escape the nest travel

Escape The Nest Travel

Welcome to escape the nest travel, ready to escape the nest.

I help moms transition to empty nesting through transformational travel experiences. Whether it’s exploring with your friends, energizing your marriage, or connecting with your kids let me help you with all the details so you can you focus on you.

Book your complimentary over-the-phone 30-minute escape the nest session using my online scheduler at a time that’s convenient for you.

BOOK MY SESSION

Not sure where to start? Join my Empty Nest Mom Traveler Group to get great ideas from members just like you!

Grab your complimentary insider’s guide to top empty nester bucket list vacations for any budget:.

• Insider secrets on the best empty nester bucket list destinations
• Sort through the confusion and choices
• Pro-tips to save money

A little bit about me

I’ll be your biggest cheerleader, coach, and guide as you transition from empty nesting to world traveler.

I am an empty nester too! My kids are 29 and 26, and left the nest at 18. They live in different cities, and have growing families. It was so hard for me to let my “little ones” go but our mutual love of traveling helped me and all of us successfully navigate this difficult transition. Cruising has been special part of our family travel tradition for the past 31 years.

Our family’s love of cruising began in 1989 when my husband and I went on a Caribbean honeymoon cruise. Since then we have traveled all over the Caribbean, Europe, Hawaii, South America, and Alaska on phenomenal cruise vacations with our two kids. They are adults now and are starting families of their own. We plan family reunion cruises every year to stay connected and strengthen our relationships since we all live in different cities. I’m so excited to introduce our new family members to the relaxation and adventures cruising has to offer.

I can’t wait to see your inner explorer reignite as a high soaring empty nester. The Caribbean is waiting with endless possibilities and new adventures to discover.

Escaping  the nest is super easy.

Schedule your free 30 min over-the-phone Escape the Nest Session.

Make your deposit, pack your bags. I handle all the details so you can focus on you.

Escape the nest! Reignite, reenergize, and reconnect.

Schedule your free 30 minute over-the-phone Escape the Nest Session using my online scheduler to find a time that is convenient for you.

If you’re not yet ready to book your session, grab your complimentary insider’s guide to top empty nester bucket list vacations for any budget:.

• Pro tips to save money

Leah Goerke, Escape the Nest Travel

• Travel Plans
• travel ideas
• Custom Travel
• saving for travel
• Empty Nester
• destination wedding
• luxury travel
• travel documents

Ocean vs. River Cruising: Which one is right for you?

When it comes to taking a cruise on a river or ocean, it’s pretty tough to go wrong. Both offer...

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Leah Goerke

Escape the nest travel, 2025 august 17-26 essential britain and ireland empty nester group trip, aug 17, 2025 to aug 26, 2025.

Available Packages

Couples and singles available until july 31, 2024 - 3 left, starting at: $3,349.00 deposit: $250.00 per person.

$3349/person double occupancy; $4369 single occupancy

Roommate Rate Available until July 31, 2024 - 2 left

$3,349.00 deposit: $250.00 per person.

$3349/person double occupancy

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NEST-Network of Entrepreneurs Selling Travel is the industry’s first and only travel marketing group in the United States dedicated solely to home based travel agencies. In business since 2004, our focus is helping entrepreneurs achieve greater success financially, professionally and personally by championing solutions just for them.

NEST offers choices for experienced Home Based Travel Advisors.

We are a marketing organization offering experienced agencies a choice between staying independent and book directly with suppliers (using their own ARC, CLIA, IATA, or TRUE number) or be part of the newly created extension of NEST called NEST Plus. NEST Plus is an extension of NEST to serve the need of Independent Travel Advisor looking for the resources of a hosted agency. At NEST you have the choice to remain independent or be part of a HOSTED program. NEST provides you with options and a place to call HOME.

If interested in the HOSTED program, Click Here for more information on NEST Plus.

NEST supports the changing needs of suppliers, helping them to connect with the rapidly growing home-based distribution channel, of agencies or Independent Travel Advisors. Today, our membership in NEST exceeds 450 agencies, comprised of the finest home-based travel professionals in the industry. Our goal remains steadfast — to create opportunities, intensify partnerships, and increase profits for our members and our suppliers.

Who Is The NEST Advisor?

NEST advisors are Home Based and Proud. They are experienced travel professionals aspiring for financial, professional, personal growth and recognition. They are: true entrepreneurs, motivated, knowledgeable sales people, focused, creative marketers, strong, invested business professionals.

N etwork of   E ntrepreneurs   S elling   T ravel

Nest is not a host agency, association, or franchise..

We are a marketing organization serving two primary clients: the home-based travel agency and the preferred travel supplier. Agencies join as members and book directly with suppliers (using their own ARC, CLIA, IATA, or TRUE number). They maintain their agency ownership, commissions and client database.

NEST supports the changing needs of suppliers, helping them to connect with the rapidly growing home-based distribution channel to train, cultivate and compensate them. Today, our membership exceeds 450 agencies, comprised of the finest home-based travel professionals in the industry. Our goal remains steadfast — to create opportunities, intensify partnerships, and increase profits for our members.

Our Mission

T o help home-based travel agencies achieve greater success financially, professionally, and personally by championing solutions and opportunities exclusively for them. Read More

Home-based & proud today?

Have you been contemplating transitioning to working from home? Join NEST to truly preserve your independence and enjoy extraordinary benefits.

To help home-based travel agencies achieve greater success financially, professionally, and personally by championing solutions and opportunities exclusively for them. Read More

Join The NEST

Or are you contemplating transitioning to the home? Join the NEST to truly preserve your independence and enjoy extraordinary benefits.

INVESTING IN YOU - The NEST ADVANTAGE

In NEST you will find an entire community of proud entrepreneurs just like you ... over 450 strong and growing. We want to be your "second" home and powerful connection to a new universe of business-building benefits.

TRUE INDEPENDENCE

Maintain your identity and earn more commission. Read More

MARKETING THAT MATTERS

Your agency will stay top-of-mind with travelers through our award-winning, professionally designed leisure travel promotional campaigns, all customizable with YOUR brand . . . Read More

LEADING TECHNOLOGY

Our proprietary technology platforms are all state-of-the-art and integrated. These powerful tools give our agencies a competitive edge to improve efficiencies and productivity . . . Read More

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS

Since 2004 NEST has built long-standing relationships with the travel industry’s best preferred suppliers . . . Read More

HOTELS & RESORTS

NEST Hotel and Resorts Collection with access to over 140,000 hotels and resorts worldwide. Read More

TRAINING & SUPPORT

NEST is committed to giving your agency a greater competitive edge...to help your clients enjoy the best travel experiences of their lives...and to make your business more profitable . . . Read More

Why choose NEST?

