A New Camp in the Clouds
Lodges
Although the AppalachianTrail begins in Georgia, the Appalachian Mountains start a little farther southwest in Alabama. In the southernmost stretch of the range, Cheaha State Park in Delta contains Mount Cheaha’s 2,407-foot-high summit—Alabama’s loftiest point—and this summer will boast elevated new accommodations, too. The thirty-two-room Cheaha State Park Lodge reflects a style that state parks director Matthew Capps dubs “modern park-itecture,” with Alabama-sourced timber that complements the park’s historic stacked-stone structures, built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. “We wanted to honor the CCC’s use of native materials while moving the style forward,” Capps says. Sleek lines and minimalist decor are decidedly chic and contemporary; multiple (and massive) wooden beams and raw stone amp up the cozy vibes while bringing the outdoors in. Up above, a rooftop bar looks toward stunning vistas, while the added altitude provides new ones. “The location is known for its sunset view,” Capps says, “but on the roof, you’ll now get a sunrise view too.” Balconies on all rooms share the dramatic overlook, and a breezeway cloaked in copper-colored aluminum reflects the sun, especially during the summer solstice, when a carefully calculated opening overhead will anoint the new lodge with golden light.
alapark.com
Blooming Where She’s (Re)Planted
Food
Little Rock native Jennifer Maune had a precipitous climb to culinary success; within five years, she was a finalist on Master-Chef, attended Le Cordon Bleu and École Ducasse in France, and staged at Le Louis XV in Monaco, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London, and the French Laundry in Napa Valley. Now she’s bringing all those lessons to her hometown with Restaurant Fleur, her new South-meets-France lunch and dinner spot, speakeasy bar, and pastry shop. Opening this spring in a historic onetime bank at the corner of Capitol and Main Streets downtown, it will retain the original 1909 tile, French molding, and marble. “It makes me proud that I’ve gotten to study under some of the top chefs in the world and have the chance to bring that experience to Little Rock,” Maune says. She is planning a menu starring Arkansas ingredients, including venison, duck, and rice, prepared with French techniques, and will collect herbs, produce, and honey from culinary gardens on her own twenty-five-acre property. Don’t miss the twelve-seat chef ’s table in the bank vault—or the dipped chocolate truffles, macarons, and a Gordon Ramsay–approved apple cake.
jennifermaune.com
City of Orchids
Conservation
Just outside Miami, the trees and grounds of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables brim with colorful orchids, a flashback to how the landscape once looked. “South Florida was an orchid paradise before development and poaching,” says Jason Downing, Fairchild’s orchid biologist and director of research. He leads the eighty-three-acre garden—which doubles as the headquarters of the American Orchid Society—in its efforts to propagate species like the ground-dwelling Florida Dancing Lady and the rare (and famous) ghost orchid. Fairchild’s thousands-strong collection, divided into rainforest, Florida hammock, and Caribbean areas, will be the main draw during Orchids in Bloom (March 14–15). The annual festival also includes growing classes, vanilla orchid–infused treats, sales of rare species, and lots of chatter about Fairchild’s Million Orchid Project. “The goal of the program is to reintroduce one million of what I call our lost native orchids,” Downing says. He relies on regional schools, neighborhood groups, and volunteers, equipping them to grow species like the Cyrtopodium punctatum Florida cigar orchid and Encyclia tampensis butterfly orchid in urban areas. So far, the program has planted more than 750,000 orchids. “Thanks to crowdsourcing science, for the first time in eighty years in South Florida, you’re no more than a few minutes’ car ride or a short walk from a native orchid growing in a tree again,” Downing says. “With their vast array of colors and their diversity, they’re natural jewels and a symbol of the wild.”
fairchildgarden.org
Where a Chef Can Savor Flavor
Openings
The Douglas, a new sixteen-room boutique hotel set within a grand 1853 house in Savannah’s historic district, has already been charming guests with interior designer Kirby Caldwell’s thoughtful touches—restored heart pine floors, intricate plasterwork—and regular cocktail hours with canapés, charcuterie, and sparkling wine. But come late spring, residents and visitors who haven’t booked a room can experience the same warm coastal welcome at Lester’s, the hotel’s new thirty-eight-seat restaurant and oyster bar next door on Oglethorpe Avenue. Jacques Larson, the heralded chef of Wild Olive and the Obstinate Daughter in Charleston, South Carolina, says opening Lester’s offers him the chance to step back from the Italian cuisine he’s known for and toward the French food of his youth. “I began cooking under a Parisian chef in 1991, and my mom’s grandmother came over from the French region of Alsace,” Larson says, “so I’m excited to make classic and modern French dishes that aren’t overworked, but just focus on the best ingredients.” That will translate into such menu items as Tybee Oyster Company’s Salt Bombs oysters, salade Niçoise with crisp local veggies, and perhaps even an old-school lobster bisque. “At the Obstinate Daughter, we’re cooking for nearly a thousand people on weekends,” Larson says. “But in Savannah, it’s such a small space that I’m just really excited to make something a bit more personal, to slow down a little.”
