I have a thing for small towns that lean hard into their European heritage, like German-tinged New Ulm, Minnesota, and New Glarus, Wisconsin (a.k.a. America's Little Switzerland). There's something touching and very American about preserving bits and pieces of the Old Country while settling wholeheartedly in the new one.

Iowa seems like an improbable destination for world-famous architecture. But Mason City, Iowa (about 30 miles south of the Minnesota border) is exactly that. The small town is home to the world's only remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel: the Historic Park Inn.

Although I haven't made it to Italy yet, I have eaten plenty of delicious pizza on my travels. I've tried the iconic coal-fired pizza at Grimaldi's in Brooklyn and taken a pizza tour in Milwaukee . I...

For the past several years, I’ve been very rigid about how I traveled—meticulously researched itineraries, figuring out the very best places to eat, and so on. That makes sense for my press trips for this blog and research trips for articles, since I'm on the job and have professional commitments to the convention and visitors bureaus and publications I'm working with.

I've been writing an annual summer roundup post for almost as long as I've had this blog. Most of them read like frantic checklists of restaurants, day trips, and recipes. For a long time, that was...

When I started drafting the intro for this post, I realized that I've written some version of it at least a dozen times over the past several years of blogging: I needed something to bring to a...