True independence, higher commissions, increased profitability, turnkey sales promotions, supplier recognition, hands on training, dedicated business analyst.

Having come from a very large consortium, I really enjoy being a member of NEST because of its ideal size. It’s large enough to have the benefits of things like free direct mail, rewards, support of the cruise lines and tour companies, yet small enough to know the staff and get assistance when needed. Plus, the networking opportunities like the annual NEST FEST conference and Seminars at Sea are intimate enough to network with fellow members and supplier executives. I believe sharing business experiences with other home-based agents and owners (which I have always been) is extremely beneficial. Fran Card Owner, Card’s Cruise Connection

NEST Products and Services

"To help home-based travel agencies achieve greater success financially, professionally, and personally by championing solutions and opportunities exclusively for them."

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Click here to find out more. Click here to register your interest.

Membership Requirements

• Must be home-based .
• Must be independently owned and operated as a sole proprietorship, partnership or corporation.
• Must already be registered to book directly with suppliers, not booking through a host.
• Must be a strong producer , generating a minimum dollar amount of preferred supplier sales.

The NEST Advantage

You can rely on our technology to customize marketing programs and solutions  tailored to your needs.

Our technology ensures you are covered in all areas to seamlessly reach your clientele and offers the best, most competitive pricing.

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We've spent more than four decades building solid relationships with the top suppliers. Our partnerships allow us the ability to negotiate competitive pricing that is passed on to our agents.

NEST Agencies

By providing a wide array of marketing and technology tools, we are committed to helping our agencies increase their share of the market through NEST preferred suppliers while increasing the profitability of their business.

Leisure Agencies

TRAVELSAVERS is committed to providing your agency with a greater competitive edge. We strongly believe that the strength and success of TRAVELSAVERS is dependent on the partnerships we have formed with our individual licensees.

Luxury Agencies

Defining our high end luxury segment, The Affluent Traveler Collection (ATC), American Marketing Group’s luxury brand, is an elite organization designed to help agents increase their luxury leisure sales. It builds upon the resources TRAVELSAVERS travel professionals can access and enhances their ability to attract today’s discerning, affluent traveler.

NEST Preferred Suppliers

NEST is here to help

450 agency members, home-based and proud.

NEST  71 Audrey Ave, Oyster Bay, NY 11771  888-245-6378    [email protected]

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Are you currently a home based agency or contemplating moving home or are you an experienced travel advisor who needs a new home to partner with.

Either way at NEST we have the program that is right for you! We offer two options that will offer you extraordinary benefits and will assist you in growing your current business model and making it more successful in the years to come.

Your success is our success whether you choose NEST or NEST Plus we offer the tools and programs you need to achieve greater success!

For Home-based travel agencies looking to partner with the country's first and only marketing group solely dedicated to Home Based Travel agencies looking for their own independency and currently have their own IATA, ARC or CLIA number

NEST Plus  

For the experienced travel advisor looking for a hosted program to call home

• Travel Advice

Airline’s insane business class is the ‘best’

A major airline has just been awarded as having the “best” business class cabin - and it’s easy to see why.

‘Do not turn up’: Airline cancels all flights

Qantas’ big menu change in economy

Emirates boss reveals big change to planes

Qatar Airways has smashed the competition this week, with the airline recognised not once, but twice for its business class cabin.

The Doha-based carrier has been awarded Best Business Class in the AirlineRatings.com 2024 Airline Excellence Awards.

Its ‘Qsuite’ is available on the majority of its long-range Boeing 777 and A350 fleet and will soon be rolled out in its 787s.

AirlineRatings.com editor-in-chief Geoffrey Thomas described it as a “first-class experience in business class”.

“It leaves nothing to chance, and our judges rated it as the best overall business-class product they had seen that is now being copied by others.,” Mr Thomas said.

“It sets a standard to which some airlines can only aspire.’’

The business class cabin is described as “spacious, private and well-designed” and packed with features designed to make travel more productive and comfortable.

Some of these features include a sliding privacy door, a giant 21.5-inch high-definition touchscreen and generous secure storage compartment.

In terms of the seat, there are four presets: lie flat, fully upright, take off, and recline — and there’s also movable panels that transform the space into a social area, allowing you to work, dine or socialise.

To top it off, there’s on-demand system for ordering meals, snacks and beverages.

It’s been a big week for the airline, which nabbed three titles, including Best Business Class at the Business Traveller Middle East Awards held on Monday in Dubai.

The awards recognise the most successful aviation and hospitality industry leaders in the region through reader-voted nominations, with the Qatari flag carrier also winning ‘Best Regional Airline Serving the Middle East’ and ‘Best Travel App’.

In a post on X, the carrier shared its list of wins alongside the caption: “Cue the applause”.

“For a comfortable journey, delicious meals, and a safe trip, I highly recommend this airline. I will never use any other airline after my excellent experience with @qatarairways. They go above and beyond to ensure passengers feel at ease, regardless of the ticket class,” one satisfied passenger wrote.

Another passenger described their experience as “flawless”.

Qatar Airways Group chief executive officer Badr Mohammed Al-Meer, said the awards are a testament to the dedication and hard work of the entire Qatar Airways team and innovative travel technologies.

“Looking ahead, we will continue to go above and beyond to deliver unparalleled services and elevated travel experiences to our passengers, both in the Middle East and across the globe.”

The airline, which has an expansive network of nearly 170 destinations worldwide, wanted to expand its Aussie offering.

It proposed twice-daily flights to the federal government to Sydney and Brisbane plus three flights a day into Melbourne, however it was rejected in a move that garnered great scrutiny.

More Coverage

It sparked anger from travellers, airports and businesses at a time of high airfares as well as concern over the influence wielded by Qantas in blocking the proposal .

Qatar Airways is currently entitled to 28 flights per week.

It faces a strict limit on how many flights per week it can offer from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane under a strict “bilateral air rights” agreement with the Australian government.

Chaos has hit passengers with a major national airline considering going into administration, with flights cancelled.

If you’re a fan of this snack, you’re going to have to part ways with it as Qantas has upgraded its domestic in-flight menu.

