THE day started early with a cacophony of warblers and robins, followed by a car alarm erupting briefly in a distant part of the campground. Gray-haired power walkers started padding past in tennis shoes. The owner of the neighboring recreational vehicle set off to patrol its perimeter armed with a bottle of spray cleanser and a rag, touching up hubcaps and brake lights and anything else that might have gathered a faint patina of dust. (''If I'm not polishing, I'm not happy,'' he had announced to me the night before.) Then the aroma of bacon mixed with wood smoke drifted in from a few sites down. And that's when I got up. With some minor variations, that was how most mornings began for me during the month of May. No matter which state I happened to awaken in, the comforting rhythms of a public campground were pretty much the same.
July 13, 2002
New Orleans: Zulu Krewe at 100: Still Marching to Its Own Beat
On Feb. 24, the raucous Zulu parade will roll down the streets of New Orleans, celebrating years of Mardi Gras tradition.
Feb. 12, 2009
The Magic Mix That Is Trinidad
Here, try a bite of this,'' says Piero Guerrini, holding out a Chinese wax apple. It's small as a plum and has a light, almost ethereal taste. It's far more delicate than the other fruits Guerrini had offered my wife, Louise, and me during the impromptu fruit tastings at his beachfront hotel. (I can much recommend the abui, with pulp as dense and sweet as custard.) I so looked forward to Guerrini's unannounced appearances at our breakfast table, with his exotic fruits and sharp knife, that I suspect my first response to a knife-wielding attacker will now be to salivate. Guerrini, an Italian photojournalist, first came to Grande Riviere, Trinidad, population 300, nearly a dozen years ago. He was working on a project about the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who had suggested he visit this village on Trinidad's northern shore. While here, Guerrini learned that a boardinghouse under an ancient sea almond tree and fronting an empty beach was for sale. He bought it and never left.
Nov. 20, 2004
Dominica: A Fuming Cauldron Behind a Green Veil
SLOUCHED in wicker chairs on the porch of Roxy's Mountain Lodge, high in the lush green hills of Dominica, we could see the Caribbean shimmering beguilingly in the distance, several miles away and 1,800 feet below. This is how I like my tropical ocean -- as a scenic and distant backdrop. The beach as a leisure concept has long baffled me, and I should admit right here that the appeal of sitting on gritty seashell fragments while courting a melanoma continues to elude me. In part this is why I felt instantly at home on Dominica, which is not to be confused with the larger and sandier Dominican Republic. This 30-mile-long island between Guadeloupe and Martinique has a smattering of dark volcanic beaches tucked amid palms, but for the most part it's ringed by picturesquely rocky coastline, and is noted more for soaring, cloud-capped mountains than tented cabanas.
April 6, 2002
Road Trip: Sitting Down With Frank Lloyd Wright
IN the early 1940's the Iowa businessman Lowell Walter wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright asking that he design a home for him. Wright's reply -- in its entirety -- read: ''My dear Mr. Walter: We will design a dwelling for you. Send further details. There will be no basement nor any attic.'' Wright's correspondence is now neatly encased behind glass at Cedar Rock, the home Wright eventually designed for Walter. And Wright's economical letter points up the aggravation of trying to get a grip on his genius. His structures, more than not, tend to be defined by what they lack.
Dec 8, 2001
A Rant: A User's Manual to Seat 21C
CONGRATULATIONS ON SELECTING SEAT 21C! This manual is intended to familiarize you with the many options available to you.
Jan. 3, 2008
Miami Beach: When More Was More
IN 1949 the architect Morris Lapidus was asked to design one of his outrageously modern hotels on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. ''I once again used my old bag of tricks,'' he recalled in his memoirs, published five years before his death in January. His tricks included ''sweeping curves, a woggle-shaped carpet, the old cheese holes in the floating ceiling and the curved walls, beanpoles hung with cages of live birds. I also added more. . . .':
Nov. 24, 2001
Chicago: Admiring Mies and Modernism, Up Close
IF you sign up for the occasional urban architectural tour, you have most likely noticed that modern buildings tend to get short shrift. Tour guides typically offer vague apologies when standing in front of a tinted glass monolith, as if accounting for an uncle who's eccentric but not in a particularly interesting way. Not in Chicago. This city loves its modern architecture the way Rome loves its fountains, and with good reason. Chicago is one of the few cities that make a plain glass box look good. It was home to Mies van der Rohe, the alpha-modernist, who brought a level of fine craftsmanship to simplified architectural forms. And there are lots of excellent vantage points from which to admire its buildings -- from the lakeside lawn at the Adler Planetarium, to Grant Park, to the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the Chicago River.
