Jane O'Shea articles

Explore spiritual destinations around the world where sacred rituals, ancient temples, pilgrimage traditions, and breathtaking landscapes create powerful experiences that photographs simply cannot capture. Discover why travelers must visit firsthand.

Canada’s best known destinations get plenty of attention, but smaller communities can deliver just as much scenery, history, food, and character. Condé Nast Traveler has highlighted places including Waterton, Canmore, Gimli, Elora, Saint Andrews, and Lunenburg among Canada’s most charming small towns. Many of the places that follow pair walkable centers with easy access to lakes, mountains, coastlines, or historic sites. For travelers willing to build a road trip around smaller dots on the map, the payoff can be substantial.

New York is often treated as the symbol of big-city impatience, where everyone appears too busy to stop. In practice, visitors regularly discover that locals will provide directions, explain the subway, or recommend a neighborhood restaurant with impressive detail. New Yorkers may deliver that assistance quickly and without much small talk, but efficiency is not the same thing as hostility.

Hallstatt, Austria, looks like the kind of place travel apps were built to sell. The lake is glassy, the mountains rise sharply, and the village seems almost too neat to be real. It is easy to understand why visitors arrive with cameras ready. It is also easy to understand why residents might feel surrounded.

Your parents chose to book a trip near your vacation, but that does not automatically turn the two trips into one shared itinerary. A boundary is a limit on how much you participate in a relationship or activity, according to the American Psychological Association. You can be happy to see your parents without handing over every morning, afternoon, and dinner of your vacation. The first step is recognizing that proximity does not create an obligation to spend every day together.

European visitors discover the unexpected differences of rural America, from vast distances and pickup trucks to small-town customs, generous portions, limited transit, and unmistakable countryside culture during their travels abroad.

Quebec can feel comfortably familiar to American travelers, yet it operates by its own cultural, linguistic, and practical rules. Visitors who expect a slightly more European version of the United States may miss what makes the province distinctive. Understanding a few common misconceptions can turn an ordinary trip into a much richer experience.

I pictured long walks, outdoor cafés, and afternoons exploring famous neighborhoods. Instead, I found myself searching for shade and checking heat alerts every few hours. It made me wonder whether planning a summer vacation has become far more complicated than it used to be.