T R U T H I N T R A V E L J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

summer

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issue

Contents 06/07.2016

Hike through jagged untouched mountains and past plunging waterfalls on Kauai’s North Shore.

70 Noto BeneCondé Nast Traveler’s Pilar Guzmán explores Sicily’s timeless southeast corner.

82 Motorcycle DiaryPhotographer Renato D’Agostin hits the road, cruising from New York to Cali on his 1983 BMW bike.

86 True NorthMeredith Bryan returns to Kauai’s remote North Shore, where locals keep Old Hawaii alive.

94 Lisbon’s New LinesAn up-and-coming group of architects and designers are modernizing Portugal’s capital.

10 C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 P H O T O G R A P H B Y A D R I A N G A U T

Contents 06/07.2016

18

Editor’s Letter The enduring appeal of the great American landscape.

26

Plane Clothes Style influencer Garance Doré on flying in all-white.

24

On Location What to pack for a trip to Martha’s Vineyard.

James FrancoWRITER“Yosemite Is My Father,” in our national parks package, page 65 What’s the one place you’re

embarrassed to say you’ve

never been? “Portugal. Part of my family comes from Madeira, and I would love to visit my ori-gins.” Favorite hotel? “Chateau Marmont on Sunset. It’s filled with ghosts and legends.” What

dish would you travel for?

“Spaghetti al pomodoro any-where in Italy.” What would the

airplane of your dreams have? “A masseuse.” When traveling,

what do you miss most from

home? “Friends.”

TALK TO US

Where are you going this year? E-mail your photos and

tips to letters@condenasttraveler.com.

THE COVER

Bound for a morning surf along Maui’s Highway Piilani in a reproduction

1957 Porsche 356 Speedster, shot by Adrian Gaut. For more travel

inspiration, see page 42.

28

The Upgrade Mirrored aviators are this season’s eye candy.

30

Long Weekend Florence-based Álvaro González heads to Positano.

Drink Outdoors For the top places to tipple alfresco this summer,

head to cntraveler.com.

cntraveler.com

FOLLOW US

@cntraveler

14 C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

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Contents 06/07.2016

38

Checking In Provence and Jaipur hotels that feel like the best versions of home.

46

The Hotel Breakfast At Biarritz’s Hôtel du Palais, even the eggs have a kick.

106

Souvenir The little things that stay with you after a big first trip.

48

Pass It On Everybody’s outside: alfresco dining in Rome; outdoor art in Japan.

50

Black Book How to crack our nation’s capital with the whole family.

65

Reconsidered Reflecting on our national parks as they turn 100.

42

Summer 2016 The 26 trips you can still book this season.

56

Groundbreaker Ace shows how a hotel can redefine a destination.

100

Travel Intel Olympics add-ons, the new Tate, urban vacations, a Swedish hotline.

37

Discovered In rural Sweden, the most magical garden you’ve never heard of.

Renato D’AgostinPHOTOGRAPHER“Motorcycle Diary,” page 82 What’s the best hotel you’ve

stayed in recently? “The tepees at El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas. They’re incredible on a dark, starry night.” What dish,

served at which restaurant,

would you travel for? “The antipasto misto of fish at Risto-rante Menegaldo, near Venice.” What would the airplane of

your dreams have? “Transpar-ent walls.” What is the most

memorable souvenir from your

travels? “My photos. When I print them once back in N.Y.C., it’s like I’m reliving my journey.”

Take Us There We want to see your holiday pics! Tag your Instagrams

each week with #Travelertuesday.

SUBSCRIBE

Visit cntraveler.com/subscribe, e-mail subscriptions@

condenasttraveler.com, or call 800-777-0700.

#travelertuesday

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R 17

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Call of the Wild

@pilar_guzman

Pilar Guzmán, Editor in Chief

AS T H E C H I L D O F FO R E I G N E R S , I would look longingly in the lunchroom at other kids’ PB&J sandwiches on white bread and tiny cans of fruit cocktail, all snug in their Snoopy or Partridge Family lunch boxes. Rolling around the bottom of a reused shopping bag was my Italian grandmother’s interpreta-tion of an American school lunch: a condiment-free roll with a single piece of mortadella or prosciutto hanging out like an untucked shirt, and three pieces of fruit. Later in life, I would come to recognize this sandwich in cafés and tabacchi during my numerous trips to Italy. But in Southern California in the late ’70s, the irreducible panino was sorely lacking in barter appeal.

Our family’s foreignness extended to travel. While other families went to Disneyland and Hawaii, to lake houses and on camping trips together, we mainly vacationed—usually internationally—as an extension of my mother’s work as a singer. The concept of a long road trip or campfire was anathema to my parents, as was the notion of sleepaway camp or Girl Scouts.

As a result, there was nothing more exotic to me than the idea of facing the wrong way in the waaaay back of a wood-paneled station wagon piled high with bikes and canoes en route to some campground in a state or national park. I still love the idea of the efficiency of the tent, the careful planning and minimalism of the gear and meals, the quintessential Americanness of the experience. On weekends, my dad would take us to flea markets where I would pore over shoe boxes filled with vintage postcards that said “Welcome to Yellowstone” or “Glacier Bay National Park.” I once picked up

an old photo album from the ’60s filled with freckle-faced kids and women in pedal push-ers posing in front of gargantuan redwoods and park entrance signage. Just as I’d cher-ished the Little House series for its evocation of endless landscapes and lessons of creative subsistence, I fetishized the squeaky-clean in-nocence of roasting marshmallows over a fire. I’ll never forget my mother’s confusion as she took her first bite of a marshmallow—it was like watching a dog eat peanut butter.

The wild frontier and all that it promises is the antithesis of “old country.” To see our beautiful open roads through the lens of Ital-ian photographer Renato D’Agostin (“Mo-torcycle Diary,” page 82) is to understand the foreignness and majesty of the American landscape. “The coast-to-coast road trip is an American rite of passage,” says D’Agostin of his two-month cross-country motorcycle journey. “It’s hard to believe it is the same country from north to south, east to west. It keeps surprising you.” And as British author Geoff Dyer writes of seeing pictures of our national parks as a boy, in our feature marking their centennial (“Close Encounters,” page 65), it “set a standard for natural beauty that seemed unsurpassable.”

Once I was old enough to drive, I took off on a road trip with a friend from Los Angeles to Eureka along Highway 1, camping and swim-ming in the Pacific. During college, friends taught me to rock climb in Yosemite, and later I drove to the Badlands and camped with a group of friends I barely knew, to prove to myself that I could. Immersion in the grandeur of these places no doubt fueled my youthful feelings of invincibility. But I was also making up for lost time, shedding my parents’ old-country suspicions. After all, breaking with tradition and creating one’s own is perhaps the greatest American tradition of them all.

Editor’s LetterThe inspiration behind this month’s issue . . .

Stephen Shore, Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13, 1979. From Picturing America’s National Parks, published by Aperture and George Eastman Museum.

18 C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

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PILAR GUZMÁNEDITOR IN CHIEF

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20 C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

The things we can’t leave without

IT’S ALWAYS COCKTAIL HOUR SOMEWHERESummer getaways should be an exercise in packing light. Which is why we say arm yourself with the kind of watch that doubles as jewelry, and tuck a structured clutch into your beach bag that can go from the pool to aperitifs.

Cartier Hypnose watch, $38,100; Valentino Garavani Enchanted Wonderland clutch, $5,175.

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R 23P H O T O G R A P H B Y M AT T H R A N E K

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Where+WearOn Location

T H E Q U I C K- F I R E G U I D EAquinnah and Gay Head

for the best beaches.

The Beach Plum Inn &

Restaurant, in Menemsha, for rosé at sunset (the town is dry, so it’s BYOB).

Larsen’s Fish Market, in Menemsha, for crab cakes (eat them down the road on the public beach).

Mad Martha’s, in Oak Bluffs, for two scoops of Lotsa Dough ice cream.

State Road, in West Tisbury, for chopped lobster salad and a glass of Roederer Estate Brut.

West Tisbury Farmers

Market, on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Hermès shirt and shorts, $1,300 and $3,775; Bally belt, $525; Rag & Bone Panama hat, $230; Salvatore Ferragamo sandals, $825; Van Cleef & Arpels Magic Alhambra earrings, $7,250; Bulgari Giardini Italiani sunglasses, $645; Tiffany & Co. Schlumberger Cones and Croisillon bracelets, $36,000 and $30,000; Dolce & Gabbana handbag, $3,695.

Martha’s VineyardIn a summer destination that’s ruled by vacation rentals, it’s always big news when a hotel opens its doors. This season, the design- driven Lark Hotels group rolls out two on the island: Summercamp in Oak Bluffs and The Christopher in Edgartown. Here, some packing inspiration for a clas-sic New England getaway.

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Where+WearPlane Clothes

Because I come from

an island, I grew up feeling

trapped, so now I travel

every chance I get. But you have to find a balance be-tween leaving and staying. If you’re always between two planes, it’s hard to have a connection with the people around you.

I’m the girl who always

feels like she’s losing her

ticket or passport.

Having a tiny bag to easily access your wallet, boarding pass, and phone is the way to go. This one is from Gucci, and like everyone, I love what’s happening at that house right now.

Skinny pants are too tight

for traveling. These are

from Citizens of Humanity.

They’re comfortable and have a kind of vibe. I can do anything while wearing white—I just won’t drink red wine on the plane. But I don’t usually get too dirty, even on photo shoots when I’m sitting on the floor. I think my tank top is from H&M and my jacket is from a military surplus store.

I always carry a bigger bag

packed with magazines

and my mess: a huge gray cashmere scarf that’s more like a blanket, Pomega5’s Daily Revitalizing Concen-trate to keep my skin hydrated, earphones, and ear plugs—you have to have these. You never know if you’ll be in a noisy hotel. I like vacations to be a kind of philosophical moment when I think about life, so I’ll have notebooks with me from Anthropologie or Smythson. Sometimes I’ll bring a hat or a Uniqlo hoodie, anything that makes me feel protected, like I’m closing the door. AS TO L D TO M O L LY C R E E D E N

“I don’t like traveling to a place for a day or two. I like to stay awhile.”How the style influencer and Corsica native Garance Doré pulls off all-white on airplanes—tray table mishaps be damned.

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P H O T O G R A P H B Y W E S T O N W E L L S

Eye CandyThis summer, swap

your all-black shades for these lightweight

mirrored aviators—the brighter, the better.

Clockwise from top: Tiffany & Co., $390; Saint

Laurent Classic 11 Surf, $375; Cutler and Gross,

$500; Dior DiorSplit, $555; Westward Leaning

Concorde 10, $205; Prada Linea Rossa, $280.

Where+WearThe Upgrade

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Where+WearLong Weekend

Vacation on RepeatEvery July, Florence-based designer Álvaro González sets aside 72 hours for eating, drinking, and lounging under a beach umbrella in Positano.

“The journey to Positano is part of the adventure,” says accessories designer Álvaro González, who, every summer, rides a train three hours to Salerno, then catches a charter boat for the 40-minute sail right to the doorstep of his hotel, the small, family-owned Il San Pietro di Positano. “It’s so beautiful to arrive by sea,” he says. “You’re surrounded by cliffs, so it feels very isolated.” Because every minute counts on a weekend get-away, he and his husband, writer Nick Vinson, step off the boat, hand over their luggage to the hotel staff, and claim two loungers under striped umbrellas. Il San Pietro’s private beach has a bar that serves Il Chiostro, a great local beer, and a seaside restaurant called Il Carlino that makes a perfectly simple burrata dish with zucchini, mint, and garlic. They’ll do dinner at the hotel’s Miche-lin-starred restaurant, Zass. “Stay until after sunset,” González advises. “The people-watching is fantastic, and there’s a duo that plays traditional Neapolitan music with a mandolin and guitar.” The next night, González and Vinson may hop a five-minute water taxi to have dinner in town at Chez Black (“Make a reservation at least a week before,” he says), but they’ll do dessert—tiramisu and stracciatella gelato—back on the ter-race at Il San Pietro. “And before check-ing out, we always book our weekend for the following year.” L E A H G I N S B E R G

Above: González’s handwritten pre-trip to-do list. Below, from left: Room 9 at Il San Pietro; the view of Positano’s main beach.

