Are you ready to handicap the New York Times 52 List of Places to Go in 2025 with me?

Quick refresher.

In recent years, the list has transitioned from America defined by celebrity places and famous-name hotels to what in our time of climate change fosters place-fit lodgings and outdoor adventure that invite travel as part of the solution instead of ballooning the problem.

The list is “must” reading for everyone from sophisticated travelers to armchair amateurs.

Looking for clues?

Consider how the Times travel section has looked back at last year’s picks. This month, Travel Editor Amy Vershup updated picks from the 2024 list. Read the tea leaves.

Two choices supported Maui after its climate-forced firestorm of last year and Morocco for its decimating earthquake.

Does this tell us Asheville in the new year? The city doesn’t show up in lists of recent years. Its Radical Hotel stands out among a new crop of boutique

properties across North America and Europe. This comes at a time when the trade press tells us that one to three hotels open their doors around the world daily to claim their stake in the luxury/lifestyle category; that hotels rarely close, and that this “may be setting the stage for a spectacular crash that could reshape the entire industry.”

The Caribbean rated two picks: Dominica, described as “an untamed garden,” rugged, still with indigenous Caribs (Kalinago people) and black volcanic sand beaches, but with few direct flights from the U.S. Also Grenada, although one of the poorest in the Antilles with the highest unemployment, has new direct flights and thanks to its many endemic spice cultivars, open-air markets that billow air-bouquets everywhere people walk.

So, maybe frequently storm-battered Puerto Rico for ’25?

Canada’s northwest Yukon Territory showed how cold has become the new hot in vacationing, where Whitehorse in 2020 set a Guinness World Record for the largest frozen-hair competition.

Makes me think of Norway’s Hurtigruten, the expert for top-of-the-globe venturing, as a cruise pick.

Singapore, renowned for national integrity, took a bow. So, Finland, staunch alongside Russia, or one of the Baltics?

Baltimore shared in bows among mainland U.S. cities where there’s no gap between how it keeps rejuvenating its Inner Harbor for residents, and how it holds itself out for visitors. Might the ’25 comparable be either of two cities in Ohio? There’s Columbus on the Scioto River that may surprise you to learn is America’s 14th largest city with almost a million people and with its 2,000-year-old restored brick German Village. Also possible is Springfield, which took a black eye when J.D. Vance falsely accused law-

abiding Haitians of eating town dogs.

Clues from the travel trade

Consider the trade paper Travel Weekly’s parent company Northstar that at its Phocuswright subsidiary’s look-ahead at tourism in 2025 cited an annual report by the Transport & Environment advocacy group that 83% of global companies “don’t [take] their climate impact seriously,” and that 57% of American travelers want the money they spend to benefit the communities they visit. Vague to be sure but the question is what the Times might make of it.

Does this open the way for Door County, Michigan that National Geographic in 1969 described as “Cape Cod on an inland sea,” that in September ranked as a NY Times “36 Hours In” feature, but hasn’t yet been listed among its 52 Places?

Past-due pushback against the wellness/luxury connection

About the wellness bandwagon assiduously promoted by high-end hotels, does this open a look at the Holistic Holiday at Sea that celebrates its 20th-anniversary weeklong cruise next March? It’s chockful of presentations by MDs and other health professionals, all vegan dining, and always sells out at cabins and suites that range from $2,000 per person to $5,500.

Less expensive except for the airfare to get there would be any of a few lodgings in the town of Angra de Heroismo on the Azorean island of Terceira, a World Heritage site. Exceptionally fitted in, the Boutique Hotel Teatro has only 16 rooms but also offers a small gym, a spa, sauna and pool. Rates range from the low hundreds into the low thousands depending on season and your choice of where to rest your head (elegantly in any case).

Further from the field among places that champion community and support biodiversity, is tiny Folkston in southeast Georgia (population under 5,000), where an Alabama mining company threatens the adjacent Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and where town boasts the exemplary local Folkston Inn. The Okefenokee is the largest remaining blackwater swamp in North America and is up for World Heritage designation.

And here’s a wild card

An absolutely stunning series of reports has unfolded in The New York Times in recent years. The series rolled out for me at a new level of awareness with 193 stories — they’re really synopses — that show the reality of climate change in every country in the world. You can follow some of this coverage by Googling here.

We also know that there are only three carbon negative countries in the world: Bhutan in the Himalayas, Panama, which has moved aggressively with purposeful policies, and Suriname on the Atlantic coast just east of Guyana and where it rains just about year-round, producing lush forest interspersed with Indigenous villages throughout the interior.

Notwithstanding that none of the three refers to climate change at its tourism website, and that Panama made the list in 2019. might Bhutan score this year — or Suriname for rain-seekers?

Welcome 2025 safely and let’s see how we measure up with the real 52 in ’25.

New Orleans is America’s most intriguing city. There as elsewhere, waves of newcomers have arrived bled by warfare, economic ruin, or flight from discrimination. But where else than at the mouth of the Mississippi River does a divided America separate only by geography? Millions relax together each year in the Big Easy. No place else feels so authentically different from America.

It’s the home of jazz, the archetype for culinary travel, a magnet for creative types born to the womb or bred to the lure: John James Audubon, Jon Batiste, Truman Capote, Kate Chopin, Edgar Degas, Ellen de Generis, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams.

Where else sends off the deceased with a brass band that might play Nearer My God to Thee on its way to burial grounds, but return Dixieland-style performing When the Saints Go Marching In? Or at Mardi Gras parades where krewes toss Moon Pies?

Where else does a city rename its airport for a reform school kid? In 2001 the city added a prefix sharp as a cornet riff to New Orleans International: “Louis Armstrong” on the anniversary of Satchmo’s 100th birthday.

How did this come to pass?