Emirates has announced more of its planes are getting a makeover – adding something Aussies love.

Claudia Looi

Touring the Top 10 Moscow Metro Stations

By Claudia Looi 2 Comments

Komsomolskaya metro station looks like a museum. It has vaulted ceilings and baroque decor.

Hidden underground, in the heart of Moscow, are historical and architectural treasures of Russia. These are Soviet-era creations – the metro stations of Moscow.

Our guide Maria introduced these elaborate metro stations as “the palaces for the people.” Built between 1937 and 1955, each station holds its own history and stories. Stalin had the idea of building beautiful underground spaces that the masses could enjoy. They would look like museums, art centers, concert halls, palaces and churches. Each would have a different theme. None would be alike.

The two-hour private tour was with a former Intourist tour guide named Maria. Maria lived in Moscow all her life and through the communist era of 60s to 90s. She has been a tour guide for more than 30 years. Being in her 60s, she moved rather quickly for her age. We traveled and crammed with Maria and other Muscovites on the metro to visit 10 different metro stations.

Arrow showing the direction of metro line 1 and 2

Moscow subways are very clean

To Maria, every street, metro and building told a story. I couldn’t keep up with her stories. I don’t remember most of what she said because I was just thrilled being in Moscow.   Added to that, she spilled out so many Russian words and names, which to one who can’t read Cyrillic, sounded so foreign and could be easily forgotten.

The metro tour was the first part of our all day tour of Moscow with Maria. Here are the stations we visited:

1. Komsomolskaya Metro Station  is the most beautiful of them all. Painted yellow and decorated with chandeliers, gold leaves and semi precious stones, the station looks like a stately museum. And possibly decorated like a palace. I saw Komsomolskaya first, before the rest of the stations upon arrival in Moscow by train from St. Petersburg.

2. Revolution Square Metro Station (Ploshchad Revolyutsii) has marble arches and 72 bronze sculptures designed by Alexey Dushkin. The marble arches are flanked by the bronze sculptures. If you look closely you will see passersby touching the bronze dog's nose. Legend has it that good luck comes to those who touch the dog's nose.

Touch the dog's nose for good luck. At the Revolution Square station

Revolution Square Metro Station

3. Arbatskaya Metro Station served as a shelter during the Soviet-era. It is one of the largest and the deepest metro stations in Moscow.

Arbatskaya Metro Station

4. Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Metro Station was built in 1935 and named after the Russian State Library. It is located near the library and has a big mosaic portrait of Lenin and yellow ceramic tiles on the track walls.

Lenin's portrait at the Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Metro Station

5. Kievskaya Metro Station was one of the first to be completed in Moscow. Named after the capital city of Ukraine by Kiev-born, Nikita Khruschev, Stalin's successor.

Kievskaya Metro Station

6. Novoslobodskaya Metro Station  was built in 1952. It has 32 stained glass murals with brass borders.

Novoslobodskaya metro station

7. Kurskaya Metro Station was one of the first few to be built in Moscow in 1938. It has ceiling panels and artwork showing Soviet leadership, Soviet lifestyle and political power. It has a dome with patriotic slogans decorated with red stars representing the Soviet's World War II Hall of Fame. Kurskaya Metro Station is a must-visit station in Moscow.

Ceiling panel and artworks at Kurskaya Metro Station

8. Mayakovskaya Metro Station built in 1938. It was named after Russian poet Vladmir Mayakovsky. This is one of the most beautiful metro stations in the world with 34 mosaics painted by Alexander Deyneka.

Mayakovskaya station

One of the over 30 ceiling mosaics in Mayakovskaya metro station

9. Belorusskaya Metro Station is named after the people of Belarus. In the picture below, there are statues of 3 members of the Partisan Resistance in Belarus during World War II. The statues were sculpted by Sergei Orlov, S. Rabinovich and I. Slonim.

10. Teatralnaya Metro Station (Theatre Metro Station) is located near the Bolshoi Theatre.

Teatralnaya Metro Station decorated with porcelain figures .

Taking the metro's escalator at the end of the tour with Maria the tour guide.

Have you visited the Moscow Metro? Leave your comment below.

January 15, 2017 at 8:17 am

An excellent read! Thanks for much for sharing the Russian metro system with us. We're heading to Moscow in April and exploring the metro stations were on our list and after reading your post, I'm even more excited to go visit them. Thanks again 🙂

December 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm

Hi, do you remember which tour company you contacted for this tour?

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A Remarkable New Thruster Could Achieve Escape Velocity—and Interplanetary Travel

Scientists are on the brink of a propulsion breakthrough.

• Ion thrusters are the most common primary engine powering satellites through orbital maneuvers today.
• But to travel from low-Earth orbit (LEO) to farther orbits—or even the Moon—requires a different kind of ion thruster capable of achieving escape velocity and orbital capture maneuvers.
• Using technology originally developed for NASA’s upcoming lunar space station, the space agency has miniaturized its high-power solar electric tech into an engine that could make more complex satellites and planetary missions possible.

These engines are as old as rocketry itself— Soviet and German rocket leaders first dreamed up their future uses more than a century ago. And today, these electric propulsion systems power the swarms of satellites around Earth that make modern life possible. Unlike chemical rockets that throw out gasses for propulsion, ion engines are powered by individual atoms , which makes them much more fuel efficient and allows satellites to operate for longer.

However, they’re not perfect. In the future, spacecraft will need to perform high-velocity propulsive maneuvers—such as achieving escape velocity and orbital capture—that current ion engines can’t deliver. That’s why NASA developed the H71M sub-kilowatt Hall-effect thruster , a next-generation ion engine that can supply a velocity change.

The propulsion system must operate using low power (sub-kilowatt) and have high-propellant throughput (i.e., the capability to use a high total mass of propellant over its lifetime) to enable the impulse required to execute these maneuvers. While commercial ion thrusters are good enough for most LEO satellites , these engines only use “10% or less of a small spacecraft’s initial mass in propellant,” according to NASA. The H71M thruster uses 30 percent, and could operate for 15,000 hours.

“Small spacecraft using the NASA-H71M electric propulsion technology will be able to independently maneuver from low-Earth orbit (LEO) to the Moon or even from a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) to Mars,” NASA wrote on its website regarding the new ion thruster. “The ability to conduct missions that originate from these near-Earth orbits can greatly increase the cadence and lower the cost of lunar and Mars science missions.”