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The things we can’t stop talking about

Not Your Garden-Variety Garden

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R 33P H O T O G R A P H B Y F E L I X O D E L L

Walk down one woodland path and you’ll see birch and aspen trees hung with acrylic paintings. Head down another and you’ll discover that what you thought was a huge tree is actually a sculpture “growing” from a block of concrete. So it goes at ethereal, sylvan Gunillaberg, the country estate of Dutch floral artist Tage Andersen in Sweden’s rural Småland region.

Gunillaberg was not Andersen’s first botanically trippy venture—garden nuts have been queuing up to see his Narnia-like floral cre-ations since he opened his Copen-hagen store in 1987—but it is by far his most ambitious. Andersen and his husband, Monz, found the seventeenth-century house set on 42 acres in 2008 and transformed it into a summer retreat/quasi-pub-lic garden that’s open May through September. “The former owner was almost 100 when he died,” says Monz. “He’d all but ignored the property, which means the estate was a sort of Sleeping Beauty.”

Andersen woke the place up, turn-ing it into yet another cult pilgrim-age for green thumbs. He painted the house yellow, planted thousands of lilies, and filled the property with pots of agapanthus and pomegran-ates as well as farm animals. Getting here isn’t easy (see sidebar). But the “middle of nowhere” location is part of the appeal. The city, the twenty-first century, and reality, for that matter, feel very, very far away. S T E P H E N W H I T L O C K

Getting ThereTHE DRIVE

It’s a four-hour drive from both Copenhagen and Stockholm. From Copenhagen, make it a straight shot (there isn’t much to stop for). From Stockholm, it’s a proper road trip, with places worth pulling over for and great views of Vättern, one of Europe’s largest lakes, for most of the drive.

Welcome to FairylandAn enchanted garden that most Swedes have never heard of.

ALONG THE WAY

You’ll want to linger in the Ödeshög area, on the eastern shore of Vättern, halfway to Gunillaberg. Hop out at Omberg Ecopark and hike up the Hjässan promontory for an amazing view of the lake. Go for lunch at the Ombergs Turistho-tell, and carve out time to tour the lakeside mansion of Swedish writer Ellen Key, a prominent suffragette and feminist.

THE BRING-BACK

Continue south for 25 miles to the village of Gränna, where polkagris (red-and-white- striped peppermint stick candy) was invented.

Clockwise from top: Tage Andersen; the artist’s sculpture Aorta giganteum; a room-size chess set designed by Andersen and ceramicist Anna R. Kinman on the ground floor of the house; a small glass pavilion in the woods behind the main house.

Word of MouthDiscovered

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R 37P H O T O G R A P H S B Y F E L I X O D E L L

Word of MouthChecking In

Provence hardly needs a sales pitch—from medieval Avignon to the port of Marseille, the country-side is a maze of hilltop villages, open-air markets, and lavender fields. Which is why it’s tempting to try to tick off every charming town, vineyard, and experience (cooking class, bike tour, both?) when you’re there. But to do so is to miss out on part of the region’s true appeal—its languid pace.

Sometimes doing next to nothing in a good hotel is the best way to experience a place.

No-Pressure Provence

Creating an escape where guests can slip into this lazy rhythm is exactly what inspired retail mogul Frédéric Biousse, founder and former CEO of Sandro Maje Claudie Pierlot (SMCP), and art dealer Guillaume Foucher to buy the Domaine de Fontenille, a wine-making estate in the south-ern Luberon, and turn it into a boutique hotel set away from Provence’s most touristy corners.

In 2013, the couple started a multi-million-dollar, 18-month overhaul of the property, restoring its eighteenth-century manor house and reviving its wine production (the estate has been growing grapes since 1638) with new equipment and a modernized storeroom. They kept the sand-colored exterior and didn’t alter the footprint of the house, but did a full gut renovation of the interior, creating 17 rooms and suites, each with wide-plank oak floors, olive-green walls, Provençal

furniture upholstered in beige linen, and modern art—by artists like Todd Hido and Anne-Lise Broyer—from the pair’s private collection or Foucher’s Parisian gallery. Then there are the expansive views of the estate’s verdant grounds, with its stands of cedar and plane trees, rose and vegetable gardens, and 86-acre vineyard (which is undergoing organic conversion). The couple also turned the vaulted cellar into an art space where they host exhibitions in collaboration with international galleries like Galerie Claude Bernard.

It’s the kind of place that gives you permission to stay put—where enjoying an alfresco lunch prepared by Michelin-starred chef Jérôme Faure, exploring the estate by bicycle, or sipping rosé in the vine-yard’s tasting room is as culturally immersive as a day-trip to nearby Aix-en-Provence. As the French say: Point trop, n’en faut—less is indeed more. L I N D S E Y T R A M U TA

From top: Patio tables at La Cuisine d’Amélie, the Domaine’s bistrot; the pool and rose garden.

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Word of MouthChecking In

Nonstop to Paradise

For those familiar with India, the name Munnu Kasliwal is synonymous with Jaipur. When the jeweler and fifth-generation owner of the city’s famed Gem Palace died in 2012, his son Siddharth took over the business, and now Sid (as he’s known) has taken on another piece of his father’s legacy: the opening of 28 Kothi. The five-bed-room guesthouse, set in the quiet Civil Lines neighborhood, has a minimalist vibe—novel, but welcome in a region known for its ornate palace hotels. “Eventually, you want to be treated like family, not royalty,” Sid says of Kothi’s appeal. “That’s what I wanted to create.”

That’s what Munnu wanted too. He’d hired an architect to design a house modeled on Jaipur’s mid-century Art Deco bungalows. The project paused after Munnu’s death, but a year later, Sid picked it back up, relying on trusted Gem Palace artisans and local craftspeo-ple—carpenters and weavers among them—to add special touches like the handmade flat-weave dhurries and block-printed upholstered headboards in the rooms, and on the artist who does Gem Palace’s miniature paintings and enamel-work for the painted palm trees on the walls. “It was all for the love of my father,” Sid explains. “Everyone came together, and Kothi came alive.” A N D R E W S E S S A

A new boutique hotel in Jaipur that’s (refreshingly) more like a home than a palace.

For the Love of Munnu

1135 AD

“This restaurant serves excellent Rajasthani food atop the sixteenth- century Amber Fort. You can look out over the whole city while you eat—you feel like you’re lost in another era.”

HAWA MAHAL BAZAAR

“For a real Jaipur experience, every visitor should walk through the aisles of this market and try the kulfi, a sweet local ice cream–like dessert.”

IDLI

“French-born designer Thierry Journo opened this clothing and home

Hit ListWhere Sid sends his friends when they’re in town.

From top: The living room–like lobby of 28 Kothi; the hotel’s farm-fresh pea soup served gardenside.

furnishings boutique a quick cab ride from Gem Palace. He uses really cool fabrics in modern prints and colors.”

KASHMIR LOOM

“This shop inside the Suján Rajmahal Pal-ace hotel is the spot for the highest-quality scarves and shawls—many luxury fashion brands get their cash-mere goods here.”

LAXMI MISHTHAN

BHANDAR

“Everyone who works in the jewelry market goes here for samosas and yogurt dumplings.”

NIROS

“It’s been a bustling streetside spot since 1949 and has great traditional Indian food— get the dried panir tikka.”

When it comes to proper high- end beach resorts in Hawaii like Maui’s Fairmont Kea Lani or Kau-ai’s St. Regis Princeville, Oahu has lagged behind the other islands (which is why it’s often a stopover on the way to idyllic retreats else-where). But you may want to ditch

the day-killing connecting flight now that the Four Seasons has opened in Ko Olina, on Oahu’s underexposed west coast—a beau-tiful stretch of shore known for its near-empty beaches. Unlike Oahu’s other luxury hotels, most of which are crammed together

in Waikiki, the Four Seasons feels surprisingly “outer island,” set on 15 lush acres and with its own beach and three pools. And it’s only a 30-minute drive from the Honolulu airport—unless, that is, you want to take the hotel’s yacht or helicopter. J O H N W O G A N

KO O L I N A

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Word of MouthSummer 2016

If you’re starting to resent your friends’ exotic vacation posts right about now (why did you book that Montauk rental again?!) or still playing airfare chicken on Kayak, you can stop your FOMO bellyaching. We’ve tracked new direct flights and mined our on-the-ground experts for the hotel openings, cultural happenings, lesser-known landscapes, and emerging food and wine spots worth traveling for—and which you just might, in some cases, have to yourself. What follows is a list of still-bookable trips to earn you serious bragging rights—from your own luxury tent on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim to a close-up with a leopard in Botswana. If we were in your shoes (and—okay, we might be), we’d get on it now!

1 See a Christo Installation Up Close in Italy’s Lake District For just three weeks starting on June 18, the quixotic environ-mental artist Christo will weave 753,500 square feet of yellow fabric across pine-shrouded Lake Iseo in Northern Italy to create The Floating Piers, which visitors can literally walk across. Shake off the crowds by booking L’Albereta, a Relais & Châteaux hotel set amid the region’s vine-yards, where you’ll be less than 45 minutes by car from the lake.

3 Take a Boat Safari in BotswanaThe best months for seeing the country’s Okavango Delta are May through August, when water levels are at their highest and elephants, giraffes, leopards, and count-less birds are most active. Camps like Duba Expedition ar-range game “drives” by motorboat—and are all the more luxuri-ous for being in the middle of nowhere.

4 Revisit the California CoastCarmel still has those golden beaches, forest hiking trails,

26 Ways to (Still) Go Big This Summer 2

against the dollar since 2014. A €500

room used to work out to $690. Now it’s

yours for $575.

EUROPEwhere

the euro is down

Stay just about anywhere in

1 8 P E R C E N T

42 C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 T Y P E B Y L A T I G R E

Word of MouthSummer 2016

and proximity to pinot and chardonnay vine-yards, but a new crop of inns like the Hotel Carmel and The Hide-away are providing welcome alternatives to the same old B&Bs.

6 Chase Sky- High Thrills in the AdirondacksWild Walk in Tupper Lake is like the High Line of the for-est—and the next best thing to being an Ewok: It’s an elevated network of bridges and platforms that cuts through the tree-tops and connects to a four-story twig tree house and a kid-size spider’s web.

7 Catch Zaha Hadid’s Last ShowThe Jameel Prize is one of the world’s most prestigious awards in Islamic art and de-sign, and this year’s selection, on view at Istanbul’s Pera Mu-seum, is the last picked under Zaha Hadid, the prize’s late patron. It’s also the first time

the exhibition will be shown outside Lon-don’s Victoria and Al-bert Museum.

8 Road-Trip the Old West—and Its New Places to StayWe love Dunton Hot Springs resort in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, which is why we’re expecting big things from its new Telluride spin- off, Dunton Town House. (And everyone knows ski towns are at their best in the summer.) The newly opened Smith Fork Ranch, from the creative team behind leather goods brand Ghurka, is 90 minutes by car from Grand Junction but feels more re-mote—and only takes 28 guests a week. Grand Canyon Under Canvas brings safari- style tents to the hotel- starved high desert about an hour from the South Rim. Or stay mobile and book a week with Air-stream 2 Go, which rents 23- and 28-foot

chrome trailers (and the SUVs to tow them) out of Las Vegas.

11 Live Your Greek Island Fantasy Without the CrowdsFolegandros has all the great beaches, the simple but delicious taverna food, and the epic sunsets over the sea that you ex-pect from a Greek isle—without the disco vibe and mega yachts. Even better, high- speed ferries from Piraeus now get you there in 3 hours instead of the 11 it used to take.

12 See the Arctic Before It MeltsYou know it won’t be there forever, and so does Crystal Cruises, whose Serenity starts sailing the Northwest Passage in August. The ship travels from Anchorage to Arctic fishing villages in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland before docking in New York.

13 Get to Colombia (Finally)Now’s the time to go: In 2014, the dollar-to-peso exchange rate was one to 1,995; today you get 2,850 pesos for a buck, an in-crease of 44 percent. Once you’re there, stay at the sleekly designed and newly opened

Four Seasons Hotel Bogota or the recently renovated Four Seasons Hotel Casa Medina Bogotá, a colonial-style retreat.

15 Cycle the Spanish PyreneesThe rugged mountains and seaside towns of Basque Country are best seen in sum-mer. The weather’s perfect, and you can tool around on locally made Orbea bikes with a Bicycle Adven-tures guide who’ll show you the best spots for pintxos—the world’s most Insta-grammable snacks!