Waves of European and African settlers built the city, some already having attempted settlements elsewhere in the New World. Hardship marked their migrations that caused many deaths before one group after another was welcomed by the small French community that had formed after the explorers Jacques Cartier in the 16th century and René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle in 1682 made sweeping claims of French dominion over La Louisiane. Germans straggled in after an attempted settlement in Biloxi in 1721.

But when England defeated France in the mid-18th century’s Seven Years’ War, French migrants from the Province of Acadia who had already fled for better lives to the Canadian Maritimes found themselves on the losing side. British Canada expelled them. Many relocated to Saint-Domingue (today’s Hispaniola), which was a rich French colony. However, after Toussaint L’Ouverture defeated Napoleon’s army and achieved independence for Haiti in 1803, France, in revolutionary turmoil, accepted Jefferson’s offer of $15 million for the 530 million-acre Louisiana Purchase.

Acadians became Cajuns. They held political power.

They welcomed a surge of white slaveowners with their enslaved Africans and freedmen of color to turn New Orleans into a great American port. Political unrest throughout Central Europe during the 1840s sent Jews to the city. Irish fled the potato famine. The city welcomed Venezuelan revolutionaries fearful that a weakened Spain in Cuba might be anxious about a next Haitian revolution that would end slavery there, which many Louisianans favored.

According to the New Orleans Historic Collection, “New Orleans grew from less than 10,000 in 1800 to over 150,000 by 1860. In the 1840s, New Orleans was second only to New York City in the number of immigrants, and by 1850 more than 50 percent of New Orleans’ population was foreign-born.” They contributed mightily to the city’s cosmopolitan culture. Germans introduced their Octoberfest, breweries that replaced expensive French wines with affordable Old World brews, their Deutsche Haus cultural center; Jews, their love for merchant commerce and learning.

The Irish introduced ubiquitous neighborhood pubs and a roisterous St. Patrick’s Day Parade on high ground beside the big bend of the river through the city named the Irish Channel, where it became the enclave of the working class from everywhere. By the 1960s, Blacks occupied the district that has since become well-off and popular with residents and visitors alike.

Joined by the looming Mississippi

No feature more fully defined life than a silt-risen river looming almost six feet above the city it rims, protected by a system of diversions, dredging, and levees viewed warily. Even in good weather, the river menaces its urban floodplain where no one lives unaware of the Great Flood of 1927 that caused 500 deaths, left more than 700,000 homeless, and economic loss estimated up to $17 billion.

Yet the city or its environs has overflowed seven more times since then, most recently in 2005 when flooding from Hurricane Katrina caused some 1,800 deaths, millions left homeless along the Gulf Coast and in the city, and economic loss estimates that topped $150 billion.

Forever French

While New Orleans may be ancestral for only a few of America’s nearly 340 million, our visits tap roots that, once experienced, branch our own attachments.

French Impressionist Degas painted a successful city for his countrymen when he visited his mother, whose family had fled Haiti, for five months late in 1872. His paintings were a sensation in France.

New Orleans became a worldwide destination for leisure travel in 1884 when the World’s Industrial & Cotton Centennial Exposition opened and has remained so.

The destination marketing organization, New Orleans & Company, says, “[I]ts heart will always keep a French beat. French words such as Lagniappe (meaning something extra, a bonus) and expressions such as laissez les bon temps rouler (let the good times roll) are entrenched in our speech. Many street names are French — Bienville, Iberville, and streets of course, Bourbon — and we live on French bread in our po-boys. . . [T]he French influence on our cooking is vast. We celebrate Bastille Day like natives and made Mardi Gras our own.”

New Orleans’ “striking competitive advantage”

So writes Nathaniel Rich in The New York Times about the great advantage earned for tourism by its people who don’t accept climate change passively. It’s resilience bred to the bone. State and city plans draw on scientific research from more than a century.

He writes that the genius of the Coastal Master Plan, Louisiana’s grand unified theory of coastal restoration, land creation and retreat, developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. . . is its honesty.”

He tells of “irreversible tipping points” already documented in a Tulane University study. Of a Times-Picayune headline” that blared, ‘We’re Screwed.”

He accepts that every hurricane is existential, that flooding will become annual, and comparisons between the lives of cities and the lives of humans, except that the city will survive as an island 35 miles out in a surrounding Gulf of Mexico.

“Other major American cities don’t talk like this. Other cities don’t live like this. But one morning, not very long from now, they will. On that morning, everyone will be a New Orleanian.” For 15 years he has been one. He writes:

In New Orleans, “You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences. . .

“Most New Orleanians. . . have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient. . . But it does not mean blindly submitting to fate. . .“

These are the creative people of America’s most creative city. These are the people every visitor wants to meet. New Orleans & Company doesn’t yet think so.

It’s 6,374 miles from Asheville, North Carolina to Baku, Azerbaijan. Events in both places show that wherever we live, the connection between climate change and how we travel for leisure or business will become measured in a way that our travels worsen.

We are slow to think this way.

Instead of connecting, we feel that torrential flooding and extreme heat where we want to go are annoyances of other peoples’ places that travel advisors tell us we can work around when they help plan our trips. Avoid the Med. Go Nordic.

Consider these chickens-come-home-to-roost measurements:

• Acres burned last year across Canada amplified by global warming — 830 million acres or as large as all of England;

• Tropical Storm Helene’s destruction that became the most costly in North Carolina’s history, killing more than 100;

• The last 15 years ranked as the hottest on record in parts of India with three months of summer temperatures reaching almost 122 F, and deaths of hundreds reported said to be in the thousands that go unreported.

Our climate watch shapes up ominously.

In September, Tropical Storm Helene channeled the peak season for viewing fall colors into travel by tens of thousands of North Carolinians into short-distance evacuation.

Two months later when those evacuees lucky enough to find roofs over their homes were daring to drink tap water again, a larger flight from reality swarmed Baku–-65,000 who mostly arrived by jet, hundreds private — trumpeted by Azerbaijani tourism, but also criticized.

