Travel

While it is less than a 15-minute drive from the hustle and bustle of East Hampton's Main Street in July, Cedar Point County Park in East Hampton's Northwest Woods feels a world away, which makes it both special and surprising. This year, Doug and Lee Biviano, who also operate concessions at the Fire Island National Seashore, have reopened the camp store and brought glamping back to the park.

Health is wealth. And vice versa, too, at the newly-renovated Gurney's Saltwater Spa. I visited the 30,000-square-foot facility to have a look around, though I didn't try any of the treatments, so you'll have to decide for yourself whether wellness as an investment is a worthy concept.

As of right now, the spa is in its "soft opening" phase, so treatments are available only to those staying at the hotel, or who buy a spa membership. Rates for off season, Labor Day to Memorial Day, are $12,000 and year round is $17,500.

Okay, that's the stressful part done. Now, relax.

Romain Glouphile is a storyteller who understands the effect of a powerful narrative. Glouphile supplies Michelin star restaurants with local wine, meats, cheese, bread. In order words, exactly the things the Provençe-Alpes-Côte region of France is known for. He also runs his eponymous restaurant Glouphile on Stalingrad Avenue on the eastern side of the port of Nice. Glouphile begins by telling you that his restaurant is essentially a wine shop and so first you must see the wines. Then he turns and walks off.

I traveled to Sicily in April. I took the Jitney from Amagansett, got off on 39th Street, walked down to Greenwich Village, and there I was.

A five-hour Sicilian food tour in New York City with Allison Scola, a sort of Rain Man of cannoli and all things Sicilian, is quite honestly the next best thing to visiting the famed Italian island in person. Although, be warned: Her signature Cannoli Crawl is bound to work up your appetite for experiencing the real thing -- it's all I can think about now. 

When I'm asked why I run so much, I usually say, only half-jokingly, "So that I can eat whatever I want." I am a runner. I just happen to go ultra-distances. Long races, hundreds of miles, sometimes over days. The other answers to that question are more serious: I run to stay fit and, more recently, to stay sane during insane times.

About the same time that I sat down to write this, the hit television show "The White Lotus," about a group of guests in a high end hotel (the first season was filmed at Four Seasons Resort Maui) announced season two was being filmed in...drumroll...Sicily. This time, the setting is the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Taormino, a hilltop town on the east coast of the island, close to the infamous Mount Etna.

The only drawback to holidaying in Burgundy, France's greatest food and wine region, is that you risk returning home fleshier and heavier than when you arrived. Unless, of course, you burn off the extra calories with a self-powered vacation on two wheels.

An email landed in my inbox sometime in March from Geoffrey Drummond, the executive director of the FoodLab at Stony Brook Southampton and a longtime producer and director of several cooking shows with Julia Child and Eric Ripert, as well as movies like "My Dinner with Andre."

    There are many paths you can take down the Eastern Seaboard, but I like the ones less traveled that stick in your memory and teach you a bit of American culture that isn't learned in the classroom.

    As you head out of Long Island, perhaps stop at the Lakehouse restaurant or the Whalers in Bay Shore for a lobster roll while pondering this guide to an ultimate mid-Atlantic journey that ends up at one of America's classic cities for food, history, and charm: Charleston, S.C.

The Hamptons to the Jersey Shore

What you need to know as you drive toward the Great Smoky Mountains is that the land is a rain forest. The hills, valleys, gullies, cracks, and seams are filled with hickory, fir, sugar maple, wild cherry, birch, chestnut, pine, cedar, and tulip poplar -- a tree that rises straight up out of the ground and nine stories later pops open with large, white magnolia-looking flowers (okay, tulips). The vegetation is so abundant that it comes described as shingled, shagged, big-toothed, winged, slippery, sweet, bitter, chalked, and weeping.

    Once upon a time, or specifically, mid-pandemic last year, an average Long Island family was looking for a place to plan a vacation. Montauk wasn't terribly appealing, they were tired of the Outer Banks and the Hudson Valley, and Kennebunkport, Me., was attractive but too distant. The spot needed to be secluded enough for social distancing but welcoming and entertaining enough for a family of 10 with two small children.

We may all be grounded at the moment, but that doesn't stop our minds from wandering. Here are the places our regular travel section contributors say they can’t wait to revisit, or discover, when life returns to normal. Enjoy these armchair adventures and stay safe at home, as we are.