16 Head to the Chicest Island in the CaribbeanEveryone forgets about St. Barts in summer, but that’s when flights to the modish French isle run you about half as much as they would in winter. Two of the original resorts, Eden Rock and Le Guana-hani, recently under-went major face-lifts— just get there before September, when the rainy season starts and hotels and restau-rants close down.

17 Explore a Slice of Africa (Almost) Nobody Else HasWant to truly impress your friends? A stay at the five-month-old

N E P A L

T I G E R S

Before this year, a visit to Chitwan National

Park demanded roughing it. Now you

can make the new Meghauli Serai, a Taj

Safari Lodge, your indulgent base camp.

Spot Bengal

5 10

The west coast’s Wild Atlantic Way is the world’s longest coastal drive, rolling past surf breaks,

14

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I N S TA N T S U M M E R VA C AT I O N

Camden, Maine, for lobster rolls

and windjammers.

Fort Bragg, California, for foggy mornings.

Kiawah Island, South Carolina,

for seaside golf links.

Mackinaw City, Michigan,

for old-school lakeside vacation vibes.

Paso Robles, California,

for great wines minus the Napa nonsense.

St. Michaels, Maryland, for yachting and G&Ts.

Sanibel Island, Florida, for beachcombing

on kid-friendly beaches.

Shelter Island, New York,

for an alternative to the Hamptons.

Victoria, British Columbia,

for a postcard- perfect international

escape just three hours from Seattle.

in

9

C A Z E N O V E & L O Y D ’ S

We’re pumped for

tour of the virtually unexplored, wildlife-filled

Make first tracks in northern

ARGENTINA

I B E R A W E T L A N D Swhere the Rincón del Socorro guest estancia

is the stuff of country-home fantasies.

IRELA T O U R

20 Catch a Fashion Show in . . . Scotland? Edinburgh’s National Museum will unveil a $21-million expansion of ten new exhibition halls on July 8, and among the items on display will be pieces from Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, and Yves Saint Laurent. Get there on Delta’s just-launched nonstop from JFK to Edin-burgh—or hop British Airways’ new flight between London and the Highlands.

21 Crack Cuba with a Pro’s HelpSo you’ve decided to go—but you’re intim-idated by everything planning your own trip will require: trolling Airbnb, refreshing air-line websites, e-mailing transportation compa-nies in Havana, and dialing on-the-ground cultural institutions and dance troupes to make sure your itiner-ary is legit. Skip the hassle and simply call

an expert, like Tom Popper at InsightCuba or Adam Vaught at Zi-casso, who can handle all the details—’cause that’s what they do.

22 Taste Cult-Favorite Wines (Without Pretense)Emerging regions are Europe’s next big things—and by going to the source, you can build both your cellar and your palate. The two-year-old Wine Route of Etna brings together vineyards along Sicily’s SS120 Highway, which skirts the northern side of the mountain. Among the growers here is Frank Cornelissen, godfather of the natu-ral wine movement. Or head for Spain’s Canaries, where microclimates make for some seriously minerally wines. Our fave? The dry Malvasia whites from Lanzarote. (The island’s vine-yards, with their rich black soil, look totally lunar.) Or seek out

25 Hit the Hawaiian Island That Has It AllMaui’s got spectacular beaches, the state’s driest weather, top-notch surfing and hik-ing, one of the most jaw-dropping drives in the country (yes, that’s the Piilani Highway on our cover), and some of Hawaii’s best hotels. Now three of them—the Fairmont Kea Lani, Royal Lahaina Resort, and Travaasa Hana—are back after (much-needed) renos.

26 Or Just Go HugeUse every last vacation day on Abercrombie & Kent’s 23-day charter jet tour through Latin America, leaving Maui on September 6. The price? $99,500 per person.

Assyrtiko, our favorite white from the island of Santorini—it’s bright and very high in acid—with a salty tang since the vines basically grow in the ocean. Bonus: The wine ages well, so pick up a case when you visit Estate Argyros.

Limalimo Lodge in the Simein Mountains of Ethiopia ought to do it, particularly when you come back with stories of tracking colobus and vervet monkeys in the surrounding wilderness. It sounds like a long trip, but the brand-new Ethio-pian Airlines nonstop between Newark and Addis Ababa helps cut travel time.

19 Discover the Most Underrated Food City in the U.S.Serious eaters with a free weekend can be among the first to check Indianapolis off their list. The city has notable chefs building national profiles with innovative menus that aren’t ambitiously overpriced, but you’d be forgiven for missing the news with Chicago hogging the Midwest-ern food spotlight. When you fly in—and it’s easier than ever, with nonstops from 33 cities—head straight to Marrow (fried tan-doori chicken; cucum-ber wakame salad) and Milktooth (killer break-fast dishes; locally roasted Tinker Coffee) for a quick orientation to the city’s best. Then pedal your way to more finds (Black Market; Rook), using Indy’s ever-expanding bike-sharing network.

timeless pubs, and seafood stands serving caught-that-hour fish.

road trip

on a winding, sometimes white-knuckle

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18

O M A N

Discover the antidote to Abu Dhabi’s skyscrapers

or Dubai’s excess:

24

The tranquil Arabian Peninsula country

will see two new Anantara hotels open this summer:

near Grand Canyon–esque Jebel Shams

on the Arabian Sea.

A L J A B A L A L A K H D A R

R E S O R T

A L B A L E E D R E S O R T

S A L A L A H

Find photos of our picks, plus more intel on making the most of your summer vacation, at cntraveler.com/summer.

Fly one of three new nonstops to

23

R E T U N E M I N D & B O D Y I N

CROATIA(at Yoga for Bad People’s retreat on Brač)

SOUTH AFRICA(at the new Leeu Estates)

& TURKEY(at Canyon Ranch’s new coastal resort).

AUCKLANDOur summer is their winter, but it’ll be

mild enough that you can

S K I M O U N T R UA P E H U I N A T- S H I R T.

Houston Air New Zealand

San Francisco United

Los Angeles American[ ]

ND

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R 45

When creative director Yolanda Edwards came back from French Basque Country, she raved about the breakfast at the Du Palais—specifi-cally the seasonal gem lettuces and piment d’es-pelette, that smoky pepper which makes everything, including the buffet’s perfectly soft scrambled eggs, taste bet-ter. Savor it, along with house-baked brioche, cured meats, and fruit tarts, in the dining room late into the morning—meaning you may just skip lunch.

Hôtel du Palais, Biarritz

Word of MouthThe Hotel Breakfast

P H O T O G R A P H BY M AT T H R A N E K

Word of MouthPass It On

Exhibition Isle

Been There, Done That

THE WHEN AND HOW

Festival dates are July 18– September 4 and October 8– November 6. From Tokyo, it’s a four-hour train ride to Uno Port, then a 20-minute ferry to Naoshima. From there, ferry trips to the other islands are short (15 to 45 minutes) and departures frequent. A festival passport is about $46, and an all-access three-day ferry pass is $20.

THE PIECES TO SEE

This year’s festival includes international big-name artists like Pipilotti Rist and Olafur Eliasson, but it’s the lesser-known Japanese artists who are really worth getting to know: Yoshinori Niwa’s performance project uses psychics to summon the ghosts of 16 former Naoshima mayors; Haruyuki Uchida filled a titanium boat with seawater and hoisted it into the sky; and Sou Fujimoto’s geometric steel-mesh pavilion sits on Naoshima’s waterfront.

WHERE TO STAY AND

WHAT (ELSE) TO DO

Book a room at the Tadao Ando–designed Benesse House

Museum, a museum/hotel on Naoshima. The spacious rooms look out onto the Seto Inland Sea and are decorated with works of art by Christo and Thomas Ruff. After you’re settled, take an end-of-day soak at the nearby I Love Yu onsen. Part art installa-tion, part bathhouse (and maybe your only chance to view art in the buff), it’s one in a trail of per-manent installations across the three-mile island. A DA M G R A H A M

Yayoi Kusama’s permanent installation Pumpkin, on Naoshima.

“ Summer in Rome means dining outdoors. And while I’ve stuck out the hour wait for an alfresco meal on the Via del Portico d’Ottavia, a better plan is to follow the Romans 45 minutes south to hilltop Ariccia. Here, Italians fill tables around the town’s square, sharing porchetta and wild boar ragout from the local taverns. Don’t worry about overdoing it on the jugs of local red—taxis stand by to get you safely back to the city.” ERIN FLORIO, Senior Associate Editor

Art fairs emphasizing local talent may evoke images of tents filled with bad seascape paintings. But Japan’s Setouchi

Triennale, held on 14 remote islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, eviscerates any bric-a- brac associations and delivers blue-chip art in a serene natural setting that you won’t find at Basel or Frieze. Setouchi started in 2010 but garnered an immediate following with the international art crowd for its site-specific pieces that speak to the islands’ natural beauty and faded industrial heritage, like Tadao Ando’s lab-yrinth of cherry blossom trees, or Wang Wen Chih’s dome made from more than 4,000 pieces of native bamboo.

Your all-time-favorite vacation: I traveled to China in 1983 for a screen-ing of Coal Miner’s Daughter, and they had an amazing dinner for us at the emperor’s palace in Beijing. I was revel-ing in this delicious soup when someone leaned over and said, “That’s camel’s- foot-tendon soup.” That sent a chill up my spine, but I just decided to go with it.

All-time worst vacation: When I was a teenager, a girlfriend and I got cheap tickets to Puerto Rico. I was a strawberry blond at the beach with this tawny-skinned girl—I borrowed her baby oil and got burned so badly. She returned to New York for work and left me in a Puerto Rican hospital!

Your ideal travel partner: My mother. She saved my life once. We climbed up this mountain in São Paulo in high heels—don’t ask me why—and there was a wooden platform that people were hang-gliding off of. I got so close to jumping off with this one glider, but my mother grabbed me by the throat and with clenched teeth said, “Not today, Sissy. Not on my watch.”

The best thing about filming Blood-line in the Florida Keys: The seafood. I love the hogfish . . . though they really need to do something about that name.

The last monument, landmark, or

natural wonder you took a selfie in

front of: The selfies I take are with fans. Does that make me the monument, landmark, or natural wonder? I choose natural wonder. DAV I D WA LT E R S

S E TO U C H I

An Editor Recommends

Bloodline star Sissy Spacek on eating whatever’s put in front of you, being pale in Puerto Rico, and (almost) hang-gliding wearing high heels.

Osaka

Tokyo

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The Jefferson Memorial.

FO R PA R E N TS , D.C. is the city of object lessons—for better and worse. You come primed to help your kid decipher the signatures of the Founding Fathers on the Declaration of Independence, or to gaze together at Abraham Lincoln’s craggy profile as you piously recite the Gettysburg Address—along with seemingly every other family in America (who, you register in a panic, all seem to be lined up outside the National Air and Space Museum). But hey—with so, so many museums, monuments, parks, waterfronts, and other distrac-tions to choose from, you can easily chart a crowd-free course. Just don’t

try to cram too much in: We found parents and kids were happiest with no more than two scheduled stops a day—and frequent pauses and distrac-tions to decompress. Besides, there’s so much to do off the Mall since once-fringy neighborhoods (NoMA, H Street Corridor) are emerging as eating and shopping hubs. Take an Uber or taxi, not the Metro, to preserve legs and moods. If you miss something major (like the fall opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture), no worries. You know you’ll be back. R E P O R T E D B Y

A L E X P O S T M A N A N D PAU L B R A D Y

WA S H I N GTO N , D . C .DCWord of MouthBlack Book

50 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y D E W E Y N I C K S

Word of MouthBlack Book

D . C . E S S E N T I A L S U N D E R R A T E D M U S E U M F R E D E R I C K D O U G L A S S N A T I O N A L H I S T O R I C S I T E ( R I G H T )

Cracking the Mega-MuseumsSince nearly every D.C. museum is free, popping in and out is encouraged. Plan smartly and you’ll get to all the major kid draws without burning out.

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International Spy Museum

National Air and Space Museum

National Museum of Natural History

National Museum of American History

While it’s not part of the Smithsonian, this museum has original

tools of the trade like an Enigma machine

and miniature weapons, and every kid gets to adopt an alias.

It has world-famous aircraft like the

1903 Wright Flyer, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, and the back-from-

space Apollo 11 com-mand module.

