Things to do in North America
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FEATURED
Roadtrip America Eastbound
22 days (ex San Francisco)
by Intrepid
Traverse the States from San Francisco to New York City, Discover some of America's best national parks, Drive through Death Valley, Roll dice in Las Vegas, Be …Not LP reviewed
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Amigos del Sol
Professional, good-value school popular with travelers. Begin classes any weekday – call the director ( [tel] cell phone 951-1968039) between 8am and 9am, 3pm and 4pm, or after 8pm, or send an email the day before you want to start. No minimum duration and no registration charge. Students starting on Monday should arrive at the office at 8:30am.
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Metropolitan Museum of Art
With more than five million visitors per year, the Met is New York’s most popular single-site tourist attraction, with one of the richest coffers in the arts world. The Met is a self-contained cultural city-state, with two million individual objects in its collection and an annual budget of over $120 million. Since completing a multimillion-dollar remodeling project that brought works out of storage, renovated the halls of 19th- and early 20th-century paintings and sculptures, expanded the Ancient Hellenistic and Roman areas and sparklingly remade the American Wing, the place is looking more divine than ever – despite operating in the midst of a financial crisis that has…
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Graceland Wedding Chapel
Offering the original Elvis impersonator wedding (from $199) for over 50 years. If it’s good enough for rock stars, then it’s probably good enough for you, too.
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Journeys Beyond the Surface
Offers personalized walking tours on aspects of the DF experience, with a get-off-the-beaten track attitude. Enhanced by expert commentary, tours may cover pre-Hispanic architecture, the muralist movement, or life in low-income neighborhoods, depending on participants’ interests.
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Bike the Big Apple
Biking tours let you cover more ground than walking tours – and give you a healthy dose of exercise to boot. Bike the Big Apple, recommended by NYC & Company, offers five set tours. Its most popular is the six-hour Back to the Old Country – the Ethnic Apple Tour, 12 miles of riding that covers Williamsburg, Roosevelt Island and the east side of Manhattan. Other tours visit the Bronx’ Little Italy, city parks, Brooklyn chocolate shops and Manhattan at night.
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Central Park
Like the city’s subway system, the vast and majestic Central Park, an 843-acre rectangle of open space in the middle of Manhattan, is a great class leveler – which is exactly what it was envisioned to be. Created in the 1860s and ’70s by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux on the marshy northern fringe of the city, the immense park was designed as a leisure space for all New Yorkers, regardless of color, class or creed. And it’s an oasis from the insanity: the lush lawns, cool forests, flowering gardens, glassy bodies of water and meandering, wooded paths providing the dose of serene nature that New Yorkers crave. Olmsted and Vaux (who also created Prospect Park in Bro…
reviewed
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Southern Food & Beverage Museum
Sitting as it does in the commercial crassness of Riverwalk Mall, the Southern Food & Beverage Museum isn’t immediately appealing – from the outside it looks more like a gift shop than anything else. Don’t judge this book by that cover. There’s actually a pretty fascinating, well-executed exhibit behind the fronting shop that includes more information than you’ll probably ever need on the food staples and dishes of the South, and New Orleans and Louisiana in particular. The attached Museum of the American Cocktail isn’t much more than a small gallery hall, but admission is free with the food museum and, hey, how often do you get to see 19th-century ads for Sazer…
reviewed
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Outdoors Geek
This mom-and-pop gear outfitter is a lot friendlier to deal with than fighting through the mobs at REI. It works like this: you call and talk to Will, who puts together a package of top gear for hiking and camping and either ships it to you or arranges a time for you to pick it up at his Aurora distribution center.
This personalized service, along with high quality goods, is the reason we love the Outdoors Geek. Also, the website is perfect for novice campers as well, with tips that will help dispel the anxiety of getting out into nature for the first time.
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Art Institute of Chicago
The second-largest art museum in the country, the Art Institute of Chicago has the kind of celebrity-heavy collection that routinely draws gasps from patrons. Grant Wood’s stern American Gothic ? Check. Edward Hopper’s lonely Nighthawks ? Yep. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte ? Here. The museum’s collection of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings is second only to those in France, and the number of surrealist works – especially boxes by Joseph Cornell – is tremendous.
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New York Public Library
This main research building of NYC’s public library system was, until recently, called the Humanities & Social Sciences Library; that all changed when billionaire businessman and library trustee Stephen A Schwarzman donated $100 million to the NYPL’s expansion, and the powers-that-be renamed it the Stephen A Schwarzman Building. Bought or not, though, it remains one of several specialist research libraries in the NYPL system, as well as one of the best free attractions in the city – a monument to learning, housed in a grand, Beaux Arts building that reflects its big-money industrialist roots. When it was dedicated in 1911, New York’s flagship library ranked as the largest…
reviewed
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In-N-Out Burger
At California’s famous In-N-Out, where the beef patties are never frozen and the potatoes are hand-diced daily, there’s a secret menu. Ask for your burger ‘animal style’ (with mustard, an onion-grilled bun and extra-special sauce).
