Travel

The off-season may be the best times to explore the more than 25 miles of trails in Shelter Island's Mashomack Preserve.

In the Hudson Valley, the town of New Paltz and nearby places like Rosendale, High Falls, and Gardiner combine for a perfect weekend getaway. History, culture, and green spaces come together spectacularly here; this is home to some of the country's most beautiful rivers, mountain ranges, farmlands, and vistas.

In Reykjavik we have 24 hours of daylight in June and about four hours in January. It's one of the cleanest, greenest, and safest cities in the world — a "greening up" that's urgent as temperatures across the Arctic rise faster than anywhere else in the world.

In 1861 -- only 10 years after Yosemite Valley had been "discovered" -- Carleton E. Watkins, perhaps the most famous early Western photographer, wandered this extraordinary natural wonder with heavy camera equipment strapped to mules and snapped images that inspired Abraham Lincoln to secure the world's first national park, in perpetuity, "for public use, resort, and recreation."

Today, many of our national parks -- Yosemite and Grand Canyon especially -- are perilously overcrowded, a reminder of what happens when a public patch of land becomes #instafamous.

African elephants are in trouble. According to the Save the Elephant organization, their numbers have fallen from as many as 10 million a hundred years ago to as few as 400,000 today, and they could be nearly extinct by the end of the next decade.

My day trip to Hudson Yards was meant to be a sojourn filled with schadenfreude. After having read numerous derogatory reviews of the commercial, residential, and cultural complex that opened on the far west side of Manhattan in March, I was eager to see the debacle up close.

A softness in people’s eyes and a gentleness of gesture. This was my travel brief, along with a bit of adventure. I didn’t mind the details, but I was craving warmth of spirit above all else, something in direct contrast to the clamor of my orbit in Manhattan.

Head northwest from Santiago for 73 miles -- practically cross-country in the world's narrowest nation -- and arrive in this port city, best described by its famous former resident, the Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda: "Valparaíso, how absurd you are . . . you haven't combed your hair/ you've never had time to get dressed/ life has always surprised you." Yet, it is Valpo, as locals call it, that does much of the surprising.

The cargo ship La Evangelista embarks weekly from Puerto Montt, charting a 1,400-mile course through the fjords and coastal channels of southern Chile, past archipelagos of uninhabited islands to Puerto Natales, a town tucked in the foothills of the famed Torres del Paine National Park.

If you’ve ever flown in or out of Kennedy Airport, you’ve probably seen the Trans World Airlines Terminal, or the TWA Flight Center as it was called. Built in 1962, the shapely building was designed by the legendary architect Eero Saarinen to usher in the Jet Age, but has been unused since 2001, when the airline went bankrupt.

Sure, people normally traipse off to tropical paradises in the dead of winter, when the dry, hot days and brilliant beaches are most appreciated. But in Central America, nature and the travel industry offer some compelling reasons to visit the area in the off-season. Between May and November, travelers are likely to encounter an absence of crowds, a significant drop in prices, and unique experiences in its flora and fauna — hence, “the green season.”

I always pictured my first trip to Italy as a romantic getaway, maybe to celebrate a milestone anniversary after two children and a certain number of years of marriage.