Summer Travel: Seven great luxury beach getaways

by McLean Robbins on


The weather is warming and we’re itching to hit the sand (after a few more weeks in the gym, naturally). Summer travel stories are often full of suggestions for budget and family-friendly getaways … but what if you just want to splurge? Economy be damned. Play up the “luxe” factor at these great summer beach destinations for those seeking to see and be seen, enjoy world-class restaurants and nightlife and enjoy five-star service along the way.

The Hamptons
Long Island’s stretch of beach towns is sleepy from Labor Day to Memorial Day, but once the warm weather hits, the crowds descend. The truly wealthy helicopter in, while the rest of us will fly to Islip airport and drive or take the Long Island Railroad and Hamptons Jitney in from New York City. By day, relax on the white sand beaches, stroll the tony shops in East Hampton or South Hampton. By night, relax at a private estate rental or the posh lodging at The 1770 House or the Mill House Inn.

Martha’s Vineyard
Hie thee to the Vineyard and you just might have a famous neighbor – or four. Members of the Kennedy clan, Oprah, and even President Obama have spent vacations on this famous New England paradise. Much less flashy than The Hamptons, beach-seekers arrive via ferries from locations like New Bedford and Hyannis. A ferry boat from Manhattan operates seasonally, and select regional carriers offer flights from cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Providence and Washington. Rest your head at the island’s Relais & Chateaux property, The Charlotte Inn.

Newport
Relax in the sunshine amidst the shadows of America’s Castles – the summer homes of the country’s robber barons and wealthy elite, most of which are now museums open to the public for tours. Not sure you “know” Newport? Picture The Great Gatsby. In summer months, the harbor fills with yacht and sailboats and the well-heeled stroll the town. Fly to Providence (40) or Boston (70 miles) and enjoy the drive. Stay at Relais & Chateaux property Castle Hill inn & Resort, offering beautiful ocean views. Newly re-branded Grace hotel, Vanderbilt Grace, offers another option.

Bermuda
Just a short direct flight from many East Coast cities, Bermuda draws rave reviews from travelers seeking Caribbean-like beaches and a relaxed atmosphere without the long travel time. Lounge on pink sand beaches, sip a Dark n’ Stormy and frolic in the turquoise waters. By night, party in Hamilton, the island’s main city and popular cruise port. Rest your head at new Rosewood resort Tucker’s Point, Mandarin-managed Elbow Beach or intimate boutique property The Reefs. Bermuda’s closest land mass is North Carolina, meaning it enjoys a similarly temperate climate.

The French Riviera
Really need to get away? Try the French Riviera. Crowds descend as early as May for the Cannes Film Festival and then spend the summer flocking to the ritzy beach town of St. Tropez, where as many as 80,000 tourists visit each day. Marvel at the massive yachts docked in the harbor, sample a traditional Tarte Tropezienne, or browse the luxury goods at Louis Vuitton or Hermes. Then get out – even the three-star hotels are overrun this time of year.

Mackinac Island
Midwesterners spend summers on this grande dame of luxury island getaways. The car-free island transports visitors back to a more genteel time, where the island’s Grand Hotel is king and the pace is slower and more refined.

Los Cabos
Texans and Californians know that their home states are hot all summer long, so they often flee the confines of the United States for our friendly neighbor to the south, Mexico. Untouched by swine flu or drug wars, Los Cabos remains a paradise of the rich and famous, who come for the beaches, party life, and ultra-luxury hotels. Our favorites? Stay at Capella Pedregal, an intimate property with the country’s only private tunnel, the always-on-top Las Ventanas, a Rosewood property, celeb favorite One & Only Palmilla, or the ritzy Esperanza.

[Flickr via slgckgc]

The world’s ten creepiest abandoned cities

by Justin Delaney on


Some cities die. The people leave, the streets go quiet, and the isolation takes on the macabre shape of a forlorn ghost-town – crumbling with haunting neglect and urban decay. From Taiwan to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, these abandoned cities lurk in the shadows of civilization. Their histories are carried in hushed whispers and futures stillborn from the day of their collapse. Some have fallen victim to catastrophe while others simply outlive their function. I think we can all agree on one thing – they are all very creepy.

