Japan hits record tourism numbers, fueled by Expo and cherry blossoms

My first trip to Kyoto was an exhausting three-day bender. I rose at 5 a.m. to see the sunrise from Fushimi Inari, spent a small fortune Ubering between temples, and probably snapped a terabyte’s worth of photos of geiko, monks, and monkeys. I departed the ancient city with the nagging feeling that I had simultaneously seen everything and nothing—a regret akin to rushing through a magnificent dinner.

When I returned this past summer with my girlfriend, I kept in mind Kipling’s advice to the traveler: “The first condition for understanding a new country is to smell it.” With the UNESCO sites safely ticked off, I wanted to savor Kyoto slowly. Mornings in coffee shops with a book. Afternoon strolls through Gion to admire art, watches, and antiques. Dinners at out-of-the-way izakaya, perhaps followed by nightcaps at bars recommended by waiters. Like a Heian roué, I would lounge, loiter, and lollygag my way through Kyoto.

From the rim of Canyon de Chelly, the view is almost impossibly beautiful. Sheer red sandstone walls plunge hundreds of feet toward a green ribbon of cottonwood trees and cultivated fields. Ancient stone dwellings cling to narrow ledges high above the canyon floor. It’s the sort of landscape that makes you reach for your camera before you’ve even begun to understand what you’re looking at.

But Canyon de Chelly is much more than another spectacular Southwestern landscape. People have lived here for nearly 5,000 years, and unlike most of the great archaeological sites of the Southwest, this is still a place where families live, farm, and maintain deep connections to their ancestral homeland. It’s also the setting for one of the most tragic chapters in American history.

Organizing items in your suitcase or backpack should be a one-time thing, but that’s rarely true. Even if you save space by rolling your clothes and arrange your gear in a Tetris-like formation, things seem to explode the second you land at your destination and unzip your bag. Even worse, dirty laundry and souvenirs make you rethink your whole packing strategy, and staying at multiple properties means that you’ll have to do it over and over again. Thankfully, the FlipSide luggage suite tackles this issue—but did it really make packing easier for me?

I’ve spent much of 2026 testing three of the brand’s bags, including the 22-inch Ryan Carry-On, 26-inch Ryan Checked Bag, and the FlipSide Backpack. And I’m delighted to share that in a world of premium bags to choose from, these actually made a difference. This is largely due to one design element that both improved and simplified my packing experience — a zippered divider that let me split each bag into two distinct packing areas.