The creation of this thruster grew from NASA’s work on the Power and Propulsion Element for Gateway , NASA’s planned lunar orbital space station. The team essentially miniaturized the high-power solar electric technologies that will make that lunar mission possible into a package that could provide thrust for smaller space missions.

One of the first spacecraft companies that will use this next-gen technology is SpaceLogistics, a space subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. The company’s NGHT-1X Hall-effect thrusters are based on NASA’s technology, and will allow its Mission Extension Pod (MEP)—which, as its name suggests, is essentially a satellite repair vehicle—to reach geosynchronous Earth orbit, where it’ll attach itself to a larger satellite. Acting as a “propulsion jet pack,” the MEP will act as an ion-powered symbiote that extends the larger satellite’s mission by at least six years.

If all goes well, this small-yet-mighty thruster could enable planetary missions once considered impossible to pull off.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough. 

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Your Neighbors Are Retiring in Their 30s. Why Can’t You?

Meet the schemers and savers obsessed with ending their careers as early as possible.

Allen Wong in his primary residence in Celebration, Fla. Credit... Maggie Shannon for The New York Times

Supported by

By Amy X. Wang

Amy X. Wang is the assistant managing editor of the magazine. She often writes about how tantalizing objects of desire change our everyday behavior.

• May 7, 2024

Even before he really knew what it meant, Allen Wong wanted to be rich. As a kid, he didn’t yet equate the word with “luxury” or “status” or “expensive things.” He didn’t think wealth would bring him 85-inch televisions and Jacuzzis, a one-of-a-kind rose-gold Lamborghini in the garage, a wearable Iron Man suit that shoots lasers — though he does, actually, have all of that now. What “rich” seemed to dangle was something simpler, more elementary, more a feeling than anything else: freedom from pain.

Listen to this article, read by Emily Woo Zeller

Wong’s parents had fled poverty — at one point, his father used tennis balls as flotation devices to illicitly cross waters from Guangzhou into Hong Kong — in order to raise a family in a more opportune land. But growing up in New York City, Wong watched one parent peddle medicinal herbs all day long while the other toiled away in a Chinatown sweatshop. They barely had time to slough off one workday before trudging into the next.

“I didn’t want my life to end up like that,” he told me. “I didn’t want to be absent from my family and only show up a few hours each day after work. I didn’t want my life to be monotonous and stuck in a repeating loop until I die.”

Then, in 2008, right as he was graduating from college, the family convulsed. Wong’s father was ousted from his business, sank into a depression and committed suicide; his mother tripped down a spiral of mental illness. Suddenly, Wong’s entry-level computer programming job was the household’s only source of income, and there was a world financial crisis going on. He had always dreamed about digging out of the middle-class quagmire — striking gold, pulling in enough money from a one-off idea that he would never have to work the way his parents did. But it was now, as anxiety and medical bills piled up, that those idle daydreams began to feel urgent and necessary. So he turbocharged his ambitions. He started coding around the clock, tinkering on D.I.Y. software ideas whenever he wasn’t at work, barely sleeping. He doggedly pushed one project after another to the App Store, praying for something to take off.

Eventually, one did: an app that let users tune in to police scanners around the world. Then another. Their runaway success took even him by surprise. By the time his peers were splurging on their first West Elm sofas, he was a self-made multimillionaire.

Wong found his day job interesting enough, and he liked his colleagues. But submitting himself to a boss’s whims, spending his days trapped like a houseplant under corporate fluorescence, grated at him; it reminded him too much of his parents’ suffering. What, he wondered, could a so-called career really offer him if he had already secured enough money for a good life? The whole point of working was to get what he had just gotten. So, at 25, he bought a $250,000 sports car painted a shimmery lime green — it wasn’t so crazy a purchase, he reasoned, because his police-scanner app was by then generating that amount of revenue in a single month — and announced that he was retiring forever.

It was only after he bought a second exotic car, a five-bedroom house in Celebration, Fla., a dog and a Disney World annual pass for his mother that Wong learned that there was an entire online community of people seeking to do what he had just done. Wong had heard of the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement before, but he didn’t think it really applied to him because of its focus on frugality. FIRE got its start in the early 2000s with a mantra of extreme saving — you may remember hearing about stoic ultraminimalists living off beans and friends’ couches — but it has since come to include all the people who would like to exit the work force on their own terms, at an age of their own choosing, rather than hustling for a paycheck all the way into their 60s. After Wong made a Reddit post sharing his story, it attracted such a flurry from FIRE adherents that he quickly became the quasi president of one of the group’s biggest online enclaves.

Some FIRE aspirants still get to early retirement by the traditional route of simply saving madly. Others, though, truffle-hunt for high-paying W-2s, tax loopholes, bold and risky market bets or big entrepreneurial ploys like Wong’s. The overarching credo of FIRE is that in today’s unpredictable financial landscape, 9-to-5s and decades-long careers have become bad investments: Old-school benefits like pensions and job security are a thing of the past, and wages aren’t even keeping up with the galloping pace of inflation. According to a 2023 survey, one-quarter of Americans would like to retire before age 50. After decades of tolerating workaholic culture as the norm, employees are tired, unafraid to show it and yearning to yank back control of their lives. To fed-up workers willing to do a little bit of math, FIRE offers a straightforward antidote: You can just leave it all behind.

Like Wong, and like so many other people who chase financial independence, I didn’t grow up with a lot of money — which might be why I became obsessed with it.

Long before “side hustle” became Merriam-Webster lingo, I was working Costco snack arbitrage on the elementary-school playground and hawking homemade bookmarks to my teachers. In adulthood, I moved on to online surveys, research studies, plasma donation, vintage resale, parts modeling and dog-sitting in other people’s homes in lieu of paying rent. I have left no income source unturned. I’ve trawled every page of NerdWallet and The Points Guy. I have made questionable margin calls. I have woken up at the crack of dawn to day-trade $NVDA, $TSLA, $TSM. I have “ flipped ”; I have “ churned .” When I feel sad, I open my phone to check on the interest rates in the five-pronged CD ladder I’ve lovingly assembled in my Marcus account, like a tic, to feel better.

Is this all embarrassing to confess? Incredibly so. Would I characterize my relationship to money as “unhealthy”? Also yes. But I often wonder if anybody in this economy, in this country — where more than 60 percent of the work force lives paycheck to paycheck, where the average American is in five- to six-figure debt and often has only cursory knowledge of how he or she got there — has a healthy relationship to money. Simply learning to understand your own finances can feel, several FIRErs said to me, like acquiring a “secret weapon.”