thedouglas.com
The Bourbon World’s Spirited Reunion
Drinks
The annual Bourbon Classic in Louisville has matured nicely since its debut in 2013—quadrupling in size while losing none of the character that makes it one of Bourbon Country’s standout events. More than a whiskey tasting, the four-day celebration (February 25–28) is the ultimate winter warm-up, offering educational seminars, face time with such industry legends as seventh- and eighth-generation Master Distillers Fred and Freddie Noe, and, of course, plenty of great whiskey. “It’s the ultimate Kentucky trifecta—culinary, cocktails, and bourbon,” says cofounder Seth Thompson. “A full epicurean immersion in the culture and lifestyle.” The event has also become something of a reunion for distillers, blenders, and culinary professionals, who mix and mingle with guests throughout the weekend. New this year: a spirited brunch at Angel’s Envy and a Top Shelf event that will pour coveted sips from the 2025 Buffalo Trace Antique Collection. Thursday features pairing dinners, while Friday’s Cocktail and Culinary Challenge teams up leading mixologists and chefs in a small-plate showdown. The festivities close out on Saturday with Bourbon University sessions and that evening’s grand tasting.
bourbonclassic.com
New Orleans Off the Page
Festival
Every year, to kick off the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, full-throated entrants engage in the “Stella!” shouting competition in tribute to Williams’s classic A Streetcar Named Desire. After the most boisterous bellower wins a prize pack that fittingly includes Stella Artois beer, festival attendees spread out across the French Quarter. This year marks the fortieth anniversary, with more than sixty events and a hundred speakers (March 25–29), including talks by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown and National Book Award–winning novelist Justin Torres. Most of the events happen at the Hotel Monteleone (itself a literary landmark as a past host to Williams, Truman Capote, and William Faulkner). Attendees appreciate the intimacy and camaraderie that develop. “You might walk down the hallway and bump into your favorite author and have a little conversation,” says festival publicist Reine Dugas. “That hardly happens at some of the bigger events.” The festival attracts not just accomplished and aspiring writers, but anyone with a bookish bent. “It’s really a place for readers as well,” Dugas says. “Writers can attend writing sessions and learn the craft, but readers can go hear author panels or literary discussions by their favorite authors. And anyone can come and just be immersed in literary New Orleans.”
tennesseewilliams.net
Marvelous Basket Cases
Craft
Karen Jackson’s white oak baskets are known for their simple, elegant designs. With the wood cut to show its grain patterns, some of her baskets are used solely for decoration, but you’re just as likely to spot them on the arms of farmers’ market shoppers around northeastern Maryland. Jackson and her husband, Dave, are the seventh owners of the Day Basket Factory in Elkton. This year, they’re celebrating the company’s 150th anniversary. The business began when two brothers left New England, drawn by the Susquehanna River Valley’s white oak forests. They wove eel traps for Chesapeake Bay watermen and baskets for cotton farmers, producing as many as two thousand a week. Today the Jacksons make only a fraction of that number, but their process remains refreshingly straightforward: “I cut the wood, and she makes the baskets,” Dave says. For the anniversary, Jackson may bring back an old design for a limited-edition basket with colored wooden strips. As the couple near retirement, they’re hoping a new generation will keep the tradition alive. “We just don’t want to see it close up and go away,” Jackson says. “There’s so much history here.”
