michelle gross

Imagine a world where one day every month was a national holiday dedicated to making your neighborhood a cleaner place. In Rwanda, on the last Saturday of each month, they do just that. During Umuganda—the Kinyarwanda word for “coming together in common purpose”—people from around the country of a thousand hills pick up trash, repair roads, and generally help each other to make the world sparkly and just a little more beautiful.
While that’s just one example of a community actually caring a...

For centuries, the Sonoran Desert has been considered a place to get your spiritual healing on. This desert is bigger than the entire state of Oregon at more than 100,000 square miles. In fact, the Sonoran spans almost the entire southern half of Arizona from Scottsdale and Sedona right down to Mexico and into parts of southern California.
Driving through the windswept sands and looming mountain ranges peppered in a sea of towering saguar...

Even in idyllic Southern California, where the average temperature rarely dips below a “brisk” 65 degrees, it’s nice to get a change of scenery every once in a while. Enter: Julian, a tiny town about an hour east of San Diego that, come autumn, will make you wonder if you've been accidentally transported to a fall foliage-ridden town in New England.
Nestled in the foothills of the Cuyamaca Mountains, much of Julian’s rustic charm has to do with the fact that it’s preserved its roots as a West...

Haunted hotels, boneyard beaches, and—obviously—sweet tea.
Dating back to 1711, Beaufort is South Carolina’s second-oldest city. Situated roughly between Charleston and Savannah, its Lowcountry landscapes—think wide-open marshlands and swaying oak trees dripped in Spanish moss—hold stories that span generations. (They also appear as the backdrop for cultural touchstones like Forrest Gump and The Big Chill.)
To truly understand this seaside town, you have to delve into its history. Remnants of...

The birthplace of the humble walking safari, Zambia has maintained a low profile compared to safari destinations in many other African nations. Unscathed by mass tourism, many of the safari lodges in Zambia are either family or independently owned and pride themselves on providing ethical safari experiences, which means training and working with local guides and staff from nearby villages and offering responsible game drives that don’t stress or endanger animals (or guests, for that matter).
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Now more than ever, where you choose to travel, and why, makes an impact. Your PTO may be finite, but your vacation options are about as long as the menu at The Cheesecake Factory. Flights, particularly international ones, have never been cheaper. Doors between cultures have been flung open. The world, as they say, is your oyster.
Lest you become paralyzed by too many choices, or fail to come up with a more compelling reason to visit a place beyond just Instagramming something, we went ahead a...

A quick getaway to a glitzy metropolis can be invigorating, but really, you need a full week to truly experience America's biggest and best cities. And while we're all for a relaxing trip to a cute small town, there's only so much leaf-peeping and antiquing you can do before you get bored. So why not split the difference? America's small cities offer the best of both worlds: all the trappings of a small town -- don't worry, there will be many opportunities to use the word "quaint" -- with eno...

All due respect to Florence + the Machine, but the dog days are definitely not over and depending on where you are in the northern hemisphere, August is shaping up to be one hot one mother. Despite the instinct to retreat into air-conditioning, August is one of the best months to travel for music and food festivals -- like Fringe Fest in Edinburgh, Scotland, or a lobster festival in Rockland, Maine. And speaking of Florence, she’s headlining at Sziget, one of Europe’s biggest parties of the s...

The process of choosing just 19 places to visit in 2019 was long, arduous, fraught with infighting -- nah, just kidding, we had a great time. But by necessity, a list so limited overlooks some truly remarkable corners of this big ‘ole world of ours. As we Sophie’s Choice’d one destination after another, we kept coming across cities in our own backyard that made surprisingly compelling cases for a visit.
Sure, they lack the daydreamy wanderlust of brand names like New Zealand and Morocco, but ...

If you're a hopeless procrastinator like me and still haven't planned your winter escape strategy, you probably assume it's too late to find anything affordable. Yet you are not as screwed as you think you are! The ethos of the Caribbean -- always be slacking -- applies to booking vacations there. And now isn't such a bad time anyway: The US dollar is at its strongest level in years, and plenty of savings await anyone who knows know where to look.
Still, given the sheer number of islands, res...

It's not too late to book your winter escape strategy....