This is home to the 45.52-carat Hope

Diamond, dinosaur fossils, a living

coral reef, as well as an enormous African

elephant guarding the entrance.

It’s got big-deal arti-facts, including the flag

that inspired “The Star-Spangled Ban-

ner,” George Washing-ton’s battle sword,

and Benjamin Frank-lin’s walking stick.

The “Operation Spy” experience lets teens

play at espionage with fictional video

surveillance and safe-cracking.

Often overlooked, NASA’s Stardust

probe is the first man-made object to

intercept a comet and return to Earth.

The gunboat Philadelphia, a

Revolutionary War ship sunk by the British on Lake

Champlain in 1776.

One of D.C.’s few paid museums, it lets

you book a timed entry up to six

months ahead of time. Hop on those

Operation Spy tickets early too.

If you’re planning to see an Imax show,

buy advance tickets at home—and visit

before 11 A.M. or after 4 P.M. to avoid

the huge swarms of afternoon tourists.

The galleries are open until 7:30 P.M. on

most (but not all) summer nights, so have

an early dinner and come back once

crowds thin. (Confirm hours at si.edu.)

Not every museum has them, so take advantage of the

self-service lockers by the Constitution

Avenue entrance to park your stuff

while exploring.

The O. Orkin Insect Zoo on the second

floor, where the brave can handle hissing

cockroaches and see tarantula feedings.

From left: The National Museum of the American Indian; the International Spy Museum.

The Sanity-Saving Hacks We Rely On How to make the most of your time on the go.

Look for Timed EntriesPretty much the only way into landmarks like the White House and the Washington Monument is to lock in a tour (weeks!) in advance. But last- minute bookers can nab line-skipping timed entries online to the National Archives Museum and the Capitol Rotunda just a few days out.

Decode the SmithsonianIts new online Trip Planner, at si.edu/visit, helps visitors navigate hundreds of exhibits and 13 museums on and near the Mall. Punch in your interests (“Astronomy,” “Design”) to break down what to see and where.

Don’t Blow Off the Art MuseumsThe Hirshhorn, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Phillips Collection—which offers a cool art scavenger hunt—are generally less kid-clogged.

Hire Your Own Guide Tour company Context can create custom family itineraries for many sights and museums (e.g., an Air and Space walk led by a NASA space camp alum), sparing you logistical legwork.

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Word of MouthBlack Book

If They’re Obsessed with AirplanesDrive 40 minutes west of downtown to the Steven

F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, near Dulles, where the Smithso-nian keeps an outstanding collection of historic air-craft—including the Enola Gay, the space shuttle Discovery, and an SR-71.

If They Heart @Ador-able_Animals on InstaThe National Zoo’s baby panda, Bei Bei, will be approaching maximum cuteness this summer. The cub—and his parents—are most active in the morning, so be there when the gates open at 8 A.M. Many visitors trek uphill from the Woodley Park–

Zoo/Adams Morgan Metro station, but you can avoid the hike by having your Uber drop you off at the northwest gate.

If You’ve Got a Foodie-in-the-MakingCab it to Union Market, near the once-gritty NoMa nabe, for dozens of food stalls serving empanadas and ramen. An eight-minute ride south, Eastern Market, a bustling 143-year-old food hall, has street musicians and flea market tables outdoors on weekends. 

If They’re SneakerheadsTake the new free streetcar from Union Station down H Street Northeast to Maketto, a concept store/

restaurant where you can browse limited-edition Adidas by Raf Simons Stan Smiths or Raised by Wolves hoodies before eating family-style Cambodian/Taiwanese street food (pork steamed bao, five-spice fried chicken). If there’s a wait for a table, play a round of indoor mini-golf at the quirky H Street

Country Club (yes, there’s a bar) down the street.

If They’re Baseball FansHead for the Washington

Navy Yard, on the Anacos-tia River, where restau-rants and splashdown fountains have popped up near Nationals Park. (Same-day game tickets are easy to snag.)

It’s Not All About HistoryThe Mall bailout plan for kids who know what they’re into.

From left: A D.C. farmers’ market; the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport.

Hotels the Whole Family Can Agree OnYou’ll like the vibe and they won’t bounce off the walls.

MASON & ROOK

This new Kimpton has oversized rooms done in stylish grays, with 65-inch TVs perfect for movie nights. Suites have deep soaking tubs, too.

PARK HYATT

WASHINGTON

It’s got sleek Shaker- inspired decor, a pool (so key!), and a top-rated restaurant, the Blue Duck Tavern, so you can send burgers upstairs while you dine à deux.

THE WATERGATE HOTEL

Yes, that one (above). The mid-century modern icon with the juicy backstory is now worth a stay thanks to a $125 million refurb.

WILLARD

INTERCONTINENTAL

Steeped in history and a block from the White House, it’s the grande dame where Lincoln slept before his inaugu-ration. ’Nuff said!

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B E S T F O R T E E N S T H E N E W S E U M / P H O T O O P T H E L A P O F T H E A L B E R T E I N S T E I N M E M O R I A L / P E A C E F U L T I M E - O U T K O G O D C O U R T Y A R D , N A T I O N A L P O R T R A I T G A L L E R Y

When You’re Ready to Say Yes to the ConeSkip the fro-yo trucks on the Mall and hit Pitango Gelato, on 7th Street Northwest. It’s got classic flavors (nocci-ola) and not-so (carda-mom) plus outstanding Counter Culture coffee.

Sip a Dry Riesling While Your Kids Play The Art Nouveau–style Pavilion Café at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden has nice wines, microbrews from Virginia’s Devils Backbone, a fountain for little ones to splash in, and it’s just across

the street from the Mall (consider bringing a soccer ball—seriously).

Get Off Your FeetIt sounds lame, but hear us out: When your over-walked feet feel like stumps, Tidal Basin

Paddle Boats is a lifesaver. For $16 you can catch a breeze out on the water and paddle (like, so slowly) for an up-close view of the Jefferson Memorial. If you need to snack up, there’s a decent, underused café at the Holocaust Memorial Museum (which should be seen in its own right). 

Where You Can Seriously Beat the Heat On July 2, the National

Building Museum will unveil “Icebergs,” trans-forming its great hall into an underwater world of glacial ice complete with “undersea” grottoes and snow cone snacks.

Find Your Lunch Tribe Right on the Mall, the National Museum of the American Indian’s Mitsitam Café serves up regional native fare like South American cherry- braised beef pupusas or Great Plains buffalo chili on fry bread.

“Our secret place to go was Bishop’s

Garden, by the National

Cathedral. My kids loved to run along

the paths and stick their hands

in the pond.”

Recharging Stations Museum fatigue is a real thing. Here are a few ways to recover.

Above: The Tidal Basin from the Jefferson Memorial.

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Word of MouthBlack Book

B E S T C R O Q U E M A D A M E L E D I P L O M A T E / F A R M - T O - T A B L E B R U N C H G A R R I S O N / H I G H - E N D C O F F E E S H O P P I N E A P P L E A N D P E A R L S

“My daughters and I love getting

lost in the Hillwood Estate,

Museum & Gardens, which was once owned

by Marjorie Merriweather

Post.”

Spend the Afternoon in Georgetown With stately row houses, Old Town shops, and leafy spots for cooling off, this is a D.C. you can (finally) relax in.

2 P.M. Roam the grounds of Dumbarton Oaks, a classic George-town mansion (now a museum with a top-notch Byzantine art collection, BTW) on 16 acres of terraced gardens.

3 P.M. Walk south on Wisconsin Avenue and stop for a cone at local institution Thomas Sweet, on the corner of P Street. Continue on Wisconsin and turn left onto N Street, a staggeringly pretty row of eighteenth-century brick homes (during JFK’s presidential campaign, he and Jackie lived at 3307 N St.). Turn right onto 31st Street (past the 1858 Post Office), then left on M Street. The Old Stone House is the oldest unchanged building in D.C.; you can pop into its low- ceilinged colonial kitchen for free.

4 P.M. Cross M Street on Thomas Jefferson Street—if you can yank your teens back from M Street’s com-mercial seductions (Urban Outfitters, Nike)—and in a block you’ll be at Lock 4 on the C&O Canal. Completed in 1850, it’s now a 185-mile-long national park. Walk along the towpath or have a pebble-flinging contest. Just beyond is Baked & Wired, whose artisanal roasts lure lines of students from Georgetown U.

5 P.M. Got time to kill before dinner? Older kids can rent kayaks at the nearby Key Bridge Boathouse. Or go early bird at the locavore magnet Farmers Fishers Bakers (owned by the North Dakota Farmers Union), near the Georgetown Waterfront Park and its fountain.

From left: Garrison; Toki Underground.

ARCHIPELAGO

U Street’s only tiki bar rivals any you’d find on the West Coast. Try to order drinks like the mezcal-and-rum Truck Bed Funeral or the tequila-heavy Retired Stripper with a straight face.

THE DABNEY

One of the city’s best restaurants is in an alley near Logan Cir-cle. Chef Jeremiah Langhorne grills local fish, meats, and veggies over open flames be-fore garnishing most everything with a gar-den’s worth of micro-greens and fresh herbs.

DEL CAMPO

D.C. is notoriously plagued by mediocre

steakhouses, but this Argentine-style parilla in the Penn Quarter ain’t one of them. Look for playful riffs on local favor-ites—like the beef “half-smoke” hot dog topped with caviar.

SOUTHERN EFFICIENCY

Near the famed 9:30 Club concert hall, in the rapidly develop-ing Shaw neighbor-hood, this whiskey bar is heavy on locally crafted spirits like Virginia-made Catoctin Creek rye.

TOKI UNDERGROUND

Despite the name, you’ll find this funky ramen-and-buns joint above The Pug, an H Street dive bar.

Parents’ Night OutIt’s a suit-and- tie town, but the dining scene here has never been more fun than it is right now. J O S É A N D R É S

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Word of MouthGroundbreaker

The lobby of the Ace Hotel New Orleans, designed by Roman and Williams.

O N A STO R M Y DAY in January, Kelly Sawdon, chief brand officer for the Ace Hotel Group, and Brad Wilson, the company’s president, stood inside an old furniture store in New Orleans, watching a construction worker push a sander across the floor. In two months, if all went according to plan, the space would be filled with guests and curious locals. But for now, coils of wire lay on the floor, and the thick smell of paint hung in the air.

Wilson, in a white construction hat, strode across the lobby, shouting over the din. “Un-like other properties we’ve worked on, this one wasn’t already a hotel, so there was a lot to be done upstairs,” he said. “But with the lobby, we’re hoping to preserve some of the original feel. The beautiful old moldings up there will stay.” He pointed. Here would be a Stump-town café, the first south of the Mason-Dixon Line; there, a stage for visiting musicians.

The Ace New Orleans opened its doors this spring, the eighth entry from the Ace Hotel Group—which, if you haven’t noticed, has been on quite the tear lately. But of course you’ve noticed: These days, no one can ig-nore Ace, even those who don’t wish to sleep in its loftlike rooms or sip artisanally roasted espresso in its artfully weathered lobbies. The brand continues to expand at a rapid clip. In the near future, if you visit a major American city—or just live in one—you might not stay in an Ace Hotel, but you may wind up in a neighborhood that Ace put on the map.

Co-founded in 1999 by Seattle club owner and entrepreneur Alex Calderwood, Ace has made a play of cheeky iconoclasm and a cu-ratorial style that can border on precious (see the Portlandia sketch about the “Deuce Hotel” and its aggressively hip check-in staff). The look is familiar by now: bespoke art on the walls, guitars in the bedrooms, upbeat mes-sages (“Everything Is Going to Be Alright”) emblazoned in the lobby. Love or loathe it, Ace’s house style has become so pervasive across the industry that new hotels are often

Can a hotel rebrand a neighborhood? With clairvoyant location-scouting, Ace Hotels and other industry players are redrawing the map of cities we thought we knew. By Matthew Shaer

Making a Scene

56 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y M AT T H E W W I L L I A M S

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Word of MouthGroundbreaker

described as “Ace-like”—be they indie brands such as Freehand, The Hoxton, and Mama Shelter, or the mil-lennial-ready offshoots of big-name chains, with their sassy “Go Away” doorknob signs and pour-over cof-fee bars. “That emphasis on ‘local, authentic’ travel has gone mainstream,” says Greg Oates, senior editor at travel industry site Skift. For instance: “The concierges at Marriott’s Renaissance brand are called ‘Navigators’ and provide local travel tips, and InterContinental fo-cuses on ‘insider’ or ‘in the know travel.’ ”

Y E T A S I M I TATO R S A B O U N D, Ace has distinguished itself in another way: by taking an unorthodox ap-proach to development, eschewing already-saturated locations for emerging ones. Opening a hotel is a multi-million-dollar gamble for any brand and its financial partners, so standard operating procedure is to choose locations based on the success of existing properties. But when the first Ace took root in an unremarkable patch of western Seattle, it was notable for having a club frequented by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck , and not much else. Belltown has been on the style map ever since. That first hotel, set in a former halfway house, felt more like a glorified hostel where a visiting band might crash after graduating from friends’ couches. Their friends probably lived in Belltown too.

