My friends at Hotels.com asked me to share a few fun things to do in Miami Beach! The whole world will be watching the vibrant city of Miami, Florida on Sunday February 2, 2020, because Super Bowl LIV will be played at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens. Families, empty nesters, couples and friend groups will travel away from the winter blues and down to where the sun shines virtually every day. Travel to Miami is red hot right now.
No two people seem to have the same destination in mind. How wonderful is that? These friends of mine have offered where they have visited at this time year that tickles them and provides that special something! Have you been to any of these destinations? I have only been to a few of them.
About three years ago, I sent out a request for all of you to share your favorite holiday destination. This collaborative post was super fun to do and I thoroughly enjoyed reading where YOU like to go!
I think it is about time we did this again!
Books and travel, travel and bookstores, they go together like peanut butter & jelly, cracker and jacks and iced tea on a hot summer day. I have been an avid reader my whole life and since I started the blog I have learned to combine my reading life with my travel life. As part of every itinerary, I look for local bookstores when I visit a new city. Do you do that?
This passion for connecting my travel destinations and my readerly needs has gotten stronger and stronger now that I have so much more time to read. When my children were young and we were so busy with school and sports activities, I was lucky to read a book a month. But now, I can plan my reading life, explore more and even try to pair books with my upcoming destinations. And there’s more…
Lucky for us, Roni McGuire, an almost Empty Nester, took a chance and reached out to me via email. Why not she thought? Roni was looking for an additional way to market her exquisite rental property in East Hampton. So she researched empty nester travel writers and thought she and I would hit it off. She was right. After several phone conversations we have easily become fast friends. Empty nesters have so much in common and can connect on so many levels. We all totally understand each other from a parental perspective as well as a myriad of other topics.
Here’s one more adventure to share from our recent trip to New York City.
It was late April, surely it was time for the arrival of Spring in New York? Right? The weather has been so strange this year. For most of the country and my friends in the Mid West and in the East the temps were still extremely chilly and they even endured a recent snowstorm. Ridiculous!
While on my recent trip to Nebraska in late April it was freezing cold and there was snow on the ground. What? When I agreed to attend an ecotourism conference in Kearney, Nebraska did I ever imagine it would be this frigid! Ha, joke’s on me! And there’s more…
It seems that lately since the whole Facebook privacy scandal, social media has become more of a negative than a positive. There are certainly a great number of attributes I do not like about it, but there are plenty of things social media does well.
Using Instagram as a referral system is definitely a popular activity and many people (like me) use it as an important food and travel resource. Prior to traveling to a new city, I peruse the hashtags and check out the restaurant accounts and often find some pretty yummy things. Receiving a New York City restaurant recommendation from a reliable source and not just from YELP is a much better scenario. At least for us, it is. I do trust those sites, but when the Editor in Chief of Bon Apetít Magazine recommends a local, smallish, out-of-the-way little restaurant and says “It is some of the best food I have had in a while”, I listened!
We traveled to New York City this past weekend in order for me to attend NYT Journeys Travel Smarter Weekend: Food and Photography in New York City. Sounds like my kind of adventure, don’t you think? I honestly did not know what to expect exactly, but knew that I would come away with lots of inspiration and definitely a few handy tips and tricks for successful and enjoyable travel.
My traveling foodie friend Angela is currently enjoying a fantastic three-week trip to Portugal. She sent me a kind of cryptic message via Facebook that said “Do you know about this?” There was no link and just the photo of the pizza with no other references. It turns out that Anderson Cooper (Yes, that one from CNN) posted this enticing pizza photo on Instagram and raved about his friend’s new restaurant in San Francisco.
Dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Pleasantville, NY
We traveled by train thirty miles outside New York City to enjoy the holiday season and to meet up with my good friend and fellow travel writer Irene Levine of Getting on Travel and her husband Jerry. Irene and Jerry live locally and have visited Blue Hill at Stone Barns on several occasions. The restaurant mood was calming and a lovely stone fireplace lit the path to our seats for a magical four hour meal.
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