Results tagged “Florida” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Our intrepid writer Andrew Nelson is just five days away from his trip to Miami, where he'll be relying on the Twitterverse to show him around. So far, he's already found a great rate at the Essex House hotel, but now he's looking for restaurant recommendations and weighing his options (should he check out Red Steakhouse? El Pub? Versailles?). Be sure to follow him at @andrewnelson to help him with the planning, and then help to show him around town when he arrives.

Andrew will be in Miami from Thursday, November 26th through Monday, November 30th. Tweet him your insider tips on where to eat, play, and soak up the city's culture, using the hashtag #ngtmiami. Follow him now, and read his story about his experience in an upcoming issue of Traveler. And you can follow @NatGeoTraveler for all the latest news from our magazine staff.

We know social media has changed the way we travel, but can it actually make for a better trip? To test the thesis, Traveler writer Andrew Nelson is trading in turkey and cranberry sauce next week for sunscreen and a BlackBerry. He's headed to Miami Beach to see if the local Twitter community can lead him to on-the-go discoveries in South Florida. If you know Miami, be a bird on his shoulder. Follow him @andrewnelson and help guide him to your favorite bits of South Beach, Coconut Grove, Little Havana and more.

Andrew will be in Miami from Thursday, November 26th through Monday, November 30th. Tweet him your insider tips on where to eat, play, and soak up the city's culture, using the hashtag #ngtmiami. Follow him now, and read his story about his experience in an upcoming issue of Traveler.

Flamingo illustrations: piccerella/istockphoto.com

Not all parking garages are created equal. For example, look to the Ballet Valet Parking Garage and Retail Center in Miami Beach, on 7th and Collins, in the heart of the Miami Art Deco Historic District.

Designed by the French firm Arquitectonica, engineered and planned by Desman Associates and constructed by McCarthy Building Companies, the structure transforms the upper levels of the garage into a hanging garden.

From PointClickHome.com:

The building includes street-level shops, a restored Art Deco façade and six parking levels concealed behind a trellised, carbon-dioxide-absorbing planting of Clusia guttifera [a flowering shrub with leathery leaves], Conocarpus erectus, var. sericeus [silver buttonwood] and Scaevola frutescans [a tropical beach shrub]. Palm trees planted along the sidewalk provide shade.

The imaginative landscaping takes some of the sting out of driving a greenhouse-gas-emitting vehicle.

UPDATE:  For more info about the Miami Art Deco Historic District, which is celebrating its 30th year on the National Register of Historic Places, and for info about their annual Art Deco Weekend in January, check the Miami Design Preservation League website here.
 
Photo by Dan Forer, courtesy of Arquitectonica

What better way to explore some of the country's greatest natural treasures and historic sites than a bicycle tour through the back roads of Florida? And now, you can do it any time of the year! In an effort to help make Florida tourism greener, non-profit organization Bike Florida is bringing back year-round, long-distance bicycle touring for the first time in 25 years.

To inaugurate the new initiative, Herb Hiller and Linda Crider, co-founders of the modern-day Florida bicycling movement, will lead a week-long bicycle tour this October 10-16, starting and ending at Palatka, a rural county seat by the St. Johns River in northeastern Florida.

"For too long there's been no organized comfortable cycling way to discover backroads Florida," says Crider.  "These tours are organized for that, but also for fun."

Contributing Editor Andrew Nelson is back from a long weekend along Florida's Gold Coast, where he found the economic downturn has had an impact on the high life.

More posh. Less dosh. For travelers looking for resort bargains, these are, as Natalie Merchant said, the days. No more so than the Sunshine State. Last winter tourism fell off the stove along with the stock market. "There was no season this year," complained one taxi driver heading up the Gold Coast from the Ft. Lauderdale Airport. "I've never seen it like that."

The recession combined with the traditional slow season - the humid Florida summer - offers bargains for the traveler. Even Boca Raton, one of East Coast's glossier destinations, is discounted this year.

Exhibit A is the august 1047-room Boca Raton Resort and Beach Club, now part of the Waldorf-Astoria collection. The resort, which started life as the aristocratic Cloister Inn (more on that later), just dropped $110 million on rejuvenating its Beach Club, a swankienda rising like a mid-mod Phoenix from the Atlantic sands. Despite the new pool and a terrific, South Beach-style lobby that makes even the knobbiest-knee-ed schlump feel himself George Clooney, the Club and the Cloister are lopping their rates during the summer with prices starting at $99 a night. Some deals offer a third or fourth night free.