A similar metamorphosis occurred a decade later in the dead cen-ter of Manhattan (emphasis on dead). What we now call the NoMad district, south of Times Square, was until 2009 an in-between zone of wig wholesalers and sidewalk patchouli-hawkers—before Ace took over an abandoned hotel and, with its deep leather couches and communal workspaces, created the hottest lobby scene in town. (The upmarket NoMad Hotel, a block south, followed three years later.)

In 2013, Ace opened its first European outpost, in East London’s gritty Shoreditch—an area overserved by vintage shops and bars but underserved by design-conscious hotels. Last December, an Ace

You might not stay in an Ace Hotel, but you may wind up in a neighborhood that Ace put on the map.

‘

Is East Liberty the Next Belltown?Two fringe neighborhoods have thrived post-Ace—and a third could follow suit. Watch this space, Pittsburgh. . .

SEATTLE

Opened 1999NEW YORK

Opened 2009PITTSBURGH

Opened 2015

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Restaurants & Bars

Ace Hotel

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arrived in Pittsburgh’s up-and-coming East Liberty district. The brand has repeated the trick often enough that industry watchers refer to the “Ace Effect,” or the explosion of a neighborhood after a cool hotel moves in (see the maps below). Identifying those areas is something Ace’s development team has been uncannily adept at: They’re the place whisper-ers, the neighborhood foragers, the location scouts for a film that you and your art-student nephew will both want a cameo in.

“People ask if there’s a technique to choos-ing neighborhoods, and actually there is,” Ace’s Wilson says, “because it’s all in the rela-tionships.” His colleague Sawdon notes that co-founder Calderwood’s greatest gift lay in making connections; he collected friends in creative circles, from visual artists to musicians to clothing designers, and delighted in mix-ing one group with another. He approached hotel development the same way—seeking introductions, asking questions, leaning hard on friends’ advice. And it’s how the brand has carried on in his absence. (Calderwood died of an apparent drug overdose in 2013.) Band-ing with so many creatives and entrepreneurs when opening its hotels, Ace is never short of networks to tap. That popularity translates to power, as Ace works with real-estate develop-ers to attract like-minded retail brands, not only to the hotel but also to the surrounding streets. “We like to keep the people who inspire us close by,” Ace’s Sawdon says. “We’ve been lucky enough to anchor all of these disparate

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retailers, record stores, and pop-ups, and that ultimately allows us to engage and collaborate with more interesting and daring people.”

Wilson offers as an example the Ace Pittsburgh, which began in 2010 as a conversation between Matthew Ciccone, a local entre-preneur, and Eric Shiner, then curator of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. Ciccone had been active in an effort to revive East Liberty, a faded neighborhood not far from the Carnegie Mellon campus. “The great part about it was all these beautiful pieces of architecture that remained—churches, storefronts, an old YMCA,” Ciccone recalls. He was hoping to get a hotel into the area. Shiner suggested he speak to his friend Calderwood, who was curious but hesitant: London was in the works, as was a hotel in downtown L.A. But Ciccone kept in touch, and in 2014, his firm teamed with the Ace principals to develop a hotel—which wound up occupying that former YMCA. (The Ace Pittsburgh won a spot on Condé Nast Traveler’s Hot List last month.)

Investing in a fringe locale is a cultural choice as much as an eco-nomical one: a show of faith in a neighborhood’s potential, balanced with a hunch that it won’t transform itself too much. East Liberty, Pittsburgh, is well removed from downtown and from anywhere your mother might want to be, yet its mix of old-man bars and edgy art spaces jibes well with the Ace ethos. And that stately Presbyte-rian church across the street? Now the congregants, many of them dressed to the nines, flock to the Ace hotel’s restaurant for Sunday brunch. “Our feeling—and this was something Alex was particularly good at—is that you don’t want to just drop into a place and throw open the doors,” Sawdon says. “You want to become part of the com-munity.” That notion has made the hotels gathering points in neigh-borhoods that didn’t have them. Walk into any Ace outpost and you’ll typically see locals meeting for drinks alongside overnight guests.

Their success has encouraged other hospitality brands to take a similar tack, putting hotels in places that might scare off mainstream developers. What Ace has done for low-profile neighborhoods, the Louisville, Kentucky–based 21c group has done for lower-profile cities, opening art-driven “museum hotels” in places like Louisville and Cincinnati. Four more hotels are now in the works, including one that just opened in a derelict Model T factory in Oklahoma City.

Craig Greenberg, president of 21c, won’t discount the possibility of going into established sections of major cities. “But it’s a unique and extremely exciting and satisfying experience to open a hotel in a place like an old factory,” he says. Working on the fringes has its challenges, Greenberg stresses. “If you’re going to an established area, it’s easier to get the required funding.” With an emerging loca-tion, investors can be cagey: Is there enough cultural infrastructure to support a hotel?

One solution, which 21c employed in Cincinnati, is the private/public partnership—the city teams with the brand and its investors to co-fund a hotel in order to reinvigorate an area. Greenberg points to increased foot traffic in neighborhoods where 21c has opened hotels, and to rising commercial rents, as indicators of the model’s success.

B U T A S T H E market grows crowded with uniquely decorated hotels in transitioning neighborhoods, how long can the hipster-ho-tel bubble last? “Instead of being the eleventh Hilton-type brand downtown, you look to the fringe,” says Lauro Ferroni, senior vice presi-dent at real estate adviser JLL’s Hotels & Hos-pitality Group. “But one limitation is there are only so many interesting sub-markets.”

For now, Ace is showing it can keep adapt-ing. In New Orleans, the Warehouse District had been farther along than East Liberty or NoMad—already home to the National WW II Museum and five of Donald Link’s acclaimed restaurants. A New Orleans–based architec-ture firm was brought in, while Roman and Williams, who’d worked on the Ace New York, collaborated on the interior design. Still, its in-dustrial patina bestows a frontier cachet. Head up to the Ace’s rooftop pool and you can gaze over the aging brick buildings that give the area its name. Beyond are the towers of the Central Business District, and beyond that—unseen and unheard from the Ace—the neon throb of the French Quarter.

“To us, this location was the best of all worlds,” Sawdon says. “It’ll take you 15 min-utes to walk to the Quarter. But you’re in a part of New Orleans you might not have explored, in a neighborhood we really love, and that’s loved by the people we love.” Sure, it’s a bit off the beaten path. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

The Stumptown Coffee Roasters café at the Ace Hotel New Orleans.

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R 61

Drink Wine, Eat Jamón, See No OneThink of Spain’s Extremadura—a bucolic farming region backed up against Portugal—as Cortona pre Under the Tuscan Sun. It’s the home of jamón Íberico, produces much of the world’s best sheep’s milk cheese, and is responsible for the kind of crisp whites that are worth the three-hour drive from Madrid. Here’s how we’re planning our next laid-back— meaning, doing as little sightseeing as possible while eating the best food possible—European getaway.

HOME BASE

Hospedería Convento de La Parra, a former Clarist convent that’s now a 21-room hotel with a small swimming pool surrounded by daybeds. Its minimalist decor—whitewashed walls, gauzy floor-to-ceiling curtains, and sheepskin rugs on terra-cotta floors—is a welcome coun-terpoint to the dry, rugged landscape.

GETTING AROUND

You’ll definitely need a car, but to really get close to the area’s groves of ancient olive trees and crumbling Roman ruins, get yourself on a horse. Jerebeque

Trails, in the town of Trujillo, keeps a sta-ble of Andalusian purebreds.

WHERE TO TASTE

Cerro la Barca, outside Mérida, is one of the few vineyards rescuing the nearly forgotten Eva de los Santos, a slow-maturing grape that grows well in Extremadura’s dry, hot weather.

Don’t miss their Vegas Altas Blanco, an excellent un-oaked organic white.

WHERE TO EAT LIKE YOU LIVE THERE

In the town of Zafra, stop by La Mar-

quesa, housed in a centuries-old olive oil mill, for grilled meats, cheeses, and plates of beautifully marbled, acorn-fed jamón. Be sure to order the risotto with Idiazabal cheese first thing—it sells out early.

THE RESERVATION TO MAKE

IN ADVANCE

At the two-Michelin-starred Atrio, chef Juan Antonio Pérez relies heavily on local ingredients in his daily tasting menu, which includes dishes like frog’s leg–stuffed tomatoes and truffle pâté en croûte. And then there’s the wine cellar stocked with the world’s best bottles—Haut-Brion, Lafite Rothschild, Latour. E D N A I S H AY I K

Word of MouthIn the Know

Scents in the City

Geo. F. Trumper Ian Fleming favored the private, velvet-curtained booths at this over 100- year-old Mayfair institution whenever he needed a shave and a trim.

Nomad Barber LDN Miguel Gutierrez re-searched grooming trends across 30 countries before opening his East End shop in 2014.

Ruffians At this hipster-esque Covent Garden outfit, you’ll be handed a stiff drink before you even make it to the retro bar-ber’s chair. J O N R OT H

When the celebrated French nose Francis Kurkdjian created Mr. Burberry, the newest male fragrance from the British luxury brand, he drew inspiration from the great barbershops of London. “The scent is about that freshness and cleanness,” says Kurkdjian. Go under the razor at any of these favorite Old Smoke es-tablishments to catch a whiff for yourself.

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Half Dome at Yosemite

National Park, California.

Close EncountersYou’ve probably car-camped in one with your family, contemplated rock formations with friends in another while high as a kite, or hiked through their ancient trees and desolate peaks. Our national parks are turning 100, and today this vast network of rugged landscapes, biblical weather swings, and roving wildlife represents some of the last places where we can still come face-to-face with a vision of Amer-ica as it once was. Here, a few vocal partisans (some of them from our archives) testify to the parks’ continued power to shock and awe.

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Word of MouthReconsidered

Most of us pretty much know one version or another of how the national parks began, as if with the story of an old uncle (in this case the twenty-sixth pres-ident of the United States, The-odore Roosevelt), about whom family lore shifts slightly with each year’s retelling. We’ve heard of how the Robust One, doing his manly things on a hunting trip out west, happened upon the caldera of Yellowstone and fell in love with it, and supported the idea—unique at the time—of making it a national park.

Never mind that the story is apocryphal. (Although Teddy created five national parks, Yel-lowstone pre-dated him, and it was Woodrow Wilson who signed the act creating the Na-tional Park Service in 1916.) The system now includes some 400 parks and historic sites, encom-passing over 84 million acres. Some are small (Hot Springs, Ar-kansas); others, like my favorite, Glacier National Park in Mon-tana, straddle two countries.

I took my oldest daughter on a daylong hike on the Granite Park Chalet trail in Glacier when she was six months old, toting

her in the front pack. At the chalet, I sipped tea—the larch in the valleys far below blazing gold, the blue haze of the smoke from a far-off wildfire softening the mountains, the namesake mountaintop glaciers smaller than in the black-and-white photos from a generation ear-lier. She doesn’t remember it, of course, and yet I believe also there is a deeper part of her that will always know the shape of that land underfoot as she bobbed in her sling, measuring in that manner each contour and the sound of the wind up high.

In the beginning, our parks—or the idea behind them—was pretty much solely to serve our hungers, whether recreational (Yellowstone visitors in the late nineteenth century would sup-posedly wander out to Old Faith-ful, shove their laundry down into its sulfurous maw, then wait the 65 minutes for their steam-cleaned if malodorous clothing to be ejected into the sky) or spir-itual. (I’m reminded of the great naturalist John Muir in Yosem-ite: “by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.”)

