One of my favorite reasons to travel is the opportunity it often affords me to step back in time and witness the traditions of a place. Last year, while traveling through France's Jura wine region, we stopped in the quaint town of Arbois during the annual event known as Le...

Less than an hour by train west of Lisbon is the small town of Sintra, which served as the summer retreat for the Portuguese royal family for centuries. The town and surrounding mountains are full of magical palaces, Moorish architecture and ruins. You can spend days exploring the town and...

With the cocktail craze of recent years largely passing France by, the city of Lyon, home to the rustic bouchon, was an especially unlikely place for a resurgence. Yet, here you will find the ironically named Soda Bar nightly serving up dozens of perhaps modern cocktail culture's most...

On my recent trip to France and Switzerland, I did a great deal of driving, easily more than 1,500 miles stretching from Zurich to Lyon to Champagne to Alsace to Jura. As my wife and I plotted out how to find each destination, not always easy with a GPS prone...

Everyone has a secret travel spot. A hidden beach, a tiny mom-and-pop restaurant, a charming town in the mountains. Often we don't want to tell anyone about our secret spot for fear of ruining its magic. But it's the job of a travel writer to uncover new places and tell...