Life tips

The airport lounge life is a taste of luxury every traveler needs to experience at least once.

I was born and raised in Rhode Island but in the summer of 2018, I moved across the ocean to Dublin, Ireland. Though it was initially supposed to be a one-year adventure, I ended up calling Ireland home for four years.

With incredible shopping, stylish restaurants, historic architecture, and world-famous nightlife, the lively Spanish capital of Madrid sets the backdrop for a splurge-worthy trip. Madrid exemplifies chulo, the Spanish word for cool, which you’ll embrace after spending days getting lost in the colorful markets, strolling through El Retiro Park, and sipping cocktails on a rooftop as the sun sets.

When wanderlust strikes, travelers often dream of jetting off to globally recognized cities, often overlooking lesser-known destinations that offer a blend of culture, history, and natural beauty every bit as good.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Clayton Balabanov and Teresa Davies, who sold their home and last year moved into the "Nomad Monster" mobile home they converted themselves. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Between 1850 and 1852, a mighty, squat stone fort rose from a low-lying island in the Milford Haven Waterway in Wales. Originally proposed by Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to King Henry VIII, more than 300 years earlier, Stack Rock Fort—about 800 yards off the coast—was built to protect the Royal Dockyard at Pembroke Dock from attack by sea. It had a 30-foot tower, walls nine feet and nine inches thick, and housed three large cannons and one smaller one. A few years later casemates were added, and by 1870, the fort got a major makeover, inspired by the threat of Napoleon III. A new battery was added, able to hold up to 175 soldiers and five officers. Most of the fort’s useful life was spent undergoing upgrades, and it only really saw active use during World War I. In 1929 it was finally decommissioned, disarmed, and scoured for useful materials. Since then, the lonely three-story fort has sat vacant but for crashing waves, nesting gulls, and opportunistic plants.

At an age when most schoolkids are still learning to tie their shoelaces, Nathaniel Prebalick — AKA Gold Plate Nate — was teaching budding treasure hunters how to pan for gold. As a third-generation prospector, he was raised amid the sparkling streams of California’s Gold Country, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, getting to know its watery veins as well as the life lines of his own hands. 

A traveler on TikTok has shared a life hack to avoid being stuck in an airport cab pickup line. 

When my daughter turned 9, I started to do the math. If she left our home at 18, her dad and I were then halfway through the summers we were guaranteed with her. Our summers with her were always jam-packed with Chicago events, summer camps, and wherever we decided to take her on vacation.

Over a two-year period, work has been carried out to remove large overhanging trees, improve the walls and trails throughout the maze, plant new fruit trees and excavate a colourful mural that became buried in the ground.

Lunchtime on a warm spring Saturday on the Cours Saleya – Nice’s famous flower market, tucked away just one row of elegant fin de siècle buildings from the sea – and it’s hard to see how any business can be open in town, apart from restaurants and cafés. Everyone, it seems, is here; every table taken beneath the canopies and parasols, queues forming outside the most popular eateries, every bench taken with families tucking into paper-wrapped socca – a salty chickpea pancake – or gelati. It feels like high summer; the sky is a vivid blue, the palazzos and mansions beneath blazing butter yellow and warm, burnished terracotta.

Hotelier Rigzin Namgyal fondly remembers a time when only the truly curious and adventurous made their way to Ladakh. When this region in north India opened to tourists in the mid-1970s, just a few backpackers each year undertook the long and arduous journey by road, over dangerous mountain passes from Manali in the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh.

An Ontario International Airport staffer advised travelers to take any old stickers from past trips off their luggage to avoid losing their bags when flying.

Abel Zhao, co-founder & CEO of FreeD Group, a technology innovator that specializes in proprietary enterprise application solutions, has acquired 75-year-old Connexus Travel from the parent company of Cathay Pacific, Swire Group. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Puerto Rico has seen tourism boom coming out of the pandemic, and the island’s authorities believe it’s poised for another surge in visitor numbers — thanks to a new marketing campaign showcasing its culture.

Destinations and attractions are investing in virtual and augmented reality technologies to drive interest and foot traffic to historical attractions. During the ITB Berlin conference last week, some attractions, tech providers and destinations discussed how such technologies will heighten the visitor experience.

It may seem that it took one purportedly “stereotypical” tourism campaign for Fiji to realize that happiness, a brand truth that the destination continues to highlight in all its campaigns, isn’t something that is switched on for tourists — it’s how the country lives.

Tree of Life Resorts and Hotels, a boutique property chain from India, has seen impressive growth from just five properties pre-Covid to 13 properties currently, with the 14th property opening next month.

One was an old dairy factory in Stuttgart. Another, an old bread factory in Salzburg. In Cologne, there’s also a former headquarters of German federal intelligence. Now – they are all a&o hostels. You can stay at one for about 43 dollars a day.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kacie Rose, a 29-year-old TikTok content creator in Florence, Italy. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Diverse landscapes are Chile's biggest asset. Traveling around this long, narrow country, you'll be greeted by an ever-shifting panorama of rolling vineyards, dazzling lakes, towering volcanoes, deep fjords, high grasslands and sprawling salt flats. To do this terrain justice, you really need a set of wheels.