Ironically, Boca Raton has been at this rodeo before. Founded by Florida's own Great Gatsby, the Jazz Age architect and shameless self-promoter Addison Mizner (1872-1933), the town owes its very existence to real estate speculation. The roly-poly Mizner, who was often accompanied by a pet monkey on his shoulder and a gaggle of swells in tow, was a driving force behind the creation of Palm Beach in the early 1920s. Looking to replicate his success further south, he began purchasing land in Boca Raton, first building the preppie-pink Spanish Revival Cloister Inn in 1926 with the hopes of attracting Northern investors. It all worked like a charm until it didn't. Mizner sold $26 million worth of real estate in 24 weeks, but then speculation and the infamous Miami hurricane that year popped the state's property bubble. Boca was "nixed by nature" observed Addison's brother, Wilson. Mizner's Boca holdings were finally sold for $71,500. He died broke in 1933.

In our search for the authentic, we're always on the quest to highlight the homemade - Hungarian chimney cakes, New Zealand cocktails, even Virginia dumplings. But what about homemade music?

On June 13 and 14, Tampa will be hosting the second annual Homemade Music Symposium, a free festival featuring a quirky mix of homegrown musical talent and international business gurus. Originally created to give local musicians the chance to learn industry tips from business greats, the event combines workshops and performances, with an emphasis on public access. Any aspiring musician can meet with legends like Tony Michaelides, a record promoter who served David Bowie, U2, and The Pixies, among others, on the Manchester rock 'n roll scene.

Photographs of Orlando by David Burnett, from the March 2007 story, "Beyond Disney" in National Geographic Magazine.

To mark the release of our March issue, we're celebrating cities over the next few weeks, and we've asked our readers to share what they love most about the places they call home. Today's city-dweller is Walker Starling from Orlando, Florida, and we were taken with his tough-love approach to his town.

Still haven't submitted? Here's your chance. We've put together a list of fill-in-the-blank questions that should help get you started and we'd love it if you would copy and paste the list into an email, fill in your answers (as many as you like) and send your responses to IntelligentTravel@ngs.org. Declare your love for that special city in your heart!

Now I'm not the biggest sports fan, so I'm proud to say that I actually knew that the Super Bowl is taking place this Sunday, February 1st. And I know the Cardinals are taking on the Steelers in Tampa Bay, Florida.

That said, as a fact-checker here at Traveler, I have to admit to not knowing much about the city that'll host Super Bowl XLIII. To make up for this gap in my geographic knowledge, I've done some research and found some cool places to go, beyond Raymond James Stadium, if you're heading down to sunny Florida this weekend for the big game.

John Ur returns this week to consider the cinematic offerings of Florida, the Sunshine State.

 

Florida is a state with a strong personality. Its name evokes images of early-bird specials, Universal Orlando, or Miami Vice. But there's also a lot to see beyond beaches and buffets. From the edges of the Panhandle near Alabama to Miami and the Keys, the state of Florida sits very close to sea level. The highest point, Britton Hill - the lowest high point of any state - peaks at just 345 feet above the ocean. Seems like the place to be if you're afraid of heights. It's also the place to be if you're into sunshine. The state's temperature has only been recorded at zero degrees Fahrenheit once, during the Great Blizzard of 1899. Of course, the trade-off is the steady barrage of hurricanes that seem to hit the state every year. Without any large geographical features to buffer the winds, the damages are always severe.

But mountains and glaciers aren't the only path to geographical richness. Florida is home to three national parks: the Dry Tortugas, Biscayne, and the Everglades, all rich in animal and plant diversity. The Dry Tortugas are a group of islands in the Florida Keys known for their mangroves and sea turtles. Biscayne, just outside Miami, is home to four distinct ecosystems and hundreds of colorful fish. The Everglades is a subtropical marshland, home to over 360 species of birds as well as alligators, dolphins and manatees. Though the Everglades is considered unstable because of all of the development around it, the state of Florida is making efforts to sustain it and help return some land back to its natural state. Just this year, the state agreed to purchase US Sugar's plant and return that area back to nature.   

Apart from the national parks, you can find the rest of tourist Florida - Orlando has Disney World, the coastlines have great beaches and Miami is a nightclub hotspot. But the tourist brochures won't tell you about the downsides of Florida. The state is the third fastest-growing state in the country adding almost 1,000 new residents daily. The result is ever-increasing suburban sprawl, with property developments swallowing up large swaths of previously open and undeveloped land.

John Sayles' 2002 movie, Sunshine State, takes a look at this issue head-on. Set in northeast Florida around Jacksonville, Sunshine State tells the story of two towns and two women, one black, one white. The women (played aptly by Edie Falco and Angela Bassett) both deal with relationship issues within their family and their lovers, but the over-arching theme, and the plot points that connect the two of them is their community of fictional Plantation Island.