Long-distance aviation is one of two causes for the steady rise of global greenhouse gas emissions that leave us complicit.

Airlines backbone long-distance travel, which its business finds most profitable.

The other is that leisure travel is supposed to be about fun, and business travel is about face-to-face dealing. Don’t get in my face about climate denial!

As Katharine Hayhoe writes in her summary of COP29, “[W]hile these Conferences of the Parties are necessary for global climate negotiations, they fall far short of the urgent and transformative action we need.” [emphasis in original]

As for tourism

The best effort humanity has organized to counter global warming — the COP process — allowed tourism, the world’s favorite leisure activity, to take center stage for the first time. At the Thematic Day on Tourism, backers under the banner of UN Tourism were meant to document why travel across all its regions had progressed from greenwashing to climate responsibility.

The outcome instead showed how little had happened since tourism attempted green policies three years ago in Glasgow. However, we also see business travel making its own trustworthy moves in Southeast Asia.

More than 300 travel companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies pledged action within a year on two core principles. They would submit climate action plans and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 to reach net zero by 2050.

How have they done?

According to The Guardian, “The Glasgow Declaration sparked a tremendous response across travel and tourism,” said Julia Simpson, the president and chief executive of the World Travel and Tourism Council, an NGO of travel businesses and a signatory of the declaration. “What the world needs now is measurable action — and there’s no time to lose.”

UN Tourism told us going into the Baku COP that:

• 74% of signatories with climate plans are measuring

• 92% of plans include decarbonization actions

• 73% of plans include actions related to biodiversity protection

• 41% of plans include climate adaptation actions

• 29% of plans refer to climate justice

• 82% of signatories with plans report working in partnership with others

• 44% of plans refer finance actions with this pathway remaining a challenge

But consider various reports following Glasgow up to Baku already published and soon to be:

• The New York Times headlined its report on tourism’s special day in Baku, “Travel Pledged to Help Cut Carbon Emissions. How Has It Done? The tourism industry will be officially recognized at COP29 on Wednesday. Industry leaders signed a climate accord in 2021 to make travel more sustainable, but the results so far are meager.”

• A forthcoming article about Glasgow finds that “only 65 out of 530,000 worldwide travel agencies have signed on. Similarly, only 117 accommodations providers are signatories out of the 29 million providers listed through Booking.com.”

• Most of the biggest emitters haven’t signed on.

• According to a study just published by the Global Carbon Budget project and the University of Exeter, international aviation emissions are projected to increase by 14 percent this year, compared to 2023. These emissions are the industry’s largest contributing factor to climate change, yet major aviation companies have not signed onto the Glasgow Declaration.

• Similarly, most cruise lines — another major industry in the travel world — have steered clear of the declaration.

• While many experts agree that the Glasgow Declaration was an important and necessary first step, few tourism organizations have signed on, those that did haven’t always followed through with their promises, and global emissions are still on the rise. Most signatories haven’t published a climate action plan.

The majority of organizations that did sign on have not yet published climate action plans, which are the essential roadmaps for reaching emission goals, according to the forthcoming article in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

The authors found that as of September 2024, only 28 percent of signatories had submitted a plan within the required 12 months. In other words, nearly three-fourths of the entities haven’t delivered what they promised.

“Even these sectoral leaders need to improve their disclosure practices to be considered credible by the international community,” the authors wrote.

There’s no enforcement.

The Glasgow Declaration “lacks legal footing in most countries,” according to Dallen J. Timothy, professor of community resources and development at Arizona State University. He asserts in the NYT piece that Glasgow stands as “more an environmental justice action, rather than a legal measure.”

Jeremy Sampson, chief executive of the nonprofit Travel Foundation and one of the drafters of the Glasgow Declaration, urged patience on the accountability front.

“We’re not at the point of policing people when we still need to be getting everyone on board with climate literacy,” he said.

But Mr. Sampson said he’s proud of the declaration’s impact, saying the Glasgow accord paved the way to COP29.

“Have we made significant progress? I think it’s fair to say that we have,” he said. “Now, here we are with this tourism day in Baku, where tourism is part of the climate conversation and has a role to play.”

I n Western North Carolina, the 40 days and nights between the end of September and the start of November cued up a memory from early Bible studies. I found the source in Genesis 7:12, where God, aggrieved by human sin, readies a global catastrophe to redo Creation. Only Noah, his wife, three sons, and their wives embark on Noah’s Ark to repopulate humanity after the Great Flood of “40 days and 40 nights.”

A year before Hurricane Helene, UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the first Global Ambition Summit in New York by declaring that by its failure to address global warming forthrightly, humanity is entering the “gates of hell.”

Our own time of 40 marks the failure of even the dubious prospect of reversing climate change that America’s President-elect calls a “hoax”, reaffirming the triumph of ideology over science. The outcome fuels the renewal of infatuation with “know-nothing” as national policy.

“Bonfire of the Vanities”

License becomes licentiousness. “All-inclusive” stands for “all you can consume.” Cruise ships ply unlimited booze packages while drunken passengers who topple from balconies are rarely recovered because entire fleets refuse to invest in safeguard systems. Hundreds have been lost since 2,000 alone.

“Drill, baby, drill,” looms over land and sea. Celebrations of Earth Day morph into fires that sweep across the Northeast and West Coast, Overheated seas tutor our first lessons in Spanish — La Niña, El Niño — while calving suggests not the picture books of newborn cows in pastures but glacier demise.

Changing ocean currents affect the lives of Indigenous communities still in Fitzcarraldo isolation.

We are everywhere becoming Ishi, Last of His Tribe, Florida’s last dusky seaside sparrow in our race to extinction.