The original FIRE doctrine revolves around delay of gratification. Save your money — ideally as much as 50 to 75 percent of each paycheck — instead of spending it immediately, and when you’ve amassed enough of a nest egg, quit your job and take the rest of your life for yourself. “It’s simple, because the main principles fit on a Post-it note,” Jacob Lund Fisker, a Danish former astrophysicist who is often thought of as the father of the FIRE movement, told me. “However, it is not easy, because everything the typical middle-class consumer has been raised and trained to believe goes against these principles. People have grown up associating success with money and spending money with happiness. They’ve been trained to sit still and perform repetitive work, first by a teacher, then by a manager. They’ve been educated to be specialists in a narrow field and never think outside that box.”

Fisker’s 2010 book, “Early Retirement Extreme” — written mostly while he lived out of an R.V. on $7,000 a year — is one seminal text for early retirees. Two others are “Your Money or Your Life,” a 1992 personal-finance bible written by Joseph R. Dominguez and Vicki Robin, and the blog Mr. Money Mustache, started in 2011 by Peter Adeney, who retired from his software-engineering job in 2005 at age 30 and figured out how to shrink his family’s expenses down to just $24,000 a year. The tao of all three tomes is that minimalist spending and anti-consumption can offer the keys to better living. (Adeney has professed to be “really just trying to get rich people to stop destroying the planet,” but his tens of thousands of monthly visitors tend to be more fixated on his other mantra: “Make you rich so you can retire early.”)

Conventional FIRE adherents are not necessarily big earners or genius mathematicians with incredible impulse control. Their superpower is their expert planning; it’s the ability to see the finish line from miles away that has allowed even some minimum-wage workers to achieve early retirement. One simple FIRE rule of thumb is to first calculate your target “FI number” by multiplying anticipated annual retirement expenses by at least 25, and then squirrel away as much as possible into interest-accruing or tax-advantaged buckets like 401(k)s, low-fee index funds, certificates of deposit, HSAs and Roth IRAs until you hit that number. As an example, if you bring home $150,000 a year, can save half of that and plan to spend $50,000 per year in retirement, then it will take only 16.5 years before you can kiss your job goodbye. For those who earn less or spend more, it will take longer — but for still others who can endure greater sacrifices, FIRE can be possible as early as their 30s.

From these plain origins, many offshoots of FIRE have sprouted up — some much more brazen than others. It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans; those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as LeanFIRE. A lot more people aim for CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and “coasting” on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit) or BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits) or FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Wong belongs).

You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils. But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world? Retirement has long been framed as a reward for a job well done — social reformers started pushing for mandatory post-work benefits in the early 20th century, and policies like Social Security later codified the tipping point between labor and leisure — but if FIRE’s incredible popularity of late (the r/Fire subreddit alone boasts nearly half a million members) is a defiant reaction to economic hardship, then it’s also a plea to re-evaluate the centrality of work to modern living. Maybe, the movement suggests, we should have always been in it for ourselves, and nobody else, from the start.

To my left was a woman who runs a phone-sex hotline; to my right, a cruise operator, a disaster-response volunteer, a kitchen-appliance entrepreneur, a public-school teacher and a former Off Broadway actor who now lives out of the back of an 18-wheeler and puts 70 percent of her weekly paycheck into index funds. It was a chilly spring weekend, and we had all flown to Cincinnati for EconoMe, an annual all-flavors-of-FIRE conference in which hundreds of people of all ages, from all over, bandy about tips on financial independence from dawn to dusk. The point of FIRE meetups — EconoMe is the largest, but others take place all over the world, some of them at a monthly clip — is only partly to give fiscal advice. Every person’s retirement plan is a highly individualized choreography, after all, so the manifold workshops and breakout groups are meant to offer only high-level ideas. The broader purpose of these get-togethers is more a sort of group therapy, geared to help people achieve their common goals and forge through their common struggles.

Much of the crowd was timid but curious — like Laura Rojo-Eddy, who decided on a whim to fly out from Texas. “My family doesn’t know anything about FIRE,” she told me. “I’ve been really shy talking about it. It’s hard to talk about finances with strangers, but in a way it’s even harder with people you love.” She chanced upon the movement in 2021 via a former colleague’s LinkedIn post, which made her consider for the first time that she may not have to work until the standard age of 65. The friend “posted she was retiring thanks to FIRE, and I was like: That’s really cool! But what the hell is she talking about? And, holy crap, this person’s my age — 40 — and what if I could do that? Should I do that?”

At EconoMe, bank-account totals were traded more freely than phone numbers. The conference’s organizer, Diania Merriam (retired at 33), introduced speakers like Jeremy Schneider (retired at 36), who spoke about how to pick a good financial adviser; the retired divorce lawyer Aaron Thomas, who evangelized the importance of prenups; the real estate tax strategist Natalie Kolodij, who discussed real estate investing and recommended employing your children starting from the age they are able to do household chores, which offers a double benefit of reducing a parent’s taxable income while building an investment-accruing tax shelter for the 7-year-old. Stephanie Zito’s two-hour seminar on the nitty-gritty of “travel hacking,” a.k.a. traversing the world through strategic deployment of credit-card points, had the crowd on the edge of their seats.

In one morning session, a brave volunteer named Krista put her life’s “balance sheet” up on a big screen so that 500 strangers could critique it for blind spots. She is 35, with four kids ages 16, 15, 9 and 7, and makes $32,000 working in a library in Wisconsin. Over the last seven years, since discovering FIRE, she and her husband had slowly paid off $200,000 in credit-card and home- and auto-loan debt. But she knew, she said, humbly dipping her head a bit, that she still had a long way to go, especially when compared with all the younger, already-retired millionaires in the room.

“Wait a second,” Frank Vasquez, one of the conference’s speakers, interrupted. “No. Do you all see this? Krista was a teenage mom who grew up in poverty. We are looking, right now, at a map of a hero’s journey.”

