The Palm Restaurant is a nearly 100-year-old steakhouse chain that operates close to 20 restaurants in the US, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. The closest location to me, however, is inside the Hard Rock Hotel at Universal Orlando.

I'd been to the restaurant before to enjoy a drink and a bite to eat at the bar — it's long been one of my favorite spots to take a break from the hustle and bustle of Universal — but I'd never eaten in the dining room before.

This spring, Universal Orlando Resort plans to open its Epic Universe theme park. In anticipation, the property is also launching three new hotels: Stella Nova Resort, Terra Luna Resort, and Helios Grand Hotel.

Stella Nova was the first to open its doors this January. The beautiful space-themed resort is tiled in dichroic glass and decorated with recreations of NASA space photographs. Plus, it's located right across from Epic Universe, which is set to open in May.

The chain Maggiano's Little Italy has been around since the early 1990s and has over 50 locations around the US, but I'd never visited it until recently.

Halloween is one of my family's favorite holidays to celebrate, but we also love having decorations up throughout autumn.

We're known to host spooky dinner parties and serve as the home base for our kids and their friends as they go trick-or-treating, so it's important to me to decorate our house with plenty of jack-o'-lanterns, skeletons, and witches.

As a journalist who covers theme parks and lives in Central Florida, I often joke that the spooky season is my Super Bowl.

From family-friendly Halloween parties at Disney World to jump-scare-filled haunted houses at SeaWorld, my family starts making its seasonal rounds in late August. But there's one event that stands above the rest: Halloween Horror Nights, or HHN, at Universal Studios Florida.

It's a tough time to be a chain restaurant, especially if you're serving fast food.

Fast-food chains are scrambling as they lose the value wars to sit-down spots and worry about retaining current consumers and appealing to future ones. At the same time, rising fast-food prices seem to only be making sit-down chains look like a way better value.

On a recent trip to Disney World, my family and I decided we'd try a new restaurant — Shula's Steak House.

The small chain was named one of the 10 best high-end steak-house chains in America by the Daily Meal, and has seven locations in Florida, Chicago, Houston, and Richmond, Virginia.

The steak house, which is owned by Shula's Restaurant Group, is named after former Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula. The chain aims to carry on Shula's legacy, so each location has a loose football theme.

I've lived in Florida for eight years but only recently heard of 30A, a growing travel hot spot in the Florida panhandle.

Nicknamed "the Hamptons of the South" by visitors, the area is located between Panama City and Destin and sits along a 24-mile stretch of highway known as County Road 30A.

Whttps://www.businessinsider.com/best-ina-garten-cookie-recipe-oatmeal-chocolate-chunkhen looking for a new dessert to make, I turned to Garten first and decided to try making her salty oatmeal chocolate-chunk cookies.

Trying sit-down chain restaurants has become a hobby for us and our teenagers. In the past year, we've shared meals at chains such as Olive Garden and Buffalo Wild Wings to see whether they lived up to the hype.

For my family, there's something special about sinking our teeth into well-seasoned burgers at a nice restaurant. But like many people choosing to cook at home nowadays, we like to make our meals from the comfort of our own kitchen.

Recently, I came across Ina Garten's recipe for high-quality burgers and knew I had to try it myself. Garten's recipe calls for beef from Niman Ranch, a company with a network of US farmers and ranchers who work to humanely and sustainably raise livestock.

Target and Walmart are usually our go-to spots for supplies. The discount department stores tend to have a broad selection and decent prices, so I was curious how they compared.

I don't mean to brag, but recently, while listening to parents talk about their never-ending back-to-school to-do lists, I turned to my husband and said, "I am so glad we don't have to worry about any of that."

I've been homeschooling my two kids for the last several years. While they both started out attending public school, the stress of putting two kids through the hoops of our school system was exhausting and anxiety-inducing.

When my husband and I relocated our family to Florida from Maryland in 2016, we immediately signed up for annual passes and started visiting its parks almost every weekend. My kids were 6 and 8 at the time, and we made lots of great family memories at Disney.

In the last year, both of my kids have had their first serious relationships. Gone are the days of schoolyard crushes, and in their place are weekend dates and dinner table talks about my kids' relationships. As a mom to a 16-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, it's been eye-opening — and sometimes harder than I imagined.

Indian food is my favorite type of cuisine, but taking my family of four out to eat can be pretty expensive. So, like many people trying to save money by cooking at home, I decided to try making one of my favorite restaurant dishes.

Recently, we decided to try Bonefish Grill — a seafood restaurant with over 160 locations across the US — for the first time.

Both popular breakfast chains have been in the news lately — Waffle House (slightly) raised its notoriously low base pay, and Cracker Barrel recently reported a dip in revenue. With Waffle House's new investments and Cracker Barrel's decrease in earnings, I was curious to see how the two stacked up in the long line of breakfast chains.

When I was a new mom, it seemed like every well-meaning stranger in a grocery checkout line would turn to me and remind me to enjoy the infant and toddler days because they'd go "so fast." Their warnings terrified me, and I wondered what life would be like when my babies were teenagers. Would they still need me? Would we get along? And what would the dating years be like for me as a parent?

I stopped drinking cold turkey at the end of last year, desperate to shake hangovers and increased anxiety. I've found a sense of well-being in sobriety that I won't be giving up anytime soon. Still, I wondered what it'd be like to be in a booze-centric environment and abstain from alcohol.