From national catastrophe to national elections

Climate travelers now wait for how Europe will react to policy shifts that might affect America’s outlook toward NATO. NATO is a stand-in for the European Union, and the EU including Britain has been far more proactive about curbing the discharge of greenhouse gas emissions from mass tourism than our own country.

America’s defense policy is only one pillar of our national security that also includes food production, energy, and how we live daily lives, which are all up for reassessment. I will return to these matters in my Thanksgiving Day posting.

For now, I want to consider what we learn from Asheville about how Tropical Storm Helene continues to affect daily lives in Asheville and Buncombe County in Western North Carolina and hypotheses concerning leisure and business travel.

Much is getting said about purposeful travel

The talk has gone far beyond “Me“ at the center of things, as in traveling for the spas of wellness resorts and of respect shown for the people who live where we visit. We need to unbury the secret of throngs migrating dangerously from birthplace countries to America from which we can

extract the migrations within America itself, an assessment of all things considered where we might avoid those places of the new redlining, where data show development has left people at risk of annihilation whether from hurricanes, fire, flooding or toxicity in the same way that we avoid places that data show risk from crime or poor schools.

The story is about how people have come together in acts of purpose because they were able to and not paid to.

The story about people in Asheville is that those who have lost so much are still giving everything they can, says Taylor Seidler. a midlife graphic arts designer who in 2020 moved back east from Washington State to be nearer family in Sopchoppy, Florida. She was among the figures who stood out in the River Arts District that the head of ArtsAVL told Ch. 11 ABC News was “roughly 80% destroyed in the storm, a $1 billion [loss] in annual sales for the regional economy [that] supports thousands of jobs.”

Even as I post this blog, Taylor says “The water coming from our taps is still not drinkable. We go to nearby locations to get water for drinking and things like washing dishes.

“Many people still don’t have reliable wi-fi, and in communities further out, things like general access and power are still spotty.”

Taylor told me about friends who were vacationing in Hawaii while Helene came through. Neighbors texted that their house beat the odds but that nobody had power. They should just stay put. “They came back anyway to volunteer in the area.”

The community is still showing up for each other

“People are gathering to clean up areas, distributing supplies. Neighbors with chainsaws are still cleaning up downed trees and taking water to those who aren’t able to get it themselves.

“Some people have [food grade] 275-gallon water totes in their front yards for anyone to take what they need.”

“We’re still getting daily updates from the city and county, including updates on water, facilities, voting, damage reporting, etc. Which are all helpful, but there are things that could be even more helpful, like either a pause on rent or more help with cost of living, as so many people are currently without income right now.”

Yet in a report I first read in The Washington Post, something extraordinary was happening in purposeful travel.

Scores of military veterans were coming from everywhere to pitch in with recovery.

“This is what we do when we go to war. We go into bad scenarios with towns turned upside down,” said Mark Elkhill, an Army veteran with the relief group Christian Rangers. (The name Christian Rangers is taken from an exercise in Robin Sage, the nearly two-week special field “final exam” for would-be Green Berets.)

“The only difference is we’re not getting shot at here, which makes it a thousand times easier,” Elkhill said.

Said Steve Santos, “It’s restoring my faith in humanity, seeing people spend their own time and money to be here. I can’t think of a better place to be. . .”

Wrote the Post’s Allison Joyce “Here, in these mountains, veterans are rediscovering pieces of that purpose. In working toward the common original goal of helping their fellow Americans, they feel connected again, part of a team, dedicated to something larger than themselves.”

We can all find this predictive of the years ahead as global warming accelerates through the otherwise bedeviling Anthropocene.

In this second of four postings about Tropical Storm Helene in western North Carolina, which further describes the region’s rise and its unpreparedness for the augmented havoc of climate change, Asheville resident Taylor Seidler suggests nonprofits worthy of cash gifts to help the community achieve its next new normal.

“BeLoved Asheville does great community work and supports those who need it most. Many people, businesses, and organizations have also started fundraisers at GoFundMe.com through a link that filters to our specific area.” Give what you can.]

I’m postponing my plan to write about destination marketing organizations (DMOs) that talk directly about global warming and climate action on their home pages.

Instead, I want to write about granular shifts in how people are relocating where they live that should make places more willing to address the issue, which brings me back to Asheville and western North Carolina (WNC). I also teed up this subject in my last posting, which in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, leaves it inconceivable that Asheville, Buncombe County, and WNC will not join other DMOs wanting to raise climate issues directly.

Newcomers will want those that follow them, who also choose to become residents, to help show the way.

Relocating northward to the South from Florida

Friends and family have been relocating from Florida to states between Georgia and Tennessee, which have situated the Carolinas as one of the 10 most moved-to regions of the U.S., replacing the Sunshine State in the topmost rank among destinations with the highest percentage of net population gain.

North Carolina in particular claims the highest ratio of newcomers to outgoers, while the western part of the state argues the most compelling

reasons that make Asheville and Buncombe County its hub.

At first, WNC gained from this Florida exodus because of a strong crafts movement quarried out of Appalachian clay that also supplied the rural independence that potters and basket makers craved.

At the turn of the 20th century, New York Times writer Suzanne Carmichael observed “ the whooping cranes of the craft world [as] a seriously endangered species in a changing environment with few protectors.” Moves toward regional self-marketing had started in the 1970s, then climaxed when the 24 counties north and south of Buncombe in 2003 gained congressional designation as one of 62 National Heritage Areas today.

Visitors began arriving from everywhere to travel the Blue Ridge Parkway, the grand Biltmore Estate in Asheville (as my parents did with 10-year-old me along) to discover the region’s natural and heritage architectural grace, some themselves enrolling in the numerous regional crafts schools, (see NYT link above), and many more that slippered themselves into the creative hub of master storytellers like Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe, who authored Look Homeward Angel, and Zelda Fitzgerald, in and out with her husband F. Scott.