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Pripyat
Location: Pripyat, Ukraine – 100km from Kiev
Story: On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl reactor began its tragic meltdown. The incident was a huge blow to the viability of the nuclear energy platform, and still today, the town of Pripyat is an abandoned shell of a city frozen in a 1980’s Soviet time-warp. While the failed reactor has been entombed in a an appropriate sounding casing called a “sarcophagus,” the area remains unsafe for human life. The town has thrived in one aspect though. Wildlife has returned to the area in droves. Wolves silently hunt among the towering apartment buildings, and boars forage for food in the abandoned amusement park – which strangely opened the day after the reactor explosion in the midst of evacuation.
Abandoned since: 1986

Sanzhi
Location: Sanzhi district, New Taipei, Taiwan
Story: This area called Sanzhi was originally a vacation resort catering to U.S. servicemen north of Taipei. The architecture could be called UFO futuro chic, and the abandoned resort community had difficulties from the beginning. During construction, many workers perished in car accidents, and other freak accidents were common. The urban legend online search trail places the death count close to twenty. The deaths were attributed to supernatural causes. Some speculated that the resort was built on a Dutch burial ground while others attributed the misfortunes to a dragon statue destroyed during construction. Either way, the ruins never took their first guest, and the stillborn project was abandoned.
Abandoned since: 1980


Craco
Location: Craco, Basilicata, Italy
Story: Built on a summit, Craco’s utility was initially derived from its ability to repel invaders. The town’s placement on a cliff precipice also threatened its integrity. After being rocked by a number of earthquakes and subsequent landslides, Craco was abandoned for lower ground. Today, the empty village is great for exploration and houses a number of interesting old world churches such as Santa Maria della Stella.
Abandoned since: 1963


Kolmanskop
Location: Kolmanskop, Namibia
Story: Once a successful diamond mining community, Kolmanskop is now a desert ghost town where the houses welcome only sand. The desert city was originally built when Germans discovered great mineral wealth in the area. They built the town in an architecturally German style with a ballroom, a theater, and the first tram system in Africa. The desert reclaimed the town when the miners moved on. The sands have filled houses, covered the streets, and slowly erased most signs of civilization aside from the towering homes and public buildings. The sight of a decaying German town in the shifting sands of the Namib desert is anachronistically delightful.
Abandoned since: 1954


Ghost Island
Location: Hashima Island, Nagasaki, Japan
Story: During the industrial revolution in Japan, the Mitsubishi company built this remote island civilization around large coal deposits in the Nagasaki islands. The island is home to some of Japan‘s first high rise concrete buildings, and for almost a century, mining thrived on the island. At its peak, the 15 acre island housed over five thousand residents – coal workers and their families. Today, a post-apocalyptic vibe haunts the abandoned island and the dilapidated towers and empty streets exist in a creepy industrial silence. In 2009, the island opened to tourists, so now you can take a trip to explore the Ghost Island’s abandoned movie theaters, apartment towers, and shops.
Abandoned since: 1974


Oradour-sur-Glane
Location: Oradour-sur-Glane, Limousin, France
Story: During World War II, the Nazi troops came upon Oradour-sur-Glane and completely destroyed the village, murdering 642 individuals. The burned cars and buildings remain frozen in time as they did in 1944, a reflection of the monstrosity of war and a memorial to the villagers who lost their lives. The massacre was one of mankind’s most vicious moments. All visitors to the “martyr village” are asked to remain silent while wandering the melancholy streets of tragedy.
Abandoned since: 1944