Oct. 5, 2002
Maine: Paddling Inn to Inn
WHEN I went looking for an outfitter offering an inn-to-inn sea kayaking excursion along Maine's rocky coast last summer, I couldn't find one. Maine has plenty of inns on the ocean and plenty of kayak outfitters, so I was puzzled when I couldn't uncover an extended journey linking one coastal inn with the next by water. Maine's coastline is famously picturesque, with rocky headlands, cobblestone coves and spiky boreal forests at the water's edge. Since much of the land is privately owned, it's also famously inaccessible. Travelers expecting wild, salty vistas often end up stewing in traffic along Route 1 en route to the few public holdings, like Acadia National Park. Traveling by kayak is an excellent way to enjoy the views far from the crowds, and staying at inns would be a welcome alternative to camping on the roots and rocks of offshore islands, as I had in the past.
June 12, 1997
The Sand Hills: A Landscape That Whispers
I WAS paddling a canoe down the Middle Loup River in Nebraska with my dog when I noted with some alarm that the still life I'd been admiring had suddenly become unstill. The sun-dappled hills stayed in place, but the cows grazing upon them did not. Vast numbers of them were moving at a brisk trot directly toward our unstable boat. The current was brisk, and my dog, Winnie, and I arrived at a tall, sandy bluff at the exact moment the cows did. They peered down expectantly, perhaps hoping for a barge of fresh silage. What they found instead was an ill-behaved, keening dog launching herself acrobatically into the river. Bellowing symphonically, the cows beat a rapid if confused retreat, and instead of worrying about being trampled or drowned, I feared that the embankment, already eroded by the river, would collapse in the mayhem and I would perish beneath a landslide of livestock.
Aug. 2, 2003
Newfoundland: The Past, Neatly Packaged
HEAD northeast in Newfoundland along the Bonavista Peninsula until the rough road ends and the cold ocean begins, and you'll find a bronze statue of a man clothed in pouffy Renaissance garb overlooking tumultuous seas. The landscape has a distinctly edge-of-the-known-world feel to it: icebergs float offshore like errant mountaintops, humpback whales feed and breach, and puffins dart along the ocean surface to and from their island colony just around the point. That improbably dapper man is John Cabot, who in 1497 reached the New World -- the New Founde Land, as it was dubbed. Like Columbus five years before him, Cabot was an Italian sailor seeking a shortcut to the Orient. He figured that by heading north to where the longitudinal lines were closer, he'd shave off some sailing days on his westward voyage to Asia.
June 10, 2000
Essay: Judging an Inn by Its Book Covers
I'M perfectly willing to buy into almost any myth about vacation travel, no matter how feeble or consistently wrong. One to which I subscribe holds that a restful stay at a quiet country inn offers the ideal opportunity to catch up on the Great Books, to finally read those classics of literature and history that got overlooked in college. So if I'm headed to an 1870's inn on a dead-end dirt road somewhere in Vermont, I'll bring along a volume of Thucydides, Virgil, Proust or one of those other authors that Allan Bloom has gotten everyone into such a lather about. Upon arrival I unpack the intended reading and place it with some ceremony near the most comfortable chair in the room. At this point the myth starts to deteriorate. The next few stages go something like this: Sit in chair. Lift book and admire heft. Open book. Read first paragraph. Gaze out window. Reread first paragraph. Become distracted by interesting-looking door handle on closet across the room. Place book on table. Examine door handle at length. Go downstairs.
March 2, 1991
Maine: Far From the Pole, Peary's Own Island
SEVERAL days before he arrived at the North Pole in April 1909, Adm. Robert E. Peary noted in his journal several ideas for memorializing his triumph. Among his thoughts: A grand mausoleum for himself, modeled after a navigational marker on a Maine island not far from where he grew up. He suggested an obelisk faced in either granite or marble, the base of which would contain a lighted room housing his sarcophagus. His bust would be displayed prominently, along with bronze figures of Eskimos, sled dogs, polar bears, musk oxen and walruses. Few have accused Peary of having a low opinion of himself or his exploits. On the other hand, quite a few have accused him of not living up to his claims, of being careless with his navigational data and of falsifying his expedition calculations. A study concluded in 1989 that Peary did in fact reach the pole, but many critics remain unswayed.
July 7, 1991