While the crafts-makers valued markets of pass-through visitor-buyers more than permanent crowding residents, whoops of crafts reviews led to the hip new market of cyclists that began to reclaim roads that Henry Ford’s Model Ts had pushed off in the early 1900s.

Bicycling, trails and wildflowers

North Carolina followed in the Seventies when it emerged as the national leader in developing networks of paved off-road bicycling trails.

Landscape architects expressed their creativity in seeding state roads and byways with spring and fall wildflower panoramas.

People who came for the crafts and trails discovered a temperate climate where year-round picnics far outnumbered winter snowmen. That climate had long favored mountainous North Carolina for second-home buyers. Ecotourism flourished.

My own cycling experiences through the state led years later to my coinage of The Climate Traveler and Travel To the Deep Nearby.

The first of those I knew who relocated was the Yugoslav comrade of Tito in his breakaway from Stalin’s USSR hegemony, later the resident Florida macrobiotic counselor Lino Stanchich. Harriet Netsky, reimagined as the jeweler Erica Rand, and from who I rented a downstairs waterfront apartment in Coconut Grove, was among those who soon followed,

A prominent Miami couple, Terence and Julie Connor, discovered Cashiers in sparsely settled Jackson County, an hour southwest of Asheville, where they bought their summer home. Their restaurateur son Brendan would follow when appointed head chef at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville.

I admired Terry, who worked in the Miami office of a Richmond law firm and rode his two-wheeler weekdays from his home in Coral Gables to his downtown office in daily rain-or-shine traffic. He became more Carolinian by riding his adopted state trails.

Regrets that I haven’t been able to check in with either Lino or Terry. Lino died a year ago; Terry, only last month while Helene was trashing NC’s west.

Linda Crider

Most influential in my cycling and trails career who made her way north was Linda Crider, Ph.D., who appears in many of my earlier Climate Traveler postings and forthcoming memoir. Linda reached Asheville circuitously.

She worked for two Florida governors in the years before Florida turned from blue to solid red. Both sought the Democratic nomination for president in successive cycles. Linda is also a singer-songwriter, who often appeared with her divorced husband and still best friend, Dale.

As a notable competitor in regional swimming raised and trained at the International Swimming Hall of Fame complex in Fort Lauderdale, Linda would move on to the state capital in Tallahassee, where while responsible for Graham’s programs in physical fitness, she invited me to meet about bicycling policy that led to Graham’s appointment of Dan Burden’s transformational role in multimodal transportation, first through cycling and then through walking, today director of innovation and inspiration with Blue Zones.

Linda and a beau would build a summer home in Cordova, Alaska, where

for a decade she consulted on cycling affairs, before selling and relocating to be nearer family in Gainesville, Florida and before starting to camp summers with her bike and guitar in Buncombe.

My own move north from Florida was part of an outpouring driven by climate change that flooding and heat made dangerous, and the resident Florida crazies of Trump and Ron DeSantis, although in our case it was our younger daughter’s finding her heartthrob online in Cobb County, Georgia. Magda chose to move. We moved with her.

You can add Asheville and Buncombe County in post-Helene North Carolina to a growing number of places that people love to visit because each talks upfront about how climate action adds to their vacation appeal.

The other four places I’ve short-listed for a project I’m advancing are Denver, Vancouver, destinations of The Nature Conservancy, and hold on to your hat, Orlando. Yes, Orlando but not necessarily surrounding Orange County.

I find places that talk about “experiences” and “wellness” and about trails and multimodal transportation, heritage, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), and farm-to-table dining. A lot of this fits into climate action.

But without specific mention of climate action, the message conveyed by its inattention is to brush it away. It’s not what people want to be bothered about when their priorities are still even borderline self-indulgence.

Asheville and Buncombe County

I feel sure about Asheville and Buncombe because Tropical Storm Helene irreversibly changed their stories.

Before Helene, their stories had always been about their arts and crafts synonymous with locally imagined shops that made their neighborhoods fun to walk around or bicycle to. They repurposed historic buildings and didn’t chase after chain hokum.

That and more including its seasonal green canopy and fall colors devastated by flooding and landslides will most likely reappear.

However, the encompassing story everyone will want to hear is about resilience.

What’s still being learned and how’s that improving lives or not?

By the time regeneration takes hold — it’s said this will take years — places like the other four I’ve sorted through will have grown to hundreds if not thousands because climate change is at least as unrelenting as the spirit of human renewal.

“So many people have their emergency home or their climate refuge here,” said a New Orleans transplant, who Yale Climate Connections cited in a recent posting. “So what happens when this is gone?” he asked.

What creative new works will be produced for local stages? What combination of live acting and movie clips at the North Carolina Stage Company? Ironically, the first play canceled after Helene was The Last Wide Open, about three alternate realities unfolding in the mystical ways the universe conspires to bring us all together.

What new fiction that captures the heroism and disinformation that also overflowed, and big picture books will appear in the windows of Battery Park’s Book Exchange & Champagne Bar?(built into a vacated federal office building from 1929)?

Context for my choices

Many places have been left out of my shortlist that you should also visit because even while they acknowledge at other sites of governmental information that tourism is included in their climate action plans, you won’t find this information if you don’t search beyond their official tourism sites. At least I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

On point, Door County, Michigan, and Greenville, South Carolina. I want you to have this context so that in my next posting when I describe my shortlist, you will see how quickly I believe tourism is turning its corner into legitimate climate action.

Door County

What follows is signed by Julie Gilbert, President & CEO of Destination Door County.

“At the outset of this long-term tourism planning process, we began by referring to this as a Destination Master Plan. After consideration of the community’s input, research, and recommendations from our consulting partner, MMGY NextFactor, we chose to change the name . . . to a Destination Stewardship Plan.

“This is reflective of the values and input expressed by our community members, as well as our commitment to serve as responsible stewards of the place that we call home. Our organization’s intention with this plan is to guide and advocate for responsible tourism management that balances quality of life and economic prosperity with the stewardship of our natural environment and community values.