Centralia
Location: Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States
Story: The entire city of Centralia was condemned by the state of Pennsylvania and its zip code was revoked. The road that once led to Centralia is blocked off. It is as if the city does not exist at all, but it does, and it has been on fire for almost fifty years. In 1962, a fire broke out in a landfill near the Odd Fellows cemetery. The fire quickly spread through a hole to the coal mine beneath the city, and the fires have been burning ever since. Smoke billows out from cracks in the road and large pits in the ground randomly open up releasing thousand degree heat and dangerous vapors into the air. The city has been slowly evacuated over the years, though some residents have chosen to stay, believing that the evacuation is a conspiracy plot by the state to obtain their mineral rights to the anthracite coal reserves below their homes. Smells like lawyers to me.
Abandoned since: still marginally occupied by 10 or so brave souls


Humberstone
Location: Northern Atacama desert, Chile
Story: Declared a UNESCO heritage site in 2005, Humberstone was once a bustling saltpeter refinery in the desert of northern Chile. Life on the moonscape of the Chilean pampas is extremely sparse, and outposts like Humberstone served as work and home for many Pampino miners. The hostile environment proved a menacing part of everyday life for Humberstone residents. Their efforts to extract nitrates from the largest saltpeter deposit in the world transformed farming in Europe and the Americas in the form of fertilizer sodium nitrate.
Abandoned since: 1960

Bodie
Location: Bodie, California, United States
Story: The poster boy for a ghost town, Bodie is absolutely stunning in its dereliction. The boom-town over 8,000 feet up in the Sierra Nevadas was a gold rush outpost, and, at its height in the 1880’s, allegedly one of the largest cities in California. 65 saloons lined the dusty mile long main street, meaning the saloon to resident ratio was definitely high enough to keep the sheriff busy. Beyond the swilling of brews though, Bodie developed into a city filled with big town characteristics like churches, hospitals, four fire departments, and even a Chinatown district. Today, visitors are free to to walk the deserted streets of this town built on gold and hope.
Abandoned since: 1942, though the last issue of the local newspaper, The Bodie Miner, was printed in 1912.


Kayaköy
Location: Kayaköy, Muğla, Turkey
Story: Thousands of Greek speaking Christians lived in this town just south of Fethiye in southwestern Turkey for hundreds of years. The rather large village has been a virtual ghost town since the end of the Greco-Turkish War. Over 500 houses and several Greek Orthodox churches populate this garden of decaying structures. Some hope exists for a resurgence of this old city, as organic farmers and craftsmen have began to trickle in to this fringe community.
Abandoned since: 1923

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Chocolate capital of the world: now Paris wears the world’s sweet crown

by David Downie on

How many more heavy gold medals can Paris drape around its neck?

Acolytes claim the City of Light is the fashion and cultural capital of Europe, the West’s greatest restaurant and food megapolis, a paradise for flaneurs, the mecca of hedonists and shop-till-you-drop materialists, the world’s favorite city, period. Now, while the Swiss and Belgians weren’t looking, Paris stole their milk cows and became the swaggering global capital of chic chocolate too.

Pundits quip that French president Nicolas Sarkozy set the stage. Elected in 2007, Sarkozy does not drink alcohol. He gobbles chocolat, the very best. His 24/7 excitability – some call it dynamism – are attributed in part to the capital’s current choco-manie.

But everyone knows Theobroma cacao – especially the unadulterated dark variety containing at least 60 percent cocoa – is good for the health, the libido, the mind, the morale. It makes people happy, fills them with energy, lifts them out of depression, and cures everything from rabies and rashes to the common cold, without weight gain. Or so some boosters claim, with impressive if unproven scientific “evidence.”

What better fuel for France‘s hyperactive, tea-tottling head of state, a man bent on seducing his rock star wife Carla Bruni and the famously difficult French masses?Nice story. But the rise of chocolate in Paris predates and goes beyond Sarkozy’s habit.

Chocoholics have followed the capital’s gradual rise since the 1990s, from bitter darkness – Paris lived in the long shadow of Lyon – into the limelight. The annual Salon du Chocolat has done much to raise Paris’s profile. Other factors have contributed equally, including the nationwide decrease in wine and liquor consumption symbolized by Sarkozy. Chocolate is the ideal, socially acceptable substitute.

But the main reason for the rise is simple: French chocolate has become exquisite in its simplest incarnations, and excitingly wild in its extreme expressions.