During a break, Jackie Cummings Koski, an Ohio local, shared her story with me: She grew up on food stamps and had a “wake-up call” with money after an acrimonious divorce left her a single mother. She learned about FIRE in her early 40s. Newly enlightened, she started saving 40 percent of the salary from her five-figure job, reached financial independence at 47 and pulled the trigger on retirement at 49, with $1.3 million in savings. “My corporate job had nothing to do with what I want to do,” Koski told me. “I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it.” She added: “While most FIRE people brag about having an old car with 200,000 miles or whatever, I drive a luxury car. But nobody’s going to chastise me, because I still retired early, even with that car, even with having made some mistakes!” Koski spends her time nowadays creating financial content and advocating for personal-finance classes to be added to high schools, and she recently wrote a “FIRE for Dummies” manual.

To my surprise, a sizable portion of the FIRE crowd at EconoMe was older. This wasn’t so surprising to Bill Yount, a 58-year-old retired physician who recently started up a podcast with Koski and another friend, Becky Heptig, that speaks to older demographics. “The average American is a late starter,” Yount told me. “That’s just who we are, living in this consumption society and not having the mentality of saving often or early.” And things are no longer “9-to-5, 40 years and a gold watch” the way they were for his parents’ generation: “I’m not in the gold-watch generation. Gen X got lost, got forgotten.”

Heptig, who is 68, found herself in dire financial straits in her 50s, when her husband’s small business faltered. “I got really scared, thinking we will never get out of this debt and we will never retire,” she says. They took a course from the financial-advice radio host Dave Ramsey, and her husband signed up for a W-2 job. After that, they started saving madly. “We were net-worth zero at 50 years old, and he retired at 63 — so for us, where we started from, we consider ourselves retiring early,” Heptig says. She had made the same wild discovery that everyone in FIRE does: that it can really take as little as a decade to hit early retirement, from the moment you learn about it and start planning. But as Yount put it to me: “You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t even know to go looking for it.”

Maybe it’s because I know too much about looking for money that I found myself, while reporting this article, especially drawn to the subculture of FatFIRE — and to the lavish, unapologetic, in-your-face money philosophy that Allen Wong and others of his ilk prefer. FatFIRE flies in the face of all the other variants of FIRE. It is anti -anticonsumption. Its typical benchmark is to accumulate enough wealth that you can comfortably spend at least $100,000 a year in retirement, but some highfliers aim for much, much bigger sums. It espouses an unbridled maximalism, a have-it-all abundance.

While most other FIRE communities steer toward the friendly and pragmatic, FatFIRE’s adherents tend to be jaded, brusque, laser-focused. They hunt for the “exit,” in the tech-world manner of speaking: a fast, lucrative way out. On the r/FatFIRE subreddit, aspirants ogle severance packages, geo-arbitrage, REIT, tax loopholes, high-risk options straddles and potential business moonshots. Successful FatFIRErs applaud one another for hitting double-digit-millions net worth, debate the merits of private jets versus second homes and agonize over how large a trust fund is ethical to set up for their kids. And just as Fisker and Adeney were beacons to early-era FIRE devotees, Allen Wong is FatFIRE’s mythic hero.

Wong is quiet and unassuming in person. When I finally met him this spring — three years after we first began chatting online — near his childhood home in Queens, he wore jeans, Asics and a wary self-consciousness. Now in his mid-30s, he has comfortably enjoyed nearly a decade of leisure; he spends the bulk of his days playing pickleball and counseling strangers online on how to follow in his footsteps. He’s not particularly interested in fame, so he posts, as the senior moderator of r/FatFIRE, under his app company’s name. For someone who is a living talisman against the tenets of conventional living, he speaks with a surprising calm — though his eyes flashed with a certain pride whenever we talked about his childhood or his father. Even though it sprouted up only seven years ago, r/FatFIRE is on the verge of overtaking r/FIRE in size, Wong told me. Membership doubled during the pandemic despite moderators’ intentionally hiding the forum from Reddit’s homepage, he said, showing me a graph, and he added that most of its members seem to be “early-career American men.”

This makes sense. Millennials may have been ushered into the work force with the encouragement to hustle, but we soon found ourselves jerked around by utterly unaffordable housing, pandemic layoffs, salaries that flopped flat while costs went stratosphere-high. Nearly half of young adults have “money dysphoria,” according to a recent survey from the personal-finance company Credit Karma. Online, trends like “quiet luxury” and “dupe culture” glorify totems of wealth while making it clear how depressingly inaccessible that echelon is for the average Joe. If the recent “antiwork” movement laid bare the disillusionment of the young work force, then FatFIRE represents those feelings put into action.

Some FatFIRE success stories are like Wong’s: a result of obsessive entrepreneurism. Just as many are a byproduct of grinding away at a regular, albeit high-earning, job for enough years. (Fisker, for one, argues that FatFIRE is just an aesthetic rebranding of the work-smart-not-hard ethos that has been woven throughout American history.) In San Francisco, Sam Dogen faithfully saved his finance-job paychecks for 13 years before retiring in 2012 to live off passive investment income. He initially budgeted $100,000 for him and his wife to spend per year, but they upped the target to $200,000 after having their first child, then to $300,000 after a second child — and recently again to $350,000 to account for the recent bout of unchecked inflation. “We choose to live in an expensive coastal city and choose to have two children,” Dogen told me. “But you look at the $300,000 budget I made for a family of four, and you’re like, This is a pretty middle-class lifestyle. FatFIRE is almost a necessity if you want to live in San Francisco.”

“I think more people should aim for FatFIRE, because even if you don’t hit it, you’ll be at regular FIRE,” Jeff Underwood, a San Diego-based FatFIRE aspirant who started chasing financial independence after he lost his house and sank $10,000 into debt, told me. “The idea of LeanFIRE makes me super nervous. Health care costs are going up. There are all these unknowns. You could really find yourself in trouble.” Through smart tips he picked up on financial-planning forums, Underwood’s net worth steadily climbed from $0 in 2011 to $1 million in 2023. He is drawn to FatFIRE’s cheeky energy and its emphasis on securing a big safety net: “I had spent so long in the survival mind-set,” he says. “My default position is to plan for the worst, because I’ve already been through the worst.”

Wong now splits most of his time between houses in Celebration, Fla., and in New York City. He wakes up early to play pickleball and can keep at it for hours if the weather is nice. Because he has so much free time to practice, he has gotten good enough to compete against elite players and coach novices. (He offered to teach me how to play, but it was a wind-whipped 35 degrees when we met up in early April, so we went to have soup dumplings instead.) Otherwise, he reads up on tech and cybersecurity news, plays video games and undertakes home-renovation projects. His houses have been burglarized three times, although he managed to halt the latest attempt with a self-programmed alarm system. He used to make videos about his exotic car collection on YouTube, a few of which went viral, but he grew tired of being a “content creator” because it felt too much like having a job. Plus, he had already done the whole rack-up-a-huge-number thing before — with money.