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Montage
This beloved Creole nightspot under the Morrison Bridge has long, white-clothed community tables, aggressively oddball waiting staff, oyster shooters, streetwine cocktails and legendary macaroni and cheese.
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Powell's City of Books
The largest independent bookstore in the US, this place is dangerously addictive. Bank on your quick one-hour 'browse' turning into three. Fantastic travel section.
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Statue of Liberty
One of the most recognizable icons in the world, the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of kinship and freedom formed out of 31 tons of copper and standing 93m from ground to torch-tip. A joint effort between America and France to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, it was created by commissioned sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. The artist spent most of 20 years turning his dream – to create the monument and mount it in the New York Harbor – into reality. Along the way it was hindered by serious financial problems, but was helped in part by the fund-raising efforts of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, as well as poet Emma Lazarus, who in 1883 …
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Café du Monde
Du Monde is overrated, but you're probably gonna go there, so here goes: the coffee is decent and the beignets (square, sugar-coated fritters) are inconsistent. The atmosphere is off-putting: you're a number forced through the wringer, trying to shout over Bob and Fran while they mispronounce 'jambalaya' and a street musician badly mangles John Lennon's 'Imagine.' At least it's open 24 hours - you might be able to capture some measure of noir-ish cool as the drunks stumble past in the Edward Hopper-esque wee hours.
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Union Square
Louis Vuitton is more top-of-mind than the Emancipation Proclamation, but this plaza, bordered by brand-name retailers, was named after pro-Union Civil War rallies held here 150 years ago. A misguided renovation paved the place and installed benches narrow enough to keep junkies from nodding off, turning this once-lovely park into a prison exercise yard. Redeeming features include Emporio Rulli Caffè, the half-price theater-ticket booth and stellar people-watching.
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Stash Café
Hearty Polish cuisine is served up with good humor in a dining room with seats made of church pews and daringly low red lights illuminating the tables. Staff range from warm and gregarious to completely stand-offish, but the food is consistent, with quality fare like pierogy (dumplings stuffed with meat or cheese, with sour cream) and potato pancakes with apple sauce. An enthusiastic pianist hammers away from time to time.
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Veselka
Here lies the epitome of what’s beautiful in New York’s dining scene – mind-blowing variety, which can cover several continents as well as the whole gamut of budgets in just a single city block. The East Village's roots lie with Ukrainian traditions, and you can still find some low-key pierogi (dumpling) palaces hanging on, like the classic and uberpopular Veselka.
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Excalibur
Arthurian legends notwithstanding, this medieval caricature, complete with crayon-colored towers and a faux drawbridge, epitomizes gaudy Vegas. Excalibur could have resembled an elegant English castle, but its designers decided to go the kitschy route instead, which is just fine with the cheapskate frat boys and families with rambunctious young kids who stay here.
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Afterwords Café & Kramerbooks
Generations of DC intelligentsia swear by this combination awesome bookstore and awesome squared brunch spot. Food is simple but very pleasing stuff, stick to your bones but pleasingly innovative – pecan-crusted catfish with hollandaise, anyone? Browsing the stacks before stuffing our guts is a favorite way to spend Washington weekends.
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Eco Ride
Surrounded by the mountains, jungle and sea, Vallarta offers some truly thrilling mountain biking. This outfit offers guided one-day cycling tours suited for beginners and badasses alike. The most challenging is a 50km expedition from El Tuito (a small town at 1100m) through Chacala and down to the beach in Yelapa. The views are stunning.
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Restaurante Natura
Styled after the successful 100% Natural chain, this little bistro offers up a good mix of natural and vegetarian Mexican cuisine.
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Alcatraz
Alcatraz: for almost 150 years, the name has given the innocent chills and the guilty cold sweats. Over the years it’s been the nation’s first military prison, a forbidding maximum-security penitentiary and disputed territory between Native American activists and the FBI. No wonder that first step you take off the ferry and onto ‘the Rock’ seems to cue ominous music: dunh-dunh-dunnnnh! It all started innocently enough back in 1775, when Spanish lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala sailed the San Carlos past the 12-acre island he called Isla de Alcatraces (Isle of the Pelicans). In 1859 a new post on Alcatraz became the first US West Coast fort, and soon proved handy as…
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Brooklyn Bridge
A New York icon, the Brooklyn Bridge was the world’s first steel suspension bridge. When it opened in 1883, the 1596ft span between its two support towers was the longest in history. Although its construction was fraught with disaster, the bridge became a magnificent example of urban design, inspiring poets, writers and painters. Today, the Brooklyn Bridge continues to dazzle – many regard it as the most beautiful bridge in the world.
The Prussian-born engineer John Roebling, who was knocked off a pier in Fulton Landing in June 1869, designed the bridge, which spans the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn; he died of tetanus poisoning before construction of the brid…
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