“As one of Wisconsin’s most popular travel destinations, increased visitation to Door County has brought a new set of tourism challenges and opportunities for our region. In our role as influential stewards of Door County as a tourism destination, it is incumbent upon us to evaluate our region’s tourism strategy and determine a responsible path forward that considers environmental sustainability of our precious natural resources and prioritizes the needs of our residents. . .

“This plan is a living document that serves as a roadmap for the entire Door County community as we collectively move forward to implement the strategies and initiatives that have been identified as priorities by our community. . .”

My call to the Door County communications director about no mention of climate action has gone unanswered.

Greenville, South Carolina

Only at its website that solicits business groups to meet in Greenville does this city of almost 75,000 between Atlanta and Charlotte have a section headlined Sustainability. It’s about the Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities at Furman University, agritourism, voluntourism, and trails and cycling otherwise largely covered at the city’s consumer site.

The city has committed to preserve more than a third of its remaining undeveloped lands.

But like Door County, Greenville doesn’t address climate action directly. Am I being picky?

Its preservation plan would “reduce greenhouse gas and other air emissions while offering convenient, efficient, comfortable and safe transportation choices for anyone who lives, works or visits the city.” It incentivizes electric vehicle charging including at hotels. Regional rail centers around an existing Amtrak station.

Apart from direct sustainability initiatives, Greensville is a place that should satisfy anyone heeding my call for Travel To the Deep Nearby. It’s cosmopolitan and richly interpretive.

Its celebrities are born local, make their mark elsewhere before they return or hear about Greenville’s beauty, public spaces, and lifestyle, visit and come to stay. A lot of credentials capture national and international attention: James Beard, Michelin, the Tour de France.

One of two stellar B&Bs in the vicinity includes the bijou Hotel Domestique of former pro cyclist and co-owner George Hincapie. Its 13 rooms, suites, and well-gardened grounds resemble the hub of a rural French village.

Serious cyclists met during George’s 17 Tours de France and attracted by word of mouth and George’s appearances around the country for his Gran Fondo Hincapie cycling events, keep the inn busy for long-stay visitors, who come for challenging training routes in the hilly terrain and others who want to work out on the 28-mile Swamp Rabbit Trail that connects downtown with Travelers Rest to the north in Greenville County, that the inn sits alongside.

I f Hurricane Helene left the East Coast with anything funny behind, it had to be a blog by retired Florida editorial page editor of the Gainesville Sun Ron Cunningham. Ron let Scott’s own words speak for getting caught with his pants down.

Studied ignorance is the political gift that keeps on giving,” Ron wrote.

“U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Floriduh, has spent virtually his entire political career — beginning as governor — ignoring environmental protections and keeping government from even acknowledging climate change, let alone doing anything about it.

“But things have changed, Now that Scott is facing a tough re-election — and trying to look concerned while meeting with victims of Hurricane Helene — he’s finally ready to concede that climate change is a thing.”

If only we had a clue as to what’s causing it, Ron asked of his target.

“Scott certainly doesn’t:

“’Who knows? Who knows what the reason is, but something is changing. Massive storms. Massive storm surge. So we’ve got to figure this out.’

“Which is not to say that Scott isn’t without solutions to this most mysterious malady:

“’You’re going to have to build higher.’

“By which he presumably means that we’ve got to start perching seaside buildings on really really high stilts so that even the most powerful storm surge will wash harmlessly underneath them. . .

“But listen, Scott’s an idea man, not a detail man. Let the scientists figure it out.”

Turn to scientists to overcome the cheek-to-cheek greenwashing of mass tourism: I put that to readers of Travel Weekly as I showed in my last posting.

As for Rick Scott, slip a shoehorn into a boot and, just like that, he becomes the Cinderella Princess.

Helene swerved east

I began writing this when I expected the power to be out for days. Despite the emergency alert that covered all of Georgia, Tropical Storm Helene swerved east after flooding Atlanta. I live just north of that divergence. We experienced rain (that we needed) and easy-to-live-with 20-mile-an-hour winds.

The essay requested by Travel Weekly called for majority science cohorts to sit on the policy boards of destination marketing organizations (DMOs). Today, almost all members of the bodies that set DMO policy represent the travel industry that the trade also markets. Accordingly, the trade markets only directly or indirectly what improves its bottom lines.

That biblical-like rampage of Helene helps me see the need to expand that science cohort that already includes climatologists, land and water conservationists, educators, ethicists, non-for-profits, citizen advocates and others to include state insurance commissioners, whether active or retired.

First estimates of damage wrought by Helene center around $150 billion, which ranks the event as one of the five naturally most costly in American history.

Yet, Helene shows the importance of this project that I have proposed for how leisure travel can contribute to climate action.

At least 200 humans are dead from Helene. Even more than 300 miles inland from the coast, one official found media sites that scared followers of dams ready to burst that forced the entire evacuation of downstream communities, thus clogging escape routes of motorists by more accurate forecasting.

For progressive Asheville and surrounding Buncombe County, with their individual climate action and climate-inclusive strategic plans, here and here, devastation came from landslides of already saturated foothills and the river that flowed scenically through the heart of town.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the river flow peaked at 24.67 ft at Asheville Sept. 27, up from the normal 1.32 ft measured three days before, flooding popular downtown arts districts. Tens of thousands in the state were still without water six days after Helene struck.

Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer told PBS of the “many people whose livelihoods depend on the ability to have folks travel here and dine in a restaurant, stay in our hotels and support our local economy.” First responders are helping fill the gap.

And as enlightened as Asheville and Buncombe County might seem to be, look at their tourism websites. The brink lies somewhere off beyond blue horizons. Indeed, what brink at all? One trade site forecasts that 2025 will be the year of tourism maximizing.