“It was as if I fast-forwarded through an entire movie, and the end credits are slowly rolling,” Wong told me recently, recalling his first, restless years in retirement. “There was nothing more to watch, and all my peers were still busy watching the movie that I already finished. After I traveled the world and had done just about every possible fun thing I could possibly do, I often found myself wondering, What now?”

Life after early retirement: the elephant in the room. What to do after the cruises, the skydiving, the teetering stack of books on the night stand? The main danger of FIRE is that you might be running hard away from something rather than toward it — that you’re propelled only by the too-nebulous idea of escape. And then, even for those who lay out a clear road map for decades of nirvana, the loneliness can eat at you.

That’s why some, like Merriam, EconoMe’s organizer, host regular social events in their local cities. The online community ChooseFI maintains a sprawling network of hundreds of local FIRE groups in cities around the world. Amy Minkley, who retired by working in Asia as a teacher and saving up to $90,000 of her salary each year, organizes an annual FIRE meetup in Bali as a way of keeping up the community that saved her from depression: “It just felt like someone had thrown me a life raft, and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she told me.

A lot of other people go the Mr. Money Mustache route: They blog. Their posts about income spreadsheets and VTSAX returns then attract the like-minded, as potential friends or even lovers. Koski has heard of romances blossoming among fellow FIRErs — though many of them prefer the company of a FIRE Luddite. “A good chunk of my friends are on my phone,” Gwen Merz, who began saving up for FIRE when she discovered the Mustache blog at age 22 and reached CoastFIRE at age 32 with $400,000 in savings, told me.

A common worry is when to stop. How much is enough? Why not make more? Since there is an upper limit to money’s effect on joy — studies have shown that global happiness tops out at income levels of about $75,000 a year — chasing infinite wealth may be psychologically futile.

“I think people can accumulate money to the detriment of their health and happiness,” says Alan Donegan, who with his wife, Katie, lives a nomadic lifestyle and coaches FIRE newbies toward their resignation letters by “trying to show money is a tool to create your version of an extraordinary life.” There are also those like Oliver Truong, a 27-year-old who cares less about the dollars and cents of it all than about fulfilling a self-imposed challenge: “I think FIRE people are some of the most creative people I’ve ever met,” he told me at EconoMe. “At least for me, it was never about the money, honestly. It was more about just doing something I wanted on my own.”

For those who succeed at early retirement, especially at the FatFIRE level, a surprise depression can set in. “It’s quite alarming and sad to see how many people are lost after they do this,” Wong’s r/FatFIRE co-moderator, Mike Doehla, told me. Doehla himself thought he was prepared for the social segregation when he FatFIREd at 40 in 2022 through his nutrition-coaching business. He wasn’t. “It has been pretty isolating, and almost awkward at times,” he confessed. Based in a small town in upstate New York, Doehla doesn’t know anyone in real life who has retired early, and all his friends are still working. But, he told me, “I think I’m psychologically broken from ever working someone else’s schedule again,” and he is keen to discover who he is, as a person, outside of work. If the quest for happiness were a tangible metric, Doehla reckons he is about 60 percent of the way there: “I have this FOMO, this empty cup, regarding what is going around me that so many people have experienced, that I just want to taste a bit.”

At EconoMe, I met a 52-year-old architect who considers himself “FattishFIRE”; he and his wife spend about $8,000 a month in Boston and would like to keep up that lifestyle in retirement. But, he told me, “I pretend I have a lot less than I do.” He lives in a building where many of his neighbors “have very little money, live off government assistance and are critical of wealthy people. They don’t know we’re like ‘stealth wealth.’ Would they not like me anymore?” (For this reason, he asked not to be identified.) He has saved enough money to retire within two or three years if he wants to, but he worries about how he’ll be perceived within a field that takes pride in its workhorse culture: “I’d always thought ‘architect’ was my personality and was going to be until I died,” he said. “Am I being too nervous? Am I crazy? I’m still a little ashamed.”

After a decade in retirement, Dogen, the San Francisco FatFIREr, recently did the unimaginable: He decided to go back to work. He doesn’t really need the money, but the endless leisure has begun to wear on him. “I can’t do pickleball all day,” Dogen told me. “So what’s the responsible thing to do? And the responsible thing to do is to find a job that has good purpose, good meaning, where you can work with some smart people and have a lot of camaraderie.” He added: “It just feels good to be part of something. I think it’s really important that we all feel like we’re part of something, contributing.” He took one gig but quit because it ate up too much time, and he is now looking for a less demanding part-time position.

Wong, these days, loves to volunteer. He donates to charities, serves on neighborhood boards and of course plays both chairman and soothsayer to the fraternity (for it is largely male) of r/FatFIRE. Wong doesn’t so much mind being solitary in real life — he considers himself a lone wolf and is often wary of making new friends for fear they will try to take financial advantage of him. He has been duped in the past by family members or acquaintances, including a friend who falsely claimed to need support for lifesaving heart surgeries. It’s not uncommon for him to get Venmo requests from strangers. (Many of his pickleball acquaintances learned about his wealth when a photographer showed up on the court to shoot him for this article.)

I asked him what he plans to do in his second decade of retirement — or his third or fourth or beyond. He doesn’t know yet. He told me he has been intrigued by the rise of A.I. and has flirted with the idea of a D.I.Y. project in that space. Ultimately, though, he hasn’t pursued it. He fears even self-employment would bring back the manic stresses he fought so hard to leave behind. “When I FatFIREd, I freed myself,” Wong told me. Inner peace, then, is the precious goal. He treasures all the time he has been able to spend with his mother and may one day share his wealth with children of his own. “Should I have worked more and made even more money? I’ve definitely left many millions of dollars on the table by stepping away from it all,” he told me. “But I always end up coming to the same conclusion: There’s no point in making so much money if you’re not going to be happy. I’d rather be free.”

Maggie Shannon is a photographer based in Los Angeles. She specializes in documentary portraiture and focuses on stories of smaller communities and social rituals.

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Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck

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Amy X. Wang is the assistant managing editor of The New York Times Magazine. More about Amy X. Wang

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Escape to the bahamas: tradewind aviation launches new routes.