They were our parks, and we celebrated them almost as an object of wealth. Through sub-sequent generations, however, we have come to see that there is additional value beyond our original impulse to enclose these places, for they now serve as islands, gardens of refugia for our cleanest air, clearest water, and for a biological diversity which far exceeds that of pub-lic or private lands lacking such protection. Our parks house the minute, such as endangered but-terflies and delicate, carnivorous

P A S S I T D O W N

“Out on the Anhinga Trail, the only sounds you hear are the wind riffling through the saw grass and the plash of fish feeding on insects and one another and the great long-necked anhingas diving or emerging from the mahogany waters of a sluggish, seaward-moving slough. You hear a hundred frogs cheeping and croaking

and the sweet wet whistle of a red-winged blackbird. A primeval six-foot-long alligator passes silently through the deep slough to the opposite side, coasts to a stop in the shallows, and lurks, a corrugated log with eyes. An anhinga rises from the water and flies like a pterodactyl to a cluster of nearby mangrove roots and cumbrously spreads and turns its enormous wings like glistening black kites silhouetted against the noontime sun. It’s mid-May, yes—but what century?”

swamp-plants, and the grand: none more famous than the iconic bison and grizzly bears of Yellowstone, both of which wander that park with freedom but which are now at risk of be-ing hunted if they stray beyond the park’s boundaries.

Today, we risk failing our legacy in other ways. We built roads and infrastructure into the parks’ interiors, encouraging people to visit them—the parks, in that manner, serving as a kind of cultural currency to be trans-ferred, in story and memory, from grandparents to parents to children, and uniting strangers in the uncommon experience of wonder. But now these systems are defunded and crumbling, as if we’ve forgotten them.

Conservation biology holds that the larger and rounder an ecosystem is, the more resilient it is against the external forces that would weaken it. Yet we are not protecting the parks’ flanks, the

S E P T E M B E R 1 9 9 4

Russell Banks on Everglades National Park, Fla.

Great Smoky Mountains

National Park

59Number of

national parks in the

National Parks System.

is the most visited.

100

R i c k B a s sAuthor of For a Little While: New

and Selected Stories

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“A few years ago, my daughter and I hiked up Mount Washburn. It was a glorious summer day, and although we had planned to climb no more than halfway, the top of the mountain beckoned. Standing at the summit, we had a tremendous sense of accomplishment—and if the adventure had ended there, it would have been sublime.

But mountains and mountain weather have a way of changing the story, and almost as soon as we started down, dark clouds sizzling with lightning charged across the valley like an advancing army. The rain arrived first, sheets of it, and then the wind picked up, sending those sheets sideways. We joined hands and ran down the trail, counting the seconds between a flash of lightning and the sound of it, until they were the same thing. We were well above tree line, completely exposed,

running for our lives and feeling hunted—the most primal fear. We made it, obviously, but just barely. As soon as we reached the park-ing lot and dashed into the car, a bolt of light-ning shot by overhead, entered the ground, ran up the roots of a nearby pine, and exploded out of the earth like a missile. And so, instead of leaving the mountain triumphant, we left it feeling grateful and stu-pid and humble and rightfully small in the face of the powerful, wild, spectacular indifference of the natural world.”

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country at their edges, through which the wildlife and entire ecological processes flow. Gold mines, roads, clear-cuts, and livestock gnaw their way right up against the dashed-line boundar-ies of these sanctuaries.

What will the future of the parks hold? It is worth noting that the two words economical and ecological share the same Greek root. Beyond the benefits the parks offer us, there awaits a more mature perspective: the idea that beauty can exist be-yond our pronouncements of what is or isn’t beautiful. And in that realization, a greater wis-dom might be made available to us. It is in the parks, and in their nearby wilderness, where we can still catch the scent and sight and sound of an older world that was beautiful back before we saw it and called it so, and which will—if we steward them carefully—re-main so long after we each close our eyes at last.

“ In the end, it may be solitude that the future will thank us for—the kind of solitude our ancestors knew; solitude that inspired in their imaginations the creative acts which made our survival as a species possible.”

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Sue Halpern on Yellowstone National Park, Mont.

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T E R R Y T E M P E S T W I L L I A M S O N G R A N D C A N Y O N , Z I O N , C A N Y O N L A N D S , A N D A R C H E S N A T I O N A L P A R K S

134Highest

temperature recorded

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Mesa Verde National Park

in Colorado, has over 600

ancient Pueblo cliff dwellings.

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Word of MouthReconsidered

I grew up in Palo Alto, Califor-nia, next to Silicon Valley. My parents had met in a painting class at Stanford in the 1960s, though eventually my dad gave up painting and went to Har-vard Business School. When my brother and I were born, in the late seventies, my father was re-covering from several substance addictions. He was completely clean by the time I was five, and though I was too young to recall him drunk, I do remember some of his recovery strategies.

These included weekend trips to Yosemite. The four-hour drive was always hell for my brother and me because we had to sit in the backseat. The last leg was es-pecially difficult since it wound through the mountains and made us carsick, and it was scary to think about the steep drop just beyond the small fence on the right as we climbed the moun-tain in the dark.

We always stayed at the Ah-wahnee, the old stone hotel that had inspired the designs of Kubrick’s fictional Overlook Hotel in The Shining. There was

an enormous dining room with a huge fireplace where we’d have breakfast before our long days of hiking. I always got waffles or pancakes. My dad said it was crucial fuel for our adventures.

My dad led us down trails. We went to caves; we went to the base of El Capitan, the boxy brown mountain; we went to Yosemite Falls, high and fantastical, like something out of The Lord of the Rings. There was very little talking on these walks. It was meditative. I imagined that I was an elf or a warrior, with Orcs be-hind every tree and dragons high on the mountains.

As a child I appreciated these trips, but not fully. They felt more like a matter of course, something our family just did. Still, I couldn’t help but be im-pressed by how grand every-thing was, the mountains bigger than anything in my normal world, with their unfathom-able height and size foreboding death, things I could never con-tend with. I thought about the climbers who had conquered them and it made me dizzy with fear. Eventually the pull of my burgeoning social life grew stronger than the lure of hiking with my father and my brother.

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A P R I L 2 0 1 0

G U Y M A R T I N O N J O S H U A T R E E N A T I O N A L P A R K , C A L I F .

“ Through the netting, we can see the Milky Way stretching in a symphonic arc east into high, bright space, a staggering view of the cosmos, but as we see it, fighting to sleep in God’s own aerodynamic test tunnel, the cosmos is a huge joke of which we are the butt.”

Height in feet of Denali (formerly

Mount McKinley), in Alaska’s Denali

National Park, the highest point in

the United States.

1,943

301

Depth in feet of Crater Lake, Oregon,

equivalent to more than 6 Statues of Liberty.

Number of endangered species

living in the national parks.

J a m e s F r a n c oActor and filmmaker

20,310

Polychrome Mountain, in Denali

National Park.

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When I was older I wrote a short story called “Yosemite” in which I tried to paint the park as an Edenic paradise. The boy narrator is growing up, and on his final trip there he finds that the facade of Eden, and his un-derstanding of his father, are starting to crack. In the story, the two boys and their father come across candles in a cave that have been arranged in a rit-ualistic circle, and later, on the side of the road, a skeleton that looks human (things we actually found). The character based on me gets jealous of the attention the father gives to the younger

son, and recedes emotionally. Later, the father gives his sons the facts-of-life talk, initiating them into the sins of experience.

I gave the story to one of my classmates at NYU, Gabrielle Demeestere, and she adapted it into a film by the same name. She asked me to play the father character, so in December 2013 I went back to Yosemite.

When we started filming, not only did I experience a perspec-tival reversal by playing my dad opposite my younger self, but Gabby had selected the very lo-cations to film where my father had taken us: the Ahwahnee Ho-tel, Yosemite Falls, El Capitan. In the dining hall scene, I tried to drum enthusiasm into the kids, who were dreading another hike. At the waterfall scene, I had to reprimand the older boy (based on me) for picking on his brother, just as my father had done. Back at the Ahwahnee, I told the boys about the birds and the bees, and they squirmed with discomfort on the bed.

Through the eyes of the fa-ther character, I saw how much my own father had done for my brother and me. The time and energy he took to take us on those trips. The love and atten-tion he’d offered us on our hikes. But I also realized that he was healing himself.

When I think of Yosemite now, I think of my father. Walking in nature, being silent, staring in awe at the sublimity of the moun-tains were gifts he has given to me. When I need to retreat from the loud, hectic urban world that I live in most of the time, I can lose myself in those peaceful sanctuaries that my father re-vealed to me.

The best way to convey what the American national parks mean to someone from my little island—Britain—is to see one of our own parks from the point of view of a visitor from North America. Finding herself in En-gland, a character in a story by Canadian writer Kate Pullinger notices that “there are a few lakes, somewhere, but they are all kept in the Lake District, as if one can’t allow lakes just any-where.” This makes it sound like the natural equivalent of some zoned “entertainment district”—especially since so much of its allure (Wordsworth, the Roman-tics) is marinated in that special British preserve, “history.”

The American national parks offer an escape from limiting ideas of district and history.

It’s not that they are timeless. Rather, you enter a realm of time on a vast scale. You wit-ness non-human or geological time at work as measured by the implacably slow, often incom-prehensible processes by which these marvels have been created. It’s as if your watch recalibrates itself and starts measuring time in millennia instead of minutes.

I’ll never forget seeing the brochures sent back to me in England—I was about ten—from an aunt who was touring the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert of Arizona. Those images of otherworldly landscapes and prehistoric light set a standard for natural beauty that seemed unsurpassable. I finally got to see these places for myself in my early thirties and experienced what has since become familiar: the ease with which the unsur-passable surpasses itself, even in the course of a single visit. The fact that the mind has been blown at Angels Landing in Zion on Tuesday does not stop it from being re-blown at Observation Point on Wednesday. Every time I go to Death Valley I find myself repeating the words of photog-rapher Edward Weston when he came in 1937: “My God! It can’t be!” But it can. We must make sure that it always will.

“ This far north in the bay, the land is a mere infant, a bare, till-covered tabula rasa uncovered by glaciers less than 20 years ago.”

S I Z E D O E S M A T T E R

G e o f f D y e rAuthor of White Sands: Experiences

from the Outside World

“To enjoy the park in summer requires submission to the idea that one’s fellow humans are also part of nature. You learn to seize your quiet moments. Now the Grotto Falls trail was ours alone, and I was walking briskly, partly out of concern that my solitude might prove short-lived.

“Just then I heard my husband hurrying to catch up, breathing con-siderably harder than the steep trail should have warranted. He said, ‘Keep walking.’ He was deliberately jangling his keys. He said he’d seen a small black bear ambling with her two cubs beside the trail. A little later we headed back down and there she was, the bear, coming up the path with her cubs. This was not the benign teddy my husband had described. This bear was enormous. We walked— very calmly—back to the falls. The bear kept coming. Until at last we ran into a large group of hikers bab-bling with excitement: They’d just seen a bear and had startled it off the trail. How my heart went out to them now, how dear they suddenly looked—my noisy fellow humans.”

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Francine Prose on Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tenn.

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arrived in Noto, by chance, at the magic hour. On that cloudless sum-mer day, the limestone capital of Sicilian Baroque architecture had begun to smolder with the setting sun. Just then, as if on cue, a pair of older men in tweedy flat caps and of nearly identical diminutive stature huddled in a brief—and likely well-rehearsed—argument. In a flash, southeastern Sicily had revealed itself: the literally blinding beauty of a town square in full solar meltdown while ancient grudges played out in emphatic hand gestures and deep sighs under the long shadows of a church facade.

Earlier that day, my husband and I, along with our two young sons, decided to cut short our trip to the northeastern town of Taormina in favor of somewhere a little less raucous and touristy. From everything we’d heard, the southeastern tip of Sicily, between Syracuse and Noto in the east and Ragusa and Modica to the west—with its concentra-tion of sleepy hilltop towns, accessible Greek ruins, and unspoiled beaches all within a 17-mile radius—sounded like the right mix of high culture and much-needed Smashball time. A quick Internet search for a decent hotel with a pool in the countryside yielded a couple of pros-pects. The first promised to be a tasteful conversion of a seventeenth- century monastery, but when we got there it looked instead like a parched 1980s-era golf resort somewhere near Phoenix. After pulling up to the second hotel, a sprawling seaside complex with faux-gilded minarets and a colonnade of crimson flags touting the resort’s partner-ship with an upscale car brand, we never even cut the engine.