There’s lots of marketing that highlights nature and adventure travel, and 25 bed-and-breakfast inns but nothing that overtly appeals to travelers who increasingly seek vacations where climate is important in their choice of where to travel.

Helene will clog courts for years in litigation between damage claimants and insurance companies.

Many in our own country will become migrants from places still misgoverned by climate change denial and developer exploitation. Indeed, many considered Asheville as a “climate haven,“ raising fears of inundation by people from the coasts. People will continue to seek places where experts show what updated climate action requires.

Yet as The Washington Post points out, this will not stop many from relocating to Asheville. The city will be rebuilt with added resilience, though as a more costly place to live. Who can say that the arts districts won’t benefit from the richer patrons moving in?

Economies reorganizing around what needs doing

People in Denver Raleigh, Minneapolis and Vancouver recognize climate action as a necessity and opportunity. In Denver it’s plain as pie here and here whereas in most ecotourism cities the connection only gets made circuitously and as in progressive Vancouver where at least I had to stumble upon it by clicking on Media, Corporate Communications, and Marketing Research tabs.

We are all becoming Africans in search of where it’s safe to live.

Next up, a closer look at the brink as Travel Weekly finds it in self-empowering travelers — more than you think!

This fortnightly posting links to an essay I was invited to submit for publication by Travel Weekly. It’s a simple-seeming yet substantive solution for a complex challenge that tourism can no longer avoid: How does travel for leisure or business become true climate action? Your comments are welcomed by email, text message or by appended comment. I will reply. Thanks.

I watch a family of young adults stew chip-chip, colorful tiny clams collected from the sea edge after lunar tides. They show me how the salty shells avail their salty broth stirred in cast iron pots with garlic, scallions, celery, lime, peppers, and thyme before thickened with curry powder and coconut milk. After 10 minutes, the shells pop open, their morsels separate and finish in the mix, while the shells are removed for cleansing and decorative reuse.

For eating, you scoop steaming mouthfuls with pulled-apart wedges of roti prepared in beachfront house kitchens.

My God! There is no meal you can prepare cheaper that’s also protein-rich, climate-friendly, and house-yard fresh. Farm to table? How about receding tide to table, tree to table — shake-rattle-and-roll to table?

“De chip-chip make yu back strong,” I’m told.

The tossed shells unquestionably make your yard pretty.

The streetside going up the hill is all chip-chip bordered. “Yu eat. Yu meet de people.”

A line winds outside a shop. I ask a couple of guys liming on a rail, “What’s going on?” They’re reading the Newsday. Somebody’s hiring for road work. I say it’s a long line. They tell me, “Yu should see it sometime. Dis not so long. A lotta people looking for work out here.”

The other says he and his friend are “a little more casual about it.”

Toco, where everything was supposed to be fearsome

No surprise to me that people are all waving welcoming hands, fingers, and arms at me.

A paved road followed the shore, narrowing to a single lane where bridges crossed stream outfalls. Everywhere else the way challenged with sharper ups and downs, more tiring but more varied in their mix of landscapes and seascapes, of settlements where the slow pace of climbs let me pedal alongside walking farmers, pet burros, or simply stop and marvel at where I find myself.

On a morning when light rain fell — the kind that mists veggies in suburban supermarkets — I come alongside a fellow with a white bushy cloud covering his beatific black face. I say, “You have a beautiful beard, Mon!” His smile stayed full while a friend close by called to me, “And you have a beautiful beard, Mon!”

One midday as I worked my way uphill, I eased alongside a fellow swinging a cutlass. I pedaled while he walked and talked. He does “some little roadwork, and that finished, is on his way to play pan.

“What could be better? You do a little work. You get a little walk. You play a little spiritual music. You’re in nature. You live wid de harmony of de worl’. You forget about de rest.”

At a roadside fruit stand, I watch a fellow who downs eight small sweet bananas called silk figs.

“Whew!” I say “A lot of bananas!”

“Eatin’ fruit good in de mawnin’,” this fellow of the hearty appetite says.

I ask, “How come?”

“Because it prepare de bowel to move durin’ de day,” he answers. I gave thanks for the knowledge and myself put away three Gros Michel

Thelma & Louise

West near Toco a view threw itself open, painted so extravagantly that I imagined it was that first Friday of Creation that turned Saturday into a day of rest. The view was the most flagrant revelation of nature, a great arc, headland to headland, where a bacchanal of sea burst against rocky shore to perimeter forest lining endless beach, the headlands brown, the shore sand-bottomed green, the sky blue, the clouds white, and I myself left merely human, mere observer of this immense flaunting.

To the upland, morning glories popped from the bush, and bird of paradise grew thick as weeds. I’d have given anything in that Thelma & Louise moment to capture the surge of that wild descent and remain everlastingly poised above the sea below.

Best of places to stay I liked Hotel Mt. Plaisir Estate, an art-filled cluster of unpretentious small buildings and fruit gardens directly on the bay at Grande Riviere. The little place had been rescued from neglect by Piero Guerini, an acclaimed photojournalist who arrived assigned to cover Derek Walcott at his theater in the capital but gave up his career to live here instead and run his hideaway for guests.

The spaces are all organic board, louvers, shutters, some sunburst forms atop doors and windows. The little hotel is hard to reach, almost two hours from the airport with no place for miles around for anything but swimming, hiking, hanging out.

“Beyond God’s back,” the locals call the section

The staff were wonderfully caring, food fresh from the sea, local vegetables and fruits prepared by village cooks learning international skills. Everybody walks to work from where they live nearby. They adore Piero for the jobs he provides and for how his place fits in.

Michael Charles, an ambulance driver in Toco, knows the place. He too admires Piero, “the Italian fellow” who, though he adds to the place “don’t chop de tree. He trim de branch.”

Mr. Dick, the maintenance person, sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. An older man, he was already here when Piero came. He said he would stay and so he does. Has his own space. Doesn’t pay. Gets paid.