daybasketfactory.com
Scrapbookers of Life
Art
The mélange of bright colors and mismatched patterns in Coulter Fussell’s artworks can often, in her words, “make your eyes buzz.” Fussell’s wall pieces—fabric and pictorial patchworks of the Southern experience that pull more from the artist’s background in quilting and doll making than contemporary painting—are sometimes difficult to capture in a photograph but are mesmerizing to see in person. The Proving Ground, her solo exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, offers that opportunity (March 21–June 14). Relying on an assortment of donated materials from friends, family, and neighbors for lively hangings that comment on such disparate topics as military history and the allure of the Florida Panhandle, Fussell has created new pieces that incorporate digital detritus into the mix. The artist has transformed ephemeral Snapchat photos and cell phone videos, mostly taken by her teenage boys, into layers of chiffon and tinted projections. Fussell’s solo exhibition pairs with the museum’s concurrent posthumous retrospective of the work of Mississippi self-taught artist L.V. Hull, who turned her rural Kosciusko residence into an enchanting, immersive installation of everyday objects, many painted with her signature colorful dots. Speaking about the similarities between their works, Fussell suggests that “where others saw chaos, L.V., like me, probably saw visual order.”
msmuseumart.org
Hometown Headliners
Music
The way lead singer BJ Barham tells it, American Aquarium’s Roadtrip to Raleigh became a three-night, highly anticipated Americana music festival the first weekend in February, drawing visitors from forty-seven states and four countries, purely by accident. Eleven years ago, worried the band’s hometown album release show wouldn’t draw a big crowd in the dead of winter, Barham called on his talented friends to join him onstage at the city’s historic Lincoln Theatre. Soon a new Triangle tradition was born. American Aquarium closes out every night, playing a different set each time. But the real magic of Roadtrip (February 5–7) is the chance to see top-billing acts like Charley Crockett, Charles Wesley Godwin, or Morgan Wade play in an intimate downtown venue; the shock is not being able to find out who the full lineup will be until after the tickets have sold out. “Zach Bryan posted on Instagram that he was eating at [the downtown Raleigh staple] Beasley’s when he was supposed to be in Seattle making a record,” Barham recalled. “And then I got on StubHub and saw that tickets were selling for over a thousand dollars. It speaks to how excited people are about this thing, because this might be the smallest place some of these friends will play all year.”
americanaquarium.com
Get Your Kicks
History
A century ago when it opened, Route 66 knit together existing roads to pave the way for a fabled route from Chicago to Los Angeles. “The history and culture of the American West are wrapped up in the notion of transportation over vast expanses,” says David Davis, the chief curatorial officer at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. To coincide with the iconic road’s centennial, the exhibition Route 66: From Trails to Truck Stops will run through May 4, exploring how the paths of the past—including early Native American trade routes and railroads—shaped what John Steinbeck would famously dub “the Mother Road.” Davis’s favorite artifacts include a railroad spike hammer, a Bowser model hand-crank gas pump from the early 1900s, and an original neon motel sign. “We’re exploring not only the history of transportation across the West,” he says, “but how Western iconography, such as boots, hats, and tepees, are a part of the tourism culture of Route 66 that continues to thrive today.”
nationalcowboymuseum.org
SEWE’s Sure Bets
Outdoors
The inaugural Southeastern Wildlife Exposition hosted a hundred wildlife artists and exhibitors and attracted five thousand attendees to Charleston. Forty-three years later, those stats have skyrocketed to five hundred artists and forty thousand guests, a fact that would have seemed about as likely to early organizers as dogs flying—and yet both are 2026 realities (February 13–15). If you’re headed to the popular DockDogs Competition at Brittlebank Park, where said canines (motivated by a bumper and a swim) soar through the salty air, make sure to venture across the street to the Charleston Marriott, where you’ll find SEWE’s newly elevated Sporting Showroom. The upgraded space features an expanded outdoor footprint along with additional programming, including live decoy carving with the Virginia master Mark McNair, and a fresh slate of bucket-list outdoor trips at the Ducks Unlimited auction. With multiple venues near Brittlebank and downtown’s Marion Square, SEWE encourages folks to walk, if possible: “Get out and enjoy Charleston,” says marketing director Meagan Trotta. “Let the city be part of the experience.” While you’re strolling, check the event schedule at Garden & Gun’s new digs, fittingly located on Magazine Street, for our annual Cocktails & Conservation series, cohosted by contributing editor T. Edward Nickens and editor in chief David DiBenedetto.
