Roadtripping

Road trip: Grapefruit League's Spring Training

One of Florida’s best road trip itineraries takes place during Spring Training. A few stadiums are still easy day trips from Miami/Fort Lauderdale, but it’s more fun to take in a few games over several days at different stadiums. You’ll have a chance to get closer to professional baseball’s stars, check out the rookies, and see how the veterans look in this month-long warm-up.

The Grapefruit League’s first game is Detroit at Atlanta on Friday, Feb. 22, but the season really kicks off the next day with eight games. Spring Training runs through March 30, but some of the last two days’ games are played closer to teams’ homes, outside Florida. You’ll find a master schedule here.

A Spring Training road trip can get you off the interstates and take you into some of Florida’s most interesting small towns, which you can explore when you’re not at a stadium. For this part, I like Florida Rambler’s Guide to Spring Training, which helps you design your own itinerary with information about campgrounds, beaches, bicycle trails and other things to do near each of the stadiums. See you at the ballpark!

Coastal road trips

Not that potential road trip routes are in short supply, but Coastal Living has put together a list of five "stunning" coastal road trips and not all are the usual suspects. Instead of California 1 through Carmel and Big Sur, it recommends a stretch that starts in Jenner, about 75 miles north of San Francisco, and runs north to Fort Bragg. In the Southeast, Coastal Living recommends Mobile, Ala., to New Orleans – a trip I took last spring (although mine started in Miami) and would especially recommend for people interested in water and wildlife. Other trips: North Carolina’s Outer Banks (everything depends on ferry schedules; check them when you first start your planning), Alaska from Seward to Anchorage (a favorite of mine), and U.S. 1 in Maine south from Acadia National Park. 

Looking for celebrities in the Caribbean

It's high season in the Caribbean, and if you want to do some celeb-spotting, here's where to find the bold-faced names. 

Road trip: A doughnut tour.

Now this is a road trip I could get into. Get too far into for my own good, as a matter of fact. It's a road tour of Kentucky's doughnut bakeries -- not Dunkin' Donuts and the like, but the independent bakeries established by the region's German and Scandinavian immigrants. Check it out. It won't be long before your mouth is watering too. 

Blue Ridge Parkway: A stop at Mt. Mitchell

It is a glorious day on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  We are headed to Mt. Mitchell, at 6,684 feet the highest point east of the Mississippi and more than 4,500 feet higher than Asheville, N.C., our starting point. The leaves are just starting to show fall color at the place where we join the parkway. The branches arch gracefully over the road, enclosing us in green with a few splashes of yellow and red, and blue sky above.

We stop at the Folk Art Center, which is jammed with the work of regional artists – pottery, painting, drawings, baskets, woodwork, glass, art quilts, jewelry. I want to buy the place out. Fortunately, the call of the road is louder, if only slightly.

As we climb, we see more color. A hillside is quilted in dozens of shades of orange and gold. A lake glitters below us, and in the distance, a succession of ridge lines fades away from us in hazy shades of blue and gray. Exposed granite towers above the road, water seeping through the rock glinting in the sun.

Gradually evergreen trees begin appearing among the maple and oak, growing in number as we near the summit, until they take over. There are lot of dead trees, some killed by acid rain, others by an aphid-like insect that attacks hemlocks. This is all explained on signs around the visitors center atop Mt. Mitchell, which is a North Carolina state park.

We climb up to a platform at the highest point and look north and west across the ridges toward Tennessee. Since it’s a clear day, maybe we’re seeing Tennessee – there’s no way of knowing, but I like to think we are.

A short distance back down the road, we stop for lunch, then go out back where the restaurant has a deck overlooking the mountains. We take one last look at the magnificent vistas, then head back down the parkway through the tunnels of trees.

Road trip destination: Sebring, Florida

Here’s what I did on my last road trip: I had been to Sebring, Florida, many times to watch racing in vintage automobiles, but I’d never done anything else touristy in the little Central Florida town, which is about 175 miles northwest of downtown Miami. So in August, with Sebring’s 100th anniversary celebration coming up in October, I drove up to see what else I could do. I visited the race track – the first time I had ever been there when there was no action on the course – then walked out on the city fishing pier, went to a Friday night party at the town’s historic heart, walked along a boardwalk through an old cypress swamp, and went wine-tasting with the chickens. Read my report here.

Autumn road trips: color in the mountains

We’re almost at my favorite time of year for road trips: autumn, when nature’s scenery is spectacular. I’m planning a trip to North Carolina, including a drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway to see the fall color. How about you?

To help you choose your route, The Miami Herald has a few articles for you. Click here for a story about New Hampshire, here for a story about Maine, and here for an article about the lodges in Georgia’s state parks.

If none of those fits the bill, here’s some help: a list of websites and phone numbers where you can find information about fall foliage. Some of these sites or phone lines might not be up and running yet, so bookmark this site for later.

STATES

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Maine

Massachusetts

New Hampshire

New York 800-225-5697

North Carolina

Tennessee

Vermont 800-VERMONT (800-837-6668)

Virginia 800-424-5683

Wisconsin

OTHER

Asheville, N.C

Blue Ridge Parkway

Georgia State Parks

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

New England: Yankee Magazine

Shenandoah National Park

USA

Photo: Maine Office of Tourism

10 new Alabama road trips

The Alabama Tourism Department has unveiled 10 new road trips within that state, ranging from the beach to the mountains, from Gee’s Bend famous patchwork quilts to bird-watching and battle re-enactments. The new trips are Numbers 21-30 of 100 that the state plans to post over three years. Check out the 30 already posted here.

Autumn road trip: Niagara-on-the-Lake

Two things I learned from doing a little wine-tasting in Niagara-on-the Lake: One, a good icewine is truly fabulous, and two, just because you can get grapes from a Cabernet Sauvignon vine doesn’t mean you can make good wine from them. I visited the town six years ago during a road trip that started in Toronto, wound around the western end of Lake Ontario to the spectacular Niagara Falls and the charming Niagara-on-the-Lake. I experienced all the greatest hits: the falls, the Shaw theater festival, and local wine-tasting. Autumn is a great time to see the place -- it’s harvest season, the leaves are changing color, and the Shaw Festival runs well into October.  If that whets your appetite, read this story by Beth Harpaz, Associated Press travel editor. But stick to the wine grapes that like the cool climate, including pinot noir and riesling.

Road trip with kids: East Coast to Oregon and back

I’ve been following the year-long road trip that Chris Elliott, who writes the Travel Troubleshooter column that runs in The Miami Herald’s Sunday travel section, is taking with his wife and their three kids, ages 5, 6, and 9. Chris and his wife, Kari Haugeto, are blogging about the trip. Up next is a cross-country trek that they are calling the Oregon Trail. It’s not the wagon trail that pioneers followed in the first half of the 1800s, but their own route. They’re off to Deadwood, S.D., one of my all-time favorite road trip discoveries, where you can still find traces of the Wild West, including the nightly re-enactment of the shooting of Wild Bill Hickok.  For good info about road trips with youngsters, check out their blog here. Below is their route for this leg.