Both properties typify the region’s fledgling high-end hospitality market, which has emerged around two categories of traveler: the European (and especially northern Italian) creative set, for whom this part of Sicily, with its caught-in-time humility, represents a kind of last frontier; and Sicilian Americans on their genealogical bucket-list trips, who often arrive to find that the island’s battered beauty doesn’t square with their Godfather-inspired old-country fantasies. In a rush to play

catch-up with more established summer playgrounds like the Amalfi and Ligurian coasts, Sicily has done what so many newly anointed destinations do—overcompensate with easy signifiers of modern luxury.

Luckily, I remembered that a friend had mentioned a newish hotel called Seven Rooms Villadorata in the heart of Noto, a UNESCO-protected, eighteenth-century Baroque masterpiece of town planning just 30 minutes southwest of Syracuse. I had enough cell reception to pull up some images as we wended our way over the dusty switch-backs off the A-18 that had taken us through hilly vineyards and arid scrubland, but not enough to get anyone on the phone. “I have a feeling about this place,” I told my husband, so we drove on.

When we arrived, I rang the bell at the stone archway outside the grand Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata, three floors of which house the hotel. We crossed a wide, sloping courtyard better suited to a horse-drawn car-riage than to our dusty teal sedan, and were met by Cristina Summa, a stylish designer and hotelier who grew up in Turin and spent childhood summers with her grandmother in Noto. For Summa, the acquisition in 2007 of the palazzo’s private apartment, and the restoration of its seven rooms, had been a lifelong dream. “We wanted to re-create the

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The Baroque Church of San Francisco in Noto, made of local tufo limestone. Right: Sicilian raw shrimp at Taverna La Cialoma in Marzamemi.We

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idea of the Grand Tour that the rich young people of the European aristocracy took,” she later told me, of her inspiration for the hotel. “Sicily was one of the stopovers where they were hosted in the noble houses to study history and art.”

Staying at Seven Rooms, which is neither a rustic agriturismo prop-erty nor a slick resort, is like spending time at the family estate of old friends. Built in 1731, near Noto’s highest point, the place feels in its formality much more French than Italian (as it turns out, the origi-nal owner had modeled it on a château in Montpelier); Summa’s chic and pristine restoration of the 20-foot-ceilinged guest rooms, at once grand and understated in a World of Interiors sort of way, reflects the building’s architectural influences and Noto’s history as a cultural and intellectual hub. With a mix of antique French and Italian furnishings and linens, and a unifying palette of gray, chalk, buff, and oatmeal, Seven Rooms seamlessly blends old and new—a crisp foil to the is-land’s ancient, earthy grit.

As is the case across so much of the region, the original town was home in turn to Ancient Greeks, Romans, Normans, and Arabs be-fore falling to the Christians in A.D. 1091. When the medieval village was leveled by an earthquake in 1693 and relocated nine miles away on a hill, it was rebuilt from the ground up by the celebrated Sicilian architects Paolo Labisi, Vincenzo Sinatra, and Rosario Gagliardi.

Presiding as if with open arms and overlook-ing the distant Ionian Sea five miles away, the Stone Garden, as Noto is called, is where these urban planners first standardized the use of tufo, a honey-colored local limestone, to catch the light across the town’s three lev-els (nobility up top, clergy in the middle, and everyone else at the base). Today, you can see the full expression of their Baroque de-sign ideals throughout Noto—an optimistic pacing of gardens, squares, churches, and staircases with a fanciful mix of convex and concave facades and all manner of putti, grif-fins, and grotesque masks.

It’s easy to cover the town on foot in a sin-gle afternoon along its two main arteries, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and the Via Cavour, which run east to west. Or if you use Noto as your base for exploring the re-gion, as we did, you can walk the streets at a languorous gelato-eating pace at the end of each day, as if you lived there. As we entered

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Clockwise from far

left: At Caffè Sicilia in Noto, where you can get the freshest cannoli with your espresso; almonds growing in the hills around Noto; in the Vendicari Nature Reserve, the ruins of

an eighteenth-century pier once used by tuna fishermen; La Cialoma in Marzamemi; the pool at the Country House Villadorata, a converted eighteenth-century residence in the Noto countryside.

town through the Porta Reale on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the imposing facade of San Francesco all’Immacolata Church appeared to rise from the top of an equally imposing set of steps, followed im-mediately by the Church of Santa Chiara (be sure to check out its oval interior). Outside the San Nicolo Cathedral, with its elaborate two-tiered facade and bell towers, a group of teenage girls eating ice-cream cones convulsed in exaggerated laughter while pretending not to notice the voluble boys in skinny jeans behind them. Meanwhile, a weathered, middle-aged accordionist played a sentimental tune, while his accomplice, a yellow parakeet, stood sentry on an upturned basket. It’s both melancholic and wry, destitute yet full of beauty. You get the sense that this scene—figures in silhouette, backlit at the day’s end like in an overexposed Kodachrome movie—would have played out much the same even a century ago.

From left: Spiaggia Marianelli, a secluded beach with lagoons and empty dunes in the Vendicari Nature Reserve; a suite at Seven Rooms in the Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata.

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The Baroque refinement of Noto is always surprising against the surrounding rugged landscape.

‘

bar and trattoria opens onto an unwittingly shabby-chic, sun-dappled deck by the sea. Try the sweet local shrimp, mixed seafood pasta with fresh tomatoes, and grilled octopus served on a wooden board.

Eating in Noto

Like Summa, a number of Italian mainlander transplants aren’t just spending summers in Sicily, they’re taking up residence here, lured by nostalgia for some back-to-the-land Italian ideal. As a result, a handful of charming restaurants have cropped up to serve a refined crowd.

S t andout GelatoIn the town center, a visit to the out-wardly unassuming 124-year-old

Caffè Sicilia, whose fourth-genera-tion co-owner, Corrado Assenza, serves almond-milk granita and cap-puccino ghiacciato (iced coffee with almond milk granita), is a must. The Ferran Adrià of pastry, Assenza is constantly evolving his confections, which might include hazelnut sponge cake with pumpkin puree or peach marmalade with a dusting of dark chocolate. Dessert, like the town’s architectural mix and local dialect, defies easy cultural classification, reflecting the French, Greek, Roman, Arab, and North African influences that distinguish Sicily from the rest of Italy. Our server directed us toward a lesser-known specialty: fresh buffalo mozzarella “broken open with your hands, never with a fork,” and topped with citrusy bergamot jam.

Updated Sici l ian Cla ssicsLike the intimate space itself— a whitewashed canteen with barrel- vaulted ceilings—Marco Baglieri’s dishes at Ristorante Crocifisso are a refreshing riff on Sicilian stalwarts. The unusually bright casarecce alla palermitana (pasta with sardines, fennel, and pine nuts) or fresh grilled

octopus and spaghetti with lightly sautéed shrimp and pesto—washed down with a bottle of crisp Etna Bi-anco—is the kind of dish you can eat every day.

Freshest CatchThe lightly breaded baked swordfish with cherry tomatoes at Ristorante Il

Cantuccio turned me into a swordfish lover—at least while I was in Sicily. Our boys devoured the homemade gnoc-chi with creamy pesto, which was topped with a dramatic heap of ricotta salata shavings.

A Minimalist ApproachAt Ristorante Manna Noto, in the Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata, the pared-back presentation of dishes like pan-seared octopus with artichokes showcases the chef ’s rev-erence for local ingredients, as well

as a degree of Japanese restraint (the chef ’s wife is Japanese). With a mix of mid-century decor and whimsical vintage neon signage, the restaurant presents an informal counterpoint to the hotel’s elegant design.

The Beach Situation

Within 5 to 12 miles of central Noto are some of the most secluded sandy beaches not just in Sicily but in all of Italy. The ones closest to town, Eloro-Pizzuta and Eloro, run right into the ruins of the seventh-century B.C. Greek city Eloro. A little farther south are San Lorenzo Beach and Calamosche in the Vendicari

Nature Reserve, a protected haven where flamingos, herons, and storks

In contrast to big European cities during the summer, this region of southern Italy has all the history of Rome along with the small-town breezy seaside charm of the Cinque Terre. (As many of us can attest, luring an eight-year-old through the Papal Apartments in Vatican City during an infernal August afternoon can make you never want to get on a plane with a child again.) Until you are in Noto, though, it’s hard to imagine just how close neighboring historic towns like Modica and Ragusa—and any number of An-cient Greek ruins and unspoiled beaches—are to the town center and to each other. This allows fam-ilies to achieve the summer vaca-tion trifecta of high culture, great food, and truly relaxing beach time—and makes sightseeing, especially with little ones, feel ser-endipitous rather than onerous.

Getting to Noto— and Beyond It

It’s easiest if you can get a flight into Catania, just over an hour from Noto, though many international flights land in Palermo (three hours away). You will need to rent a car, which is easy enough to do at either airport. Fortunately, the main high-ways—like the A18, which connects Catania to Syracuse and Noto— are smoothly paved. Be sure to re-quest a car with GPS since reception can be spotty if you’re reliant on Google Maps (especially with a lim-ited data plan).

Must- S top Roadside MealIf you’re looking for a fantastic lunch on your way from Catania to Noto, I Rizzari, near Agusta in Brucoli, is a worthwhile seafood pilgrimage. The dark interior of this tiny family-run

Notes on Noto: An Insider’s Guide

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Noto before sunset, when the streets come to life with locals on their passeggiata or doing their shopping.

Playing HouseIf you’re traveling with family or friends, consider renting the dreamy yet perfectly understated Villa Zisola for $10,200 a week. The six-bedroom estate sits amid olive, chestnut, and citrus trees and over-looks 125 acres of the Mazzei family’s vineyard, known for its Nero d’Avola. The property, with an idyllic swim-ming pool, is ten minutes from Noto and five minutes from Eloro Beach.

Side-Trip One: Ragusa and Modica

R AGUSAAn hour northwest of Noto, the town of Ragusa was also decimated by the earthquake in 1693 and rebuilt in the Baroque style. But if Noto is all horizontal breadth, Ragusa spirals improbably atop a hill like something out of Dr. Seuss. The restored Donnafugata Castle exemplifies nineteenth- century eclecticism—neo- Venetian Gothic and neoclassical elements on a seventeenth-century structure. The trefoil arches in the loggia, man-made caves and mazes, and exotic landscaping are a wonder-ful folly. It’s impossible to miss the Piazza Duomo, an open, palm tree–filled reprieve from the town’s narrow alleys. Reward yourself for the climb up with lunch or a gelato.

The Ref ined TableLocated steps from the Duomo di

San Giorgio in Ragusa Ibla (the lower town), the two-Michelin-star Duomo skews a little formal. Here, chef Ciccio Sultano represents Sicily’s new culi-nary guard—a native son who pays homage to his mother’s traditional cooking with ambitious dishes like maialino nero (black pork) di Nebrodi.

Local FlavorsHead to La Locandina for the kind of simple homemade seafood pastas that most restaurants tend to over-complicate, like the fresh taglionini with vongole (clams) and cherry to-matoes. Caravanserraglio, known for its pizza, also has a great seasonal menu of roasted vegetables and fish cooked in its wood-burning oven.

More S t andout Gelato Gelati DiVini does a memorable take on the ice-cream sandwich—three scoops of ice cream in a brioche bun. It’s also known for inventive flavors like Planeta Rosé (made with wine from a Sicilian vintner), Moscato Fan-tasia di Limone, and Fica Carube.

MODICA Just 25 minutes south of Ragusa, Modica is another shining example of Sicilian Baroque architecture, but the layers of Greek, Roman, Arab, and Norman civilization are more evident here. Modica is also the capi-tal of high-end chocolate production, which dates to the 1500s. The methods—as well as those used to make traditional Arab and Spanish cakes—remain the same to this day at the famous Antica Dolceria

Bonajuto, run by Pierpaolo Ruta. There is one chic hotel, Casa

Talía, if you want to spend the night, and great restaurants.

Culinar y Time TravelAs the names suggests, Osteria dei

Sapori Perduti (“Osteria of Lost Fla-vors”) is known for distinctly southern Sicilian cooking—think humbly deli-cious dishes like pasta con il macco, a brothy tagliolini with fava beans, fennel, and sage, or a classic bollito.