sewe.com
Cocktails & Conservation series
Welcome to the Neighborhood
Hotels
A fresh crop of boutique hotels, including a charming pair of historic properties, entice travelers beyond the bright lights of Broadway to Nashville’s leafy neighborhoods. Minutes from downtown, these walkable pockets allow visitors to experience Music City like a local—good food, friendly residents, no crowds. “You’re near the party but not in the party,” says the hotelier Róbert LeBlanc of his first hotel outside New Orleans. The Chloe Nashville, opening this winter in Hillsboro Village, is set within two revamped 1920s Craftsman bungalows, once the home of Asylum Records and Spirit Music, where marquee artists like Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs recorded chart toppers. LeBlanc partnered with the interior designer Sara Costello to reimagine the hotel’s nineteen guest rooms, three bars, restaurant, and pool deck to reflect Nashville’s contemporary creative spirit, highlighting the work of local makers throughout, from the Chris Coleman artwork on the walls to the Imogene + Willie–designed staff uniforms. In nearby Sylvan Park, longtime neighborhood residents Erin and Alex Tolbert have transformed an early-twentieth-century boardinghouse into a luxuriously appointed eight-suite bed-and-breakfast. “From Sylvan Park Boarding House, you can walk to six casual restaurants, six to eight high-end restaurants, two playgrounds, a popular greenway, and a robust Saturday farmers’ market,” says Erin of the property, slated to open this spring. “Plus, you’re just a ten-dollar Uber from downtown.”
chloenashville.com
spboardinghouse.com
Canvasing the Nation
Arts
Showcasing rare works by iconic American modernists including Ellsworth Kelly, Jacob Lawrence, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Andrew Wyeth—some of which have never been available for public view—a new exhibition, American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection: From Edward Hopper to Alma Thomas, provides a fascinating glimpse into the private art collection of the eponymous Texas billionaire, philanthropist, and art enthusiast. “It’s a thoughtful connoisseur’s collection, not a trophy collection,” says Carter Foster, the chief curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, the second stop (March 8–August 2) on the exhibition’s four-part Texas tour. Covering the late nineteenth century through the first eight decades of the twentieth, the nearly eighty paintings and watercolors on display reflect a growing exploration of the American landscape as a muse across a range of mediums and styles. “You get the sense he was buying things he genuinely liked,” Foster adds. “It has nuance and a tangible sense of personality.”
blantonmuseum.org
Horse Country Hideout
Hotels
Although you won’t find a pair of complimentary paddock boots next to the bed in Leesburg’s new Hotel Burg, the spot does take its equine connection seriously: Every room in the inn includes a picture of a horse. “I wanted it to feel hyperlocal,” says the hotel’s developer Kevin Ash, citing the region’s rich heritage of horse farms, fox hunts, and polo fields. The $25 million project centers on a reclaimed 1885 house, now decorated with Ralph Lauren–inspired plaids, herringbone fabric, and Persian rugs. Guests can sign up for horseback riding, winery visits, and even an Orvis-endorsed fly-fishing outing on the Potomac River. The hotel’s main restaurant, the Huntōn (Old English for “hunt”), specializes in open-fire cooking. Michelin recognized chef Vincent Badiee’s menu includes aged steaks, lobster thermidor, and a game pie with venison, rabbit, quail, and duck. There’s also a rooftop bar and speakeasy, and the hotel hosts a local social club and coworking studio, all helping integrate it naturally into the community, Ash says. “It feels like it’s been here for years and years and years, and we’re a few months in.”
hotelburg.com
Springtime Stoke
Outdoors
Every March, as temperatures climb and days lengthen, Snowshoe Mountain in Snowshoe throws a blowout bash. On the final day of its winter season, the slopes host a ski-for-free day for West Virginia residents, a tradition that has become something of a statewide holiday. It’s not only a bargain, but a great time of year to ski, says Andy Rice, a Presbyterian minister who also serves as the resort’s race team coach: “It’s a little nicer to be outside, it’s getting warmer, but there’s still lots of great skiing to be had.” Snowshoe, which opened in 1974, has developed a reputation for some of the best skiing in the mid-Atlantic, with 1,500 feet of vertical drop and a range of run difficulties. Its signature Cupp Run, designed by legendary French skier Jean-Claude Killy, stretches a mile and a half. For this year’s closing day, scheduled for March 22, expect the resort to be laid-back, with skiers wearing T-shirts, Rice says. There will also be music at the mountaintop ski village and a party at the Flume Shack slopeside bar. “It can be a silly, easygoing dynamic,” he says. “It’s worth the trip.”
snowshoemtn.com
—Larry Bleiberg, Wayne Curtis, CJ Lotz Diego, Robert Alan Grand, Elizabeth Hutchison Hicklin, Jennifer Kornegay, Lindsey Liles, and Tom Wilmes
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