Paros, Greece

City or coast? Culture capital or cowboy outpost? Progressive destination or old favorite? Browse our annual guide, compiled from recommendations by The Star Travel team and a few far-flung readers, to get inspired. Then, start packing.

Anyone who hasn't visited "the swamp" (as Donald Trump loves to refer to the District) in the last decade or so, and perhaps plans to during election year, is in for a great surprise. At least on the culinary front.

New Zealand is a magical place to visit, especially when you’re looking for a change in climate. Too cold at home? Our winter is New Zealand's summer, and vice versa.

Moscow (pronounced Moscoe) is about a two-hour drive from Spokane, Wash., through the lake town of Coeur d’Alene, and the rolling “palouses,” or fields of wheat, soy, and other crops.  Named after Moscow, Pa., not the Russian city, this town of about 25,000 is home to the University of Idaho and close to the border of Washington State.

    In a 2014 "Simpsons" episode, Homer, with Bart and Lisa at his feet, spins a globe, points to Uruguay and emits that heh-heh-heh trademark laugh before exclaiming, "Look at this country -- U R Gay!"

What better way to cap off a hot summer and warm start to fall than with some cool Halloween fun? From totally scary to just plain silly, here are 10 ways to spook yourself over the next couple of weeks.

Sure there are tons of films and talks and parties to cram into a few short days, but when you need a change of pace, there are a wealth of choices, from a quiet few minutes in a beautiful library to a chowder contest in Montauk.

Julie and Dan Resnick, Amagansett residents and co-founders of Feedfeed, a behemoth online crowd-sourcing food platform, that lists over one million enthusiastic foodie followers, have come to know Los Angeles well over the last two years. After moving from New York to Amagansett permanently in 2010, they decided to go bicoastal last year and spend the winter months in the Pacific Palisades area, where they rent a house with a kumquat tree in the garden bearing fruit.

The wide-open desert of Arizona, where the prized 100-year-old saguaro cactuses grow wild among rattlesnakes and roadrunners, used to be dotted with dozens of dude ranches. Families would escape the cold of the winter here for an active week of riding horses, hiking, exploring, swimming, learning rope tricks, and drinking cowboy coffee.

In Reykjavik we have 24 hours of daylight in June and about four hours in January. It's one of the cleanest, greenest, and safest cities in the world — a "greening up" that's urgent as temperatures across the Arctic rise faster than anywhere else in the world.

In the Hudson Valley, the town of New Paltz and nearby places like Rosendale, High Falls, and Gardiner combine for a perfect weekend getaway. History, culture, and green spaces come together spectacularly here; this is home to some of the country's most beautiful rivers, mountain ranges, farmlands, and vistas.

The off-season may be the best times to explore the more than 25 miles of trails in Shelter Island's Mashomack Preserve.

African elephants are in trouble. According to the Save the Elephant organization, their numbers have fallen from as many as 10 million a hundred years ago to as few as 400,000 today, and they could be nearly extinct by the end of the next decade.

In 1861 -- only 10 years after Yosemite Valley had been "discovered" -- Carleton E. Watkins, perhaps the most famous early Western photographer, wandered this extraordinary natural wonder with heavy camera equipment strapped to mules and snapped images that inspired Abraham Lincoln to secure the world's first national park, in perpetuity, "for public use, resort, and recreation."

Today, many of our national parks -- Yosemite and Grand Canyon especially -- are perilously overcrowded, a reminder of what happens when a public patch of land becomes #instafamous.

The cargo ship La Evangelista embarks weekly from Puerto Montt, charting a 1,400-mile course through the fjords and coastal channels of southern Chile, past archipelagos of uninhabited islands to Puerto Natales, a town tucked in the foothills of the famed Torres del Paine National Park.

My day trip to Hudson Yards was meant to be a sojourn filled with schadenfreude. After having read numerous derogatory reviews of the commercial, residential, and cultural complex that opened on the far west side of Manhattan in March, I was eager to see the debacle up close.

Head northwest from Santiago for 73 miles -- practically cross-country in the world's narrowest nation -- and arrive in this port city, best described by its famous former resident, the Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda: "Valparaíso, how absurd you are . . . you haven't combed your hair/ you've never had time to get dressed/ life has always surprised you." Yet, it is Valpo, as locals call it, that does much of the surprising.