North America’s first aerial tramway — and, for fall 2026, in its final season. Ten minutes to a 4,080-foot summit and a four-state view of the color.
Cape Town’s great Africana bookshop — a 1957 Long Street institution stacked with new, secondhand and antiquarian titles on Southern Africa, and the best free hour you’ll spend in the city.
If you do one serious thing in Cape Town, make it this — a community-built museum to the neighborhood apartheid erased. It reframes the whole trip; the hotels, the restaurants, the wine farms all mean more once you’ve sat with it.
A hands-on Cape Malay cooking class in a home in the Bo-Kaap, where you roll your own rotis, fry samoosas, cook curry, and eat the lot — easily the most authentic meal you’ll have in Cape Town for the money.
An employee-owned Franschhoek wine boutique where the people who farm and make the wine actually own the brand — a rare tasting where the give-back is the whole point, and some of the best wine we drank in the winelands.
A seventh-generation family farm right on the Mohawk Trail — pick-your-own apples, a maple creemee made from their own syrup, and one of the most memorable stops of a Berkshires foliage day.
A bohemian working harbour and antique-strewn village on the False Bay coast — easy to reach by car, Uber or one of the world’s prettiest commuter trains, and free to wander all afternoon.
One of the world’s great botanical gardens, spread across Table Mountain’s eastern slopes — a world-class half-day for the price of a coffee, with a treetop walkway and summer sunset concerts.
The largest contemporary art museum in the country, sprawling through two dozen old mill buildings in North Adams — spectacular, genuinely one-of-a-kind, and the perfect move on a gray foliage afternoon.
A weekend (and summer-evening) food and farmers’ market at Granger Bay — the best window into how Cape Town actually spends its weekends, and a brilliant breakfast over the sea for the price of a coffee back home.
The flat-topped mountain over the city, reachable by a rotating cable car or a steep hike straight up — absolutely worth doing, but only on a clear, low-wind day, because cloud and high wind shut the cableway down with no warning.
A storied college course in the Berkshires — and one of the most beautiful places anywhere to take in fall foliage, eighteen holes at a time.
A five-course dinner aboard restored 1950s rail cars, rolling twenty miles along the Pemi River Valley near Lincoln — a genuinely special, only-here night on a White Mountains foliage trip.
A hop-on, hop-off tram-and-bus loop through the Franschhoek winelands — the most relaxed, car-free (and designated-driver-free) way to taste your way around the valley.
Africa’s largest contemporary art museum, carved out of a 1920s grain silo at the V&A Waterfront — the best place in the city to see what art from this continent is doing right now, and worth going into with your eyes open.
