Travel

Quentin Baxter is a native Charlestonian, world-class drummer, and musical director of the Charleston Jazz Initiative. “There are a lot of restaurants where the music is part of the experience—this has been a big part...

Whatever moves you—food, history, or working up a sweat—you’ll discover it in Birmingham. Alabama’s biggest city is booming, snagging national honors for its chefs, parks, and artful reinvention.

A champion pitmaster offers a taste of Memphis’s smokin’ hot barbecue scene

Knoxville’s population—approximately 185,000—is about one-third that of Memphis and Nashville. And while Memphis claims Elvis and Nashville the Grand Ole Opry, Knoxville boasts an unlikely pair of native sons: country singer Kenny Chesney and filmmaker Quentin Tarantino.

The Gulf Coast beaches are considered the best in North America for shelling, and nowhere is this more evident than along South Florida’s Lee Island Coast, a fifty-mile stretch of white, sandy coastline studded with more than 100 barrier islands.

“I’ve played enough Minecraft to know where diamonds are,” my 19-year-old cousin says as we schlep across acres of muddy furrows with our rented bucket, sieves, and shovels. Although I’m highly skeptical of the real-world applications of Minecraft, there’s no sense in arguing when he points out a small rivulet of water trickling through the muck.

Ongoing streetscape and redevelopment projects have prioritized historic preservation, and because the old has graciously welcomed the new, the best of Savannah still shines through.

Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw River Delta is one of the richest repositories of life on the planet. A writer tours this vibrant but vulnerable ecosystem with the human who knows it best.