, I had no choice but to accept his challenge and to ultimately crush the Finnish driver’s spirits on the 60-mile Red Course.

Compared to the typical Latin American tamale — a corn-based mixture steamed in a corn husk or banana leaf — the Mississippi Delta’s iteration is smaller, spicier, meatier and often simmered rather than steamed. Some say the dish came from Mexican migrants or soldiers in the Mexican American war; its origins may lie in Native American cuisine, or hail from the African dish, kush — cornbread hash. The flavours are as varied as the backstory — here are some of the best places to try them.

I've had the luxury of sitting underneath glass-dome windows as my Rocky Mountaineer train barreled between Colorado's mountains.

We’re proud to announce the winners of the 2017 SmarterTravel Editors’ Choice Awards. We spent six months and enlisted eight subject experts to select our Editors’ Choice winners, and then turned it over to you, our readers.

Supersonic speed – mainstream fares