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.