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The semi-private jet company is flying on-demand throughout the Bahamas now, with scheduled service from Palm Beach, Florida to North Eleuthera and Marsh Harbour starting this winter.

Tradewind Aviation has opened a new Southeast hub in Palm Beach, Florida.

Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Razor Thin Margins !

My nickname seems apt for David Zipkin at this moment, as he teeters along the edge of a multi-million dollar Bahamian bluff in Eleuthera. It strikes us as funny, because in private aviation, it’s often true. Or at least it used to be in 2001, when pilots David and his brother Eric Zipkin co-founded Tradewind Aviation with just one plane, an eight-seat Cessna Caravan turboprop.

Today, Tradewind is considered one of the top semi-private airlines with a 32-plane fleet of mostly Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12s. Their stock-in-trade is operating private charters as well as scheduled service around the northeast, the Caribbean and St. Barts, with its notoriously short runways. When I first met the Zipkin brothers two years ago, their fleet count was only 23. They say the trick to growth is keeping these planes in the air: “There's nothing more expensive than an airplane sitting on the ground.”

So they opened a new Southeast hub in Florida last September, officially entering a major market. Tradewind’s private clients can now fly pretty much anywhere within 350 nautical miles from Palm Beach International Airport (PBI), which includes all of the Bahamas, an archipelago made up of 700 islands. (There’s a lot more to this place than Nassau).

Eleuthera specifically, the 110-mile island with ferry service to nearby Harbour Island, is of obvious interest to Tradewind because it’s a known hideaway for celebrities and a real estate enclave for billionaires-with-a-B. Lenny Kravitz has a home here. Need I say more?

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“We've always known that the South Florida-Bahamas market is very strong and perfect for what we do. I would have loved to be in this market 10 years ago, but we didn't have the infrastructure to support it. Now that we do it's an exciting time because we can commit to new markets,” Zipkin told Forbes. It’s also an exciting time for travelers, who can take advantage of this fly private-for-less charter model, which operates short distance flights on 8-seat planes. The appeal, apart from mod leather seats, complimentary champagne and fresh-faced pilots, is that they’re small enough to land on remote islands, where you might not otherwise find good, or any, service.

Though Tradewind’s new schedule of charters to North Eleuthera and Marsh Harbour from Palm Beach has not yet been published, pricing will start “in the range of $350 per person one-way,” according to the company. (For updated timing and pricing, check Tradewind’s website ). Here’s a first look at the experience:

Eleuthera is a long, thin island in the Bahamas archipelago.

Explore Eleuthera in 10 Stunning Images

Named after the Greek word ‘eleutheros,’ meaning freedom, Eleuthera is also called ‘Freedom Island.’ Freedom from tourists is one observation. There are no mega Margaritavilles or Sandals resorts in sight. What you will find on this quiet, laid-back island are untouched beaches, pink sands, coral reefs and other natural wonders. And if you want to shake things up, Harbour Island with its high-end hotels and membership clubs is just a 10-minute ferry ride away.

The Charter Flight

Tradewind co-founder and chief commercial officer David Zipkin

I joined Tradewind co-founder and chief commercial officer David Zipkin for a sneak peek at the new route, meeting him at the Palm Beach FBO (fixed-base operator) ahead of our flight. We were greeted by two young pilots who carried our luggage and led us from a private lounge directly to the tarmac, which is standard operating procedure for Tradewind’s private charters.

Aerial Arrival

Flying into North Eleuthera, Bahamas

The turquoise waters of Eleuthera are a breathtaking sight from above. Arriving in such style has been a luxury reserved only for the ultra-wealthy. Until now.

Glass Window Bridge

The Glass Window Bridge

One of Eleuthera’s attractions is the Glass Window Bridge, a man-made strip of land that divides the phenomenal contrast of raucous, royal blue waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the calm, turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea. Taking in both vistas is a surreal sight, to say the least.

Queen’s Bath

The Queen's Bath is a natural attraction for visitors to the island of Eleuthera

The Queen’s Bath, located 0.6 miles south of the Glass Window Bridge, is indeed an ideal spot to bathe like a queen in the warm waters of the Atlantic. These natural tide pools have been carved by centuries of waves pounding exposed rock, creating a dramatic backdrop for your afternoon soak.

The Cove’s Villa

Inside the 3-bedroom villa at the Cove Eleuthera.

The Cove Eleuthera is a stylish, 29-room resort situated on 40 acres overlooking two private beaches. There are a range of suites, villas and cottages on property, but this 3-bedroom villa fashioned in bamboo and teak wood is a showstopper designed by Bar Architects , with a full kitchen, private plunge pool, and outdoor shower — all with the option of a private butler, private chef, and babysitting services. It’s the kind of place you might book for a special occasion or wedding, if the in-laws are feeling generous. (Prices range from $3,500 a night in the low season to $10,000 in the high season, from November to May.)

The Cove’s Infinity Pool

The infinity pool at The Cove Eleuthera

Following owner Oscar Tang’s $70 million renovation, which is still ongoing, the Cove unveiled this heated infinity pool overlooking both beaches. Amenities here include a state-of-the-art fitness center, yoga studio, an open-air cocktail bar built to face the sunset, and an elegant seafood restaurant. According to Managing Director Carlton Russell, the property will add two pickleball courts by November to keep up with demand, along with a new boardroom for corporate off-site retreats.

Harbour Island

Harbour Island in The Bahamas

Harbour Island has a very ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’ charm, with plenty of luxurious hotels and secluded beaches. The island doesn’t allow cars, so go with the Bahamian flow, hop on a bicycle or golf cart, and let your hair blow in the breeze.

Dunmore Hotel & Beach Club

Beachside dining at the Dunmore Hotel

At the center of the action on Harbour Island is The Dunmore , which possesses a retro 1960s resort glam and is framed by pink sands, breezy patios, and vintage rattan. With the sensibility of an exclusive private members club, it's no wonder celebs feel safe to socialize.

Pink Sands Beach

Pink Sands Beach, Harbour Island

The Dunmore is situated smack in the middle section of Pink Sands beach. It is a three-mile stretch of finely crushed coral that’s been sifted and smoothed overtime, and looks lovely in any light.

The Sunset Cruise

A sunset boat cruise in Eleuthera

The art of the evening sunset boat cruise requires a bit of planning. Pictured here is the Cove’s wine and cheese pairing. It’s an excellent idea, in theory. My advice? Hold your goblet close and bring an extra towel, just in case waters get choppy.

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