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Florida's Gulf Coast offers easy escapes, whether you're craving lush resorts, preseason baseball, or natural retreats.

Want to experience the Florida's natural side? Here, we find manatees (and mermaids), orchids and alligators, weird deer, butterflies, and chickens.

Fans flock to Sarasota County, where they can get close to their team, and their companions can find plenty of other distractions.

Families flock to the Panhandle’s scenic highway during school breaks. But adults can chill here in the spring, too—it’s all in the timing.

The first time that I was lured to the Flora-Bama Lounge, I had been casting for speckled trout on a guided fishing trip off the coast of Orange Beach, Alabama. This was a fall evening in the ’90s. Gulls spread rumors overhead. The sun was going to orange. From a distant point came music, pounding yet lighthearted, like a cross between Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffett. It sounded like dirty dancing. It sounded like a good time.

Mend Coffee & Goods is designed to be a place for the inter-ability community to convene, work, and socialize. It comes from Jay and Katherine Wolf, the founders of disability nonprofit Hope Heals, and will serve Opo coffee drinks—think espresso, drip, nitro, cold brew lattes—and kombucha on tap, plus breakfast and pastries.

Some of the most exciting food in Atlanta today is served out of borrowed kitchens, at farmers markets, and from food trucks. Here’s some of our recent faves, and where to find them. 

Chef Rich Rosendale touts experience cooking around the globe, from India to Germany to Ecuador and the Philippines. He owns a Southern-style barbecue “café” called Roots 657 in Virginia and operates an event catering company out of 200 Peachtree Street Downtown. On March 17, he’ll launch a full-service restaurant on the ground floor of the same building (which is where the Harry Potter exhibit currently resides.) Called R3 Rosendale Concepts, it will serve lunch inspired by his pandemic-time delivery-only pizza company (Roots Local Pizza To-Go) and a soup concept called Soups Up. Dinner will be more refined, serving dishes inspired by international flavors and a craft cocktail lounge he opened earlier in his career.

James Beard Award-winning chef Marcus Samuelsson is someone who makes his name known. He competed on Top Chef, Chopped, and Iron Chef; partnered with restaurateur/chef Jonathan Waxman on a cookbook, and opened restaurants across the country. Come March 17, he’ll add another restaurant to that list as he brings his craft south.

The brand calling itself the “Official Pretzel of Beer” is distributed across the U.S.—but it was born in Marietta, inspired by a recipe from cofounder Sean McSweeney’s grandmother. “She’d always have pretzels there when we got together for the holidays,” he says. “She made everything from scratch, including her seasoning.”