Thanks to smoke residue that can only have come from cooking tons of brisket and ribs over decades, the walls at Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor, Tex., are an indescribable shade of grayish-greenish-brown. Well, almost indescribable. “Sherwin-Williams Grease Pit,” suggested the man behind me, as we edged forward in the long line. Exactly. Louie Mueller [...]

 

Five meals, five snacks and six drinks (including one huge margarita). Two museums (one presidential). One odd road race, one odd toy store and one very, very odd game of bingo. All this, plus live blues, indie rock, honky-tonk and qawwali, in one weekend. And all for $100. Seth Kugel for The New York TimesBridesmaids [...]

 

Seth KugelSan Angelo was one stop on the Frugal Traveler’s Texas road trip. But first, how to best save money in the planning stage? I’m not really your drive-across-America type — more of a train-through-India or Bolivia-by-bus kind of traveler. But I’ve long wanted to do a road trip in Texas. For someone like me, [...]

 

An old woman in a plain gray dress and a shopping bag full of oblong orange squashes called out to me from down the street. I had no idea what she was saying – and that couldn’t have made me happier. After all, I had come to her rural village – Malhadas, in the northeast [...]

Three year-old Matilde, dressed in a pink sweatsuit that read “Fashion Beauty Girl,” wanted to take her princess doll to the pig slaughter. Her mom, whom I had met through my hosts in this small Portuguese town, objected. “The piggies are going to make the princess dirty,” she said. Minus the doll we all walked [...]

Visiting a college town can sure bring back memories: dorm living, late night studying, partying to excess, roaming the campus dressed like vampires. The vampire apparel may be less familiar if you didn’t attend the University of Coimbra, founded in 1290 — making it one of the world’s oldest continually operating universities — and still [...]

 

Seth Kugel for The New York TimesHoliday lights in downtown Reykjavik, where bars and cafes offer a warm respite from the cold. It was pitch black at 8:30 a.m. on a frigid Icelandic morning, but at least there was no snow falling. Though cloud cover the night before had scuttled my chance to see the [...]

 

Seth Kugel for The New York TimesThe Hampton Court Palace, just outside Richmond, England, and worth a visit. A scheduling quirk had handed me 36 hours to kill in London while en route from Oxford, England, to Portugal — a happy proposition for anyone with deep pockets. Perhaps the braised rabbit at Michelin-starred St. John [...]

 

The best way to save money in Midtown is to spend more time downtown — advice many a New Yorker has foisted upon visiting friends. But I spend enough time in other people’s cities to know that certain zones get tagged as tourist traps for a reason: they have attractions worth seeing. Such is the [...]

 

Academic research supports going to Oyster.com’s “Photo Fakeout” series before reserving a hotel room. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it thousands of times: “Substantial Amounts of Domain Importance Heterogeneity exist in the contribution of vacations to people’s Quality of Life.” All right, I’ve never actually said that. It’s a quote from Sara Dolnicar, [...]

November 29, 2011, 1:01 pm By SETH KUGEL I sized up the 14th fairway overlooking the sea in Palm Beach, Fla., long a winter escape for millionaires, and pondered two questions: A 7-iron or an 8-iron? And, what the heck was I doing here? My golf swing is a sad story. But my time in [...]

November 23, 2011, 3:11 pm By SETH KUGEL Check out my holiday gift guide, featuring items for $50 and under (way under), and ideas for the really frugal: make-it-yourself gifts. Right, a cervical collar (firm) to help you sleep on planes. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content [...]

November 15, 2011, 1:58 pm By SETH KUGEL There are some easy tricks to keeping things cheap in Miami. Before you go, keep an eye out for flight specials and do some savvy hotel room bidding on Priceline. Once you’re there, spend your days on the beaches of South Beach (free) and at the galleries [...]

November 8, 2011, 3:19 pm By SETH KUGEL “Joyce, this cookie is as big as your face,” one M.I.T. business student said to another, as they pounced on the oversize chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin treats left over from a lunchtime lecture on the Chinese economy. Tuition for the M.B.A. program at the M.I.T. Sloan [...]

November 1, 2011, 3:59 pm By SETH KUGEL Sometimes in little towns in far-off lands, you do things you wouldn’t do at home, like hanging on the back half of a motorbike as it jolts over unpaved country roads. In Pirenópolis, Brazil, a cute, cobblestoned colonial town 85 miles west of Brasília, moto-taxis are the [...]