Travel -- Where to Go in 2026

Travel is almost always the unanimous choice when people are asked what they would do if they had the freedom to do what they want. Usually, it's a question about retirement plans or a "what if" query about a fortuitous windfall like winning the lottery. As Robert Fulghum once noted in a quirky little essay he wrote about traveling, "nomads we are at heart, and we scratch the itch whenever we get a chance." 

Travel has been a constant in my life since late 1992 when I graduated college with few teaching prospects and little desire to settle into a thirty-year career in one place at that point in my life. So, my (future) wife and I moved to Taiwan, where we lived for five years, traveling quite a bit in between contracts and on any given week or so we could get a way. That inclination is also part of my kids' DNA -- my daughter recently returned from a semester abroad in Spain, and my son and his girlfriend seem to head abroad any time they can -- Ireland, Japan, Austria ... the international sauntering goes on.

2025 turned out to be a big travel year for us, though it began with one simple trip and grew from there. We spent a week in St. Maarten, traveled for a couple more around Washington, DC and the Chesapeake Bay area, jaunted off to Paris for the exquisite (and once in a lifetime) art exhibit and career retrospective on David Hockney at the Louis Vuitton Foundation (and unexpectedly ended up witnessing the final stage of the Tour de France as it rolled through Montmartre), and finished the summer with a trip to Boston and Concord for the Thoreau Society's Annual Gathering.

This year will likely not present as much varied travel, but will include a big move, as we wrap up our two years in FoCo and our near quarter-century in Colorado by relocating to the East Coast, likely in Maryland and the DC-Chesapeake Bay region. Baltimore in all its cool quirky fun has definitely caught our eye. So, with all that in mind, I thought I'd share the annual "52 Places to Go, So Little Time: Where We Went in 2025" from the New York Times. 

52 Places to Go, the Travel section’s annual list of recommended destinations, lands every January. Each short entry is a snapshot into a different possible adventure.

Some Travel editors were intrigued enough to design their own personal vacations around the list: Amy Virshup described staying in the inns atop Italy’s Dolomite Mountains known as rifugios as “otherworldly,” while Stephen Hiltner fondly recalls “ducking into a crowded izakaya during a torrential rain” in Osaka, Japan.

In 2025, a number of our writers and photographers also headed to destinations on this year’s list to dig even deeper into what makes them worth visiting.