Take Home a Bot tleEnoteca Rappa is a tiny shop that specializes in Sicilian wines, craft beers, honey, jams, meats, and cheeses.

Side-Trip Two: Syracuse and Ortigia

If you squint, you can conjure this once-mighty city of 300,000 that at its height defeated an Athenian armada in 413 B.C. Cicero called Syra-cuse “the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all.” Today, it has one of the best collections of ancient ruins dating back to the eighth century B.C., including a Greek theater and a Roman amphitheater. Spend half a day at the site and the other half wandering the glorious bright-white island of Ortigia, where the Greeks, Romans, and Normans left their collective mark and where a restrained Baroque architectural style prevails. The sun-drenched, café-strewn Piazza del Duomo feels strikingly modern in its openness. Within a small radius is the sixth- century Temple of Apollo, still largely intact, and the Piazza Archi-

mede, an homage to the native son and mathematician.

Lunch on the GoFrom a small shop with an outdoor stall, Caseificio Borderi turns out gigantic sandwiches (for less than $6) made from house-made mozza-rella and a choice of artisanal hams and salamis with chopped herbs, oil, and lemon juice. Wash them down with a local beer or Sicilian wine.

Fea st of the SensesOrtigia has a fabulous outdoor food market near the Talete parking area, open every morning but Sunday. Here, tables are piled high with the ripest tomatoes and peaches, fresh swordfish and sea urchins, and you can watch Sicilian vendors do what they do best: shout, gesticulate with big carving knives, and make sure you don’t go home without something memorably delicious.

are more populous than humans and the pale aqua waters are calm and clean. One great option is to rent lounge chairs and umbrellas at the Agua Beach Resort, in San Lorenzo Noto, for just $12 a day; stay for a light lunch, like a plate of flavorful Pachino tomatoes with mozzarella.

Sun-Dappled LunchJust a ten-minute drive south of Agua Beach, you can have a proper sit-down meal in Marzamemi at the seaside Taverna La Cialoma. Order the carpaccio gamberi (raw local shrimp) or the zucchini with shrimp and any simply grilled fish.

Where Else to Stay

Seven Rooms Villadorata is the place to book so you can explore Noto’s his-toric center like a local, but for a whole different take, you might consider spending time in campagna as well.

Rural Escape Seven Rooms recently opened the Country House Villadorata, ten minutes outside town. It’s an equally luxe property with sleek modern furnishings and a gorgeous zero- entry pool. Rooms with terraces sur-rounded by citrus, olive, and almond trees are great for decom-pressing at the end of the day.

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No American road trip looms larger in our collective consciousness than the one bound west. Last summer, Italian-born photographer Renato D’Agostin followed in

the footsteps of Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac, traveling 7,439 miles on his 1983 BMW motorcycle from New York to Los Angeles, developing film

in hotel sinks along the way.

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Previous page, left: Death Valley, California, at high noon. ”I think Mars is more hospitable,” says D’Agostin. Right: The Grand Canyon. This page, clockwise from top left: Holding a sun-warmed lizard; flora in southern New Mexico; soldiers from a nearby base walk some of White Sands National Monument’s 275 square miles of desert and dunes, made of rare, blindingly bright gypsum; the iconic meander in the Colorado River called Horseshoe Bend; a working farm not far from Malibu; to D’Agostin, the headlight of his motorcycle mimicked the full moon; tourists queue at Niagara Falls; heading toward Birming-ham, Alabama, on a small highway leaving the Smoky Mountains.

“Everything changes,” D’Agostin says. “It’s hard to believe it is the same country from north to south, east to west. The landscape keeps surprising you.”

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he drive from Princeville down to Hanalei, on the North Shore of Kauai, is one of the better ways on this planet to spend ten minutes. Just past a sleepy one-engine fire station, Kuhio Highway—the island’s only thoroughfare, which snakes along its rounded coast—veers left and descends down a bluff from Princeville’s manicured condo developments into a lush agricultural valley of bright- emerald taro fields set against mountains so deeply, hauntingly green they’re practically blue. (It’s no wonder Kauai stood in for Vietnam

in 2008’s Tropic Thunder.) At the base of the hill, amid skinny palm trees, you’ll find a one-lane steel-trussed bridge originally built in 1912. Cross it in the early evening, as the sun drops behind shadowy, cloud-capped peaks, and the mountains texturize, separating into lush layers of dense overgrowth, a verdant orgy of jades, limes, and chartreuse aglow in Hawaii’s famously soft light.

S O M E T H I N G M A G I C A L happens on this drive. At the very least, you look up from your iPhone, and everyone in the car falls silent. People say they are “called” to Kauai—here’s where that begins to sound less Bible-thumpy. My father-in-law discovered it in 1982, when a long layover in Honolulu prompted him to ask an airline employee what other island he should visit. At the airport in Lihue, on Kau-ai’s South Shore, he rented a car and started driving. A year later, he’d bought a condo in Prince ville, the North Shore’s most devel-oped area, where there’s a St. Regis and an 18-hole golf course—but no stoplights. For the next two decades, he would fly his three chil-dren to Kauai from Washington, D.C., for the summer. My husband and I still come every

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other year, if we’re lucky, staying in the house his parents purchased from novelist Haruki Murakami. Each time we drive to Hanalei—usually to grab burritos at Pat’s Taqueria, a re-liably delicious taco truck, before hitting one of the near-empty beaches outside town—we revive a long-running fantasy of ours. It’s the one where we pack up our belongings and ditch our hamster-wheel life in New York for a more contemplative existence out here on the most remote of the major Hawaiian is-lands, just a stone’s throw from the date line, at the last stop before tomorrow. The details inevitably bring us back to earth, but the drive has lost none of its power.

Jim Moffat, a celebrated chef from San Francisco, actually did pull the escape hatch.

“I came here on a whim and instantly fell in love with it,” he recalls, grabbing a cold-brewed Maui-grown coffee at the counter of his new artisanal bakery in Hanalei. “I asked my girl if she wanted to raise kids on the beach, and she said yes.” The couple moved here in 2004; he opened Bar Acuda, a perpetually packed tapas restaurant, in 2005; earned a James Beard nod in 2012; and, last year, took over the town’s underwhelming coffee shop and replaced it with the Hanalei Bread Company, which sells insanely delicious $8 chai spice and coco-nut java drinks alongside homemade millet sandwich bread. Take a seat on the bakery’s wraparound porch for some fantastic people- watching—this is the de facto town square, where tattooed surfers, attractive young tourist couples, oddly healthy wild chickens, and, de-pending on the day, Pierce Brosnan (who has a house here) all pass by.

Other than Moffat’s establishments, a new influx of food trucks, and a slight increase in rush-hour traffic, Hanalei has changed little in recent years. There are still no national chain stores, or buildings taller than a coconut tree (this is an actual law on Kauai), and no man who lives here

Previous page, from

left: A sunset surf at Hanalei, Kauai’s largest bay, with two miles of beach; Wailua Falls tumbles 80 feet near the island’s eastern shore. This page,

from left: Goat’s milk products from Kauai Kunana Dairy are sold at markets around the island; the waters off the Na Pali Coast, the site of a famous 11-mile hike; the Moeller family of Naikela Botani-cals, part of Kauai’s growing sustainable farming movement; walking the secluded Secret Beach.

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seems to wear a shirt, ever. As night falls, the ring of exquisite beaches framing Hanalei Bay fades to near-black, lit not by high-rises but by the porch lights of a few bungalows on stilts set back in the trees (they appear unassuming but fetch millions). “Sometimes it’s like liv-ing on an island in the middle of the ocean!” snorts Moffat with a shrug when an employee finds him on the porch to inform him that his restaurant and bakery have both lost power.

Delicious though his food may be, Moffat knows that no one comes to the North Shore of Kauai for a meal. There’s no better way to describe what one does here than the well-

worn phrase commune with nature. “It’s a heavy place,” says author and former pro volleyball player Gabby Reece, who spends half the year on Kauai with her husband, big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton, and hosts free morning workouts when she’s in town. “There’s not a lot of white noise or distraction, so you kind of have to deal with yourself.” This is a place where the surf is big, the rain plentiful, and the hiking legendary (many trails end at waterfalls or pristine beaches, like Hanakapi‘ai, the hidden slip of sand two miles into the Na Pali Coast’s famous Kalalau Trail). The North Shore is the last word in beaches, really—a mic drop of sand-meets-sea around every bend in the road—and has been im-mortalized in films from South Pacific (1958) to The Descendants (2011), making the island an open secret in Hollywood. (Ben Stiller and Bette Midler own homes here, and Mark Zuckerberg recently bought about 700 acres near Kilauea, a former sugar plantation.)

While big-name resorts have proliferated on the sunnier South Shore, the North has retained a sort of outlaw anti-glamour, resisting so much as a boutique hotel. Residents have successfully blocked state plans to expand and elevate the bridge into Hanalei, which floods when it rains and bottlenecks traffic at other times, because the plans would have eased the way for tour buses and construction vehicles. As a result, Hanalei, especially, often feels like some secret Hawaii, a last bastion of undiscovered authenticity where it’s still possible to live like a local. Here you can watch Hamilton, who grew up on Kauai, catch perfectly peeling waves at the point break a few hundred yards out from the St. Regis. Or rent a board from the Hanalei Surf Company and ride some yourself at Pine Trees, the narrow beach on Hanalei Bay where local legends Andy and Bruce Irons learned to surf. Back in Princeville, you can walk down an unassuming path and find yourself swimming at

Queen’s Bath, a gleaming tidal pool carved by lava, amid fish crashed in by the waves, or waiting for a sea turtle to swim by before jumping off low cliffs into the ocean. (Don’t even consider doing this unless it’s summer and the surf is calm; plenty of people have been swept out to sea here.) Later, you’ll want to blow off your dinner reservation and pick up fresh ono at the fish market behind the kitschy Dolphin Restaurant, then make a picnic of it on the beach. Kauai rewards the casual and spontaneous. “So many of the best experiences here are about getting lost,” says Aaron Moeller, 35, a Kauai-raised organic farmer and founder of Naikela Botanicals, a line of locally grown herbal teas and health powders. “Instead of having a destination, just put the wind in your hair. Check the waves at different spots, see what’s happening today.”

To understand how the North Shore has retained its end-of-the-earth vibe, never succumbing to a Tulum-like fate, you have to know its past. As people who live here like to tell you, Kauai is the only Hawaiian island that has never been conquered, sep-arated from the others by a wide, ornery channel that thwarted King Kamehameha I, who united the other islands by force in the early nineteenth century (Kauai joined the kingdom by treaty in 1810). Its geographic remoteness has cultivated a sense of sep-arateness, with ancient inhabitants speaking a distinct dialect of Hawaiian. This history informs locals’ identity. “Kauai is kind of the last bastion of fighters,” says Sheila Donnelly Theroux, a luxury publicist on Oahu (and wife of writer Paul Theroux) whose family has lived in Hawaii for four generations and who calls Kauai her favorite island. “The peo-ple who live in Hanalei are the reason it’s so retro. I can’t think of another place in Hawaii that’s so preserved in time.”

Hanalei, especially, often feels like some secret Hawaii, a last bastion of undiscovered authenticity where it’s still possible to live like a local.

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Like 97 percent of Kauai, the Na Pali Coast is inaccessible by road, meaning you have to hike or kayak in to enjoy its dramatic cliff faces and quiet coves.

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here were also the hurricanes. Iwa crashed through in 1982, and, a decade later, Iniki, a Category 4, devastated Kauai. The storm, etched in the minds of locals, took years to rebuild from. “We haven’t changed as quickly as we might have if we’d had a vibrant economy for the last 30 years,” says Jan TenBruggencate, a local communications consul-tant and newspaper reporter. Because Kauai lacks Maui and Oahu’s tourist infrastructure, it occasion-ally creaks under the weight of the modest crowds that come to admire it. Ke‘e Beach, at the trailhead

leading to the Na Pali Coast, has suffered for its famed beauty, with cars clogging the parking lots at the end of the road. It’s one of the few genuinely crowded places on the island, which is why locals tend to avoid it in favor of beaches like Lumahai, where you can pull a car right up to the sand near a stand of ironwood pines. This is