Pancho, also on staff, explains a reason “for troubles” that come up at Carnival.

“De men get all mod because de women don’ cooperate wid dem.”

One of the staff­­ women replies, “I don’ agree wid dot. De problem jobs. De men have no job. De unemployment very high. Dat de problem.”

Where the road ends at Matelot there’s only the hiking trail west for 20 miles to Blanchisseuse.

Next morning as I climb Monte Video back out of Piero’s Shangri-la, a fellow along the road walking down says to me laughingly, “Better you t’rough wid dat bike, Mon, an’ walk de way.”

With a laugh of my own, I hear myself think, “Better you t’rough wid dat bike, Mon, an’ jus’ stay.”

Locals kept getting into the ride with me. Three times cars stopped or people called out that they’d seen me earlier in the ride.

“Some watah?” one with his granny asks from a Nissan pickup. “Maybe a lift in the back? I saw you strugglin’ wid yu bags. Can I give you a drop down to Mayaro?”

“No thanks,” I say. “I can make it”.

Granny smiles, he smiles, and of course I do.

Later in the north, one slows to shout, “Drop de gear down! Drop de gear down!” as if I wasn’t already in lowest gear.

A rare cyclist passing the other way, calls, “Hey, you have a good load, Mon.” And I am still shy three late-afternoon miles from Rio Claro.

Reaching the Atlantic coast

A fellow stops me as I’m already stopped, and he is walking in the other direction. His tee shirt says, “I love Canada”. I repeat his words. We talk, which so easily happens in this country, especially on a bike. I hear pan.

“Yeah, Mon” he says, “It a pan shed getting ready for Carnival, and I too.” He lifts up his “I love Canada”. Tucked inside his shorts are his mallets.

In Princes Town, guys “lime” in front of rum bars. I watch a Chinese family preparing the East Indian staple, doubles, assembly-line style. One child separates the flaky wrappers, siblings fill them with shrimp, beef or potatoes. Mom wraps the plump parcels and maybe it’s an uncle who stuffs two at a time into bags. Dad handles the cash.

Roadside vendors will simply set a sheet of zinc over an oil drum and load it up with dasheen or some oranges or other roots. For anybody who has ever tried to grow bamboo, or elephant ears or hibiscus, crotons, bananas, anthuriums at home, this countryside will be a revelation. Also for horseflies.

After I call “Good morning” to people I’m passing, they typically call back, “Riight,” “Okay, all right.” “Yah, Mon.” I pass one lady looking proper to whom I toss a greeting. She screws herself up in defense of normalcy and with schoolmarm-ish de rigeur deigns a “Good Morning [class]!”

I reach the coast at a designated national archaeological site

Here the Ortoire River and Ortoire Beach Front contain middens of a Venezuelan settlement from about 2,000 B.C.E. I cross the ancient stream on an almost finished new bridge that leads to a shoreside corridor of mixed tall palms. Mayaro Bay laps the beach; the offshore breeze blows wind at my back.

Suddenly the road explodes in a shower of white, hundreds of cattle egrets that signaled a herd led across the road to the beach to reach fresh pasture.

The setting was jungle back of the beach until I reached Cascadoux Road to a village of houses on stilts in the Nariva Swamp where settlers cultivated rice. Reggae pulsed, roosters crowed, lush gardens and bougainvillea grew in patches of dark brown soil.

The salvation of Nariva Swamp

I got to talking with John, who explained he could make a living by working six months of the year with his power saw in Tobago construction and the rainy season catching fish and crab and growing melons and rice here. It was all picturesque West Indian except that the paddies were altering the swamp. Kernahan Village had been carved out of the forest by a grid of drainage channels. It could only happen, Karlin had told me, because wetlands were still looked at as wastelands by a ministry of agriculture that was also in charge of environmental affairs.

She had thrown up her hands as she added that more than a quarter of the 6,342 hectares [15671.4 acres] of reed beds and marshes had been converted to rice farming. She called the farmers squatters and their presence illegal. Not only did they pay no rent, no tax, no fee for water. They qualified for soft loans from the agricultural development bank, and because government had a monopoly on the purchase of rice, it could also subsidize the price for growers. Illegal farming was profiting the village by some TT$3 million a year.

Yet I would later learn of what Karlin called a “politically courageous move” that followed the 1993 signing by Trinidad and Tobago of the international Ramsar Wetlands Treaty.

That not only removed the squatters. It also combined with new protections for giant leatherback turtles between their March and August nesting period and the Nariva’s destination on the flight path for North American birds including raptors and seabirds that led to TT’s first significant marketing as a year-round nature-based tourism destination.

The Trust helped prepare a first-time management plan for Nariva.

The rise of ecotourism

Some former villagers have since taken to guiding visitors who come for wildlife viewing that includes not only the colony of scarlet ibis but other native species that include red-bellied macaws, flocks of parrots, and native howler monkeys, white-fronted capuchins, caimans, and manatees. [A Google map now shows guest houses and restaurants that have opened along the shore.]

A lot of thinking surfaced about how tourism might be meaningful in a place like Trinidad which offered not simply lovely beaches. Karlyn talked about “something else we had to offer at that time when consciousness about environmental issues began to grow and have their impact here.”

There had always been a great concern with the leatherback turtles. A big lobby had developed that won the issue.

“To the extent there might be violations, the community is quite harsh on predatory humans. There’s a lot of community policing. We understood that wildlife protection could be attractive to tourists, the leatherbacks one of them. So you had the conservation, environmental, heritage movements raising consciousness in Trinidad and that the culture of the country was now being managed in such a way that it could be linked with Trinidad as an attractive destination.”

Karlyn added that people began to see the north coast beyond Maracas Bay for its rugged natural coastline with its largely remote, untouched areas of interest to people interested in nature and hiking.