Ever since France’s great pastry chefs began breaking away from the starred restaurants where they were employed, chocolate-making has slipped out of the grip of the industrial candy-makers, local bakeries-cum-pastry-and-chocolate-shops, and fuddy-duddy neighborhood chocolatiers.

New-wave Paris chocolate masters the likes of Jean-Paul Hevin, Pierre Hermé, Christian Constant, Patrick Roger, and Michel Chaudun are as dynamic as Sarkozy, have global reach, and get at least as much press as the predictable French foodie idols, the three-star brigade led by Alain Ducasse, Guy Savoy, et al. Many chocolate stars have shops in Japan; Chaudun’s website is in Japanese.

Cult status for chocolatiers also derives from the fact that they’re not mere artisans. They’re artistes. Take Roger and Chaudun. Both sculpt chocolate. Roger is irreverent and fanciful – a master of kitsch Pop Art. Chaudun excels with Eiffel Towers, among his most popular creations.

Actually, “popular” is not quite right, given the price. Chaudun’s and his peers’ prices ensure their wares are for elites in a city slavish to exclusivity. A pound of their precious Theobroma easily tops hundreds of dollars.

There’s nothing ordinary about chic Paris chocolates, from the cacao bean up. Some top practitioners import their highest-quality beans, roasting and transforming them. Most buy prepared chocolate “bases” from France’s exclusive, persnickety, and expensive chocolate supplier, Valrhona. Typically, beans or bases are many times more expensive than those used by fine artisanal chocolate makers elsewhere.

Like it or not, for the most part luscious Belgian and Swiss chocolates are perceived as rich, fattening, sweet, milky, creamy and old-fashioned. French chocolates – especially those made in Paris – are seen as dark, lean, intense, avant-garde, surprising, disconcerting, sometimes silly or shocking. They’re filled with everything from camembert to lavender honey and floral essences, liquorice to ginger, herbs and spices, and fine wine, sometimes in multiples of three, four or six unlikely combinations.

Chocolatiers and suppliers in Italy, America, Belgium and Switzerland have followed suit. But the sheer concentration of avant-garde masters in Paris is unrivaled. And few outside the French capital have comparable panache or draw. Who had ever heard of Pierre Marcolini, a Belgian choc-and-awe master, before he opened his chicissime boutique near the French Senate?

No wonder Hevin and Marcolini display their edible artworks as if they were jewels. While they won’t set you back as much as a bauble from Cartier, you might think twice before ingesting them. Aesthetics are a big part of the experience.

It may well be this nexus of food and fashion that is driving Paris’s current chocolate boom. Chocolat and haute couture meet on the runway, sometimes to the strains of opera, with chic chocolatiers daubing models with liquid chocolate, or hanging chocolate undies and necklaces in strategic locations.

As dozens of boring old mom-and-pop stores selling useful items continue to disappear from the 2nd, 6th, 7th, 8th and 16th arrondissements, or the inevitable Marais, they are often replaced by chocolate boutiques. Toss a euro coin and it will land on big-name or hungry provincial cacao magicians planting their tills in the last available floor space.

Ridiculous? Perhaps. But this is Paris, ça c’est Paris. Chaudin’s chocolate Eiffel Towers might as well be emblazoned with the capital’s latest moniker: “Paris, City of Chocolate.”

Video: beautiful aurora from a plane

by Elizabeth Seward on

Witnessing a beautiful aurora is on my absolutely-need-to-do list. But in the meantime, I’ll have to satisfy my infatuation with that which is googleable. Auroras are caused when charged particles, directed by the Earth’s magnetic field, collide.

This video is a time lapse video. The photographer, Nate Bolt, explains how he put this cool video together on his YouTube page.“I shot a photo roughly every two miles between take-off in San Francisco and landing in Paris CDG to make this airplane time lapse”, he introduces the video in the YouTube page’s description”.

“Shot with a 5d2, a time-lapse controller, and a 16mm – 35mm, mixed with some iPhone shots. The flight path from SF to Paris goes well over Greenland and the arctic circle, where you can see “northern” lights from all sides of the plane, which explains why I could shoot them facing South”, he explains.

