One of Miami Beach’s most iconic and Instagram-worthy attractions is its collection of colorful lifeguard towers. On my recent trip, I set out to walk the length of Miami Beach to see as many of these artistic structures as I could. I managed to visit nine of them, but with 36 of them scattered along the shoreline, there’s plenty left to explore.

Miami is an ideal vacation for escapism without having to leave the country. The combination of bold colors, warm sun, and being by the water is truly undefeated.

For a week, I walked around absorbing as much of this kind of energy as I could, hoping to bottle a bit of it to return to Virginia with me. I look at the photos I captured and they feel like a whispered memory from an old friend, vibrant and alive, yet just out of reach until next time.

When I first saw that Pharrell Williams was collaborating with David Grutman to open the Goodtime Hotel in 2021, I immediately added it to the list of places I wanted to stay—partly because Pharrell is a fellow Virginia native and partly because I fell in love with the aesthetic. It just seemed like, well, a good time.

After spending a week there, I thought I would clue you in—is it really the ultimate "good time" as the name suggests? Here's what I loved and then a few things that caught me off guard.

Something I never really considered about seeing art across the country is how much culture and geographic location can influence the collection of work shown at a museum. At Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), I was introduced to the work of several Latinx artists, a group whom I’ve not had the privilege of seeing much in museums before now.

Nestled in a relatively quiet area of downtown Miami, lies a quaint Vietnamese restaurant called Tâm Tâm. I had never knowingly had Vietnamese food, but one look at the menu and I knew it was a place I needed to be. If you could measure a restaurant's worth by entry, the line outside suggests an upcoming acclaimed experience. Modest in size, Tâm Tâm is the definition of a local treasure and the kind of place I prefer to find myself when it comes to food.

Chicago is full of food gems, and each time I visit the city, I make it a point to try new restaurants, preferably black-owned. Chicago is a city in which you’ll find many Southern restaurants because The Great Migration brought the food I’m so accustomed to in Virginia up north and then across the country. Dining at these restaurants always feels familiar in that way, but I also have come to expect and enjoy the surprises that evolution and a geographical change can bring to such classic and time-honored dishes.

Big Jones in Chicago was mentioned on one of my favorite Netflix series High on the Hog, so you know I had to add it to my list. If you can find any type of cuisine in Chicago, it’s Southern food, thanks to the great migration, and Big Jones beautifully marries tradition with a fresh approach to Southern cuisine.

Eating a black-owned restaurants whenever I travel feels particularly important to me, because it’s an experience that makes me feel at home and reminds me of my culture. We may all be in different places, but food connects us by the continuation of traditions that define Southern cooking, and I’ll always be grateful to places like Virtue for that.