You’re invited to an Otherworldly Dinner Party

This seemingly infinite white table emerging from the ocean waves stopped me in my internet-scouring tracks today. I had to know. Is this real? And if so, how do I get invited? The origin of the photo was not cited but it didn’t take me long to track down its source and discover that not only is this otherworldly…

Who Wants to Buy a 1950s Doo-Wop Motel?

The Jersey Shore earned a certain kind of reputation when MTV cameras infamously descended on its coast in the naughties, but “guidos” aside, in the 1950s, it was Hollywood royalty like Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly who had claimed it as their summer vacation spot. In post-war America, the shore hosted some of the biggest…

Greetings from France’s Slice of the Sahara Desert

You’d think you were stranded in an African desert, but the Dune du Pilat (Dune of Pilat) has a grandeur all its own. All 60,000,000 m³ of it are sandwiched between the aquamarine waters of the Atlantic and the emerald Landes forest, making it quite unlike any other ‘desert’ oasis on our lovely planet. Mainly, because it’s in…

Victorian Prudes and their Bizarre Beachside Bathing Machines

Picture that moment when you finally get to the beach after a long winter, excitedly peel off your clothes, run madly towards the water and crash into the salty waves without a care in the world … this is not that. If you were a beachgoer in Georgian or Victorian times, more specifically, a female…

The Bay of Abandoned Hotels

As summer winds down and holidaymakers swap the beach for their real lives, hotels will inevitably begin to empty of their guests and resorts will slowly become ghost towns until the next season. But very few resorts will get as ghostly as the Kupari luxury resort in Croatia, which hasn’t seen any paying guests since…

The Mad Beach Party of 1923

In the summer of 1923, an American husband and wife could be credited with two rather surprising things. Their name is seldom remembered in the context of the glamorous 1920s, but the French Riviera became the summer destination it is today thanks to the infectious expatriate couple known as the Murphys. Gerald and Sarah convinced their circle…

Greetings from California, the Hellish Oil-Pumping State of Yesteryear

It looks like a scene out of a dystopian horror movie foreshadowing our planet’s bleak future. But not very long ago, this was California, the (black) golden state. I guess I never really understood exactly what it meant when they said Los Angeles and much of Southern California was “built on oil”. I think I was imagining some oil fields out…

The Remains of a Hollywood Playground Wiped off the Map

Beachfront properties custom-built for movie stars and the Hollywood elite, panoramic views from the sand dunes stretching as far as Malibu, developed as “an isolated playground for the wealthy”– Surfridge, California was once one of the most coveted neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Today, it looks like this… (c) Eyetwist on Flickr (c) Houze on Flickr (c)…

Old School Bikinis: A Brief Compendium of the Itsy Bitsy

There’s something about vintage bikinis, something about the way they looked tailor-made with soft cotton patterns not made in China, generously cut with so much extra puffy fabric, you could probably have stuffed a sandwich down the front of your pants for lunch at the beach. And now that swimwear season is nearly upon us, I’m finding it…

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24 Hours in Aveiro, the Candy-Colored “Venice of Portugal”

For the last leg of our little Portuguese road trip, we floated into the old port and fishing town of Aveiro, about an hour south of Porto. It’s known as the Venice of Portugal, except of course, without the Venetian price tag. The Mister and I checked into a perfect little yellow fisherman’s house along the…

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