“The photos during take-off and landing are all computer models and totally rendered because I would never use an electronic device during times when the FAA prohibits them. I did get lucky and have a whole row to myself to setup the tripod and gear”.

Check the video out. It’s great!

Travel caution urged but experiences await, who to turn to?

by Chris Owen on

There is a lot to be said about experience when it comes to traveling. If we have been some place a number of times, that previous experience can add a valuable filter to what we see in video and print reports when events occur around the globe. Government-issued travel alerts and warnings are surely important to consider. Catastrophic weather events, political unrest and the like are too. But while experts urge caution they also explain the actual situation on the ground may not be cause to cancel plans then travel elsewhere.

In Travel caution urged but experiences await, what to do? we talked with premiere land tour operator Abercrombie and Kent, asking the question “Is it safe to travel to Egypt?” who told us:

“The situation has improved dramatically in recent weeks. The U.S. State Department has softened its Travel Warning and both the French and the British have updated their cautions. Airports and financial institutions are functioning normally and popular tourist sites are open – and remarkably free of visitors. Beyond that, Egyptians are relishing their new-found freedom and a sense of optimism is palpable wherever you go…”

Today we take a closer look at areas where headline-grabbing events have led many to reconsider travel plans, some life-long dreams, that may indeed be safe for travel.

Asking again “Is it safe to travel to Egypt?”, we talk to Dwain Wall, Senior Vice President & General Manager of CruiseOne & Cruises Inc. Unlike big-ship cruises, river cruises sail on smaller ships to get up close and personal with countries almost everywhere. Throughout the Middle East and Europe from Egypt to France to Vietnam, river cruising is gaining in popularity. But some worry that same up-close-and-personal exposure many find attractive, puts them in harms way.

“Travelers no matter the destination must be fully aware of any issues in their destination prior to travel “says Wall, adding “This awareness allows for them to properly prepare and assure their safety.”


Beyond our personal knowledge, preparation for travel such as checking to see entry requirements for various countries or enrolling in the US Department of State’s registered traveler (STEP) program, we trust tour operators to keep us safe. If a situation should develop while we travel, being with someone or some company experienced in how things work in a given country under normal circumstances can help.

“The continent of Europe encompasses many countries with vast cultural differences. The most apparent is the many languages that are spoken that can itself make for difficulties which can be exasperated in an emergency or by security issues.”


Beyond traveling with a destination expert and adequate preparation on our part as travelers, backing our plans with some sort of travel protection is also advised.

“The best way to assure that travelers are protected is for them to purchase travel insurance with a reputable travel insurance company. These companies have an amazing array of services including cancel for any reason, and once on the trip should a traveler experience an issue, their emergency response teams have foreign language speakers at their disposal in addition to great resources both at their HQ and on the ground in many foreign countries that they can rely upon.”


Still, caution is urged. Even the best travel insurance can not prevent a tsunami from occurring or political unrest to take center stage in any number of countries. Often, travel insurance does not cover natural disasters or other Acts of God so knowing what is and is not covered is important. Beyond insurance and probably more importantly, a trust should be established with a travel service provider, one we can count on.

“Obviously, traveling to countries experiencing civil turmoil such as Egypt, Jordan, and other North Africa/Middle Eastern Countries should be carefully considered prior to purchase. The tour and cruise operators are informed and knowledgeable of the situation on the ground and have proven to be responsible in openly and honestly sharing the risk with consumers and offering options to the travelers if they are uncomfortable in continuing with their travel plans after booking.


That said, the travel community, those who make a living on travel or travel-related products, is starting to speak up about travel in general and if it is safe or not.

“At the same time, it is very important that U.S. travel leaders take the lead in supporting the return of Americans to these important destinations. The industry must support these destinations as tourism is often the number one economic driver and thus, the more jobs created by tourism, the better the security situation will be. It’s a global economy and these situations impact all of us both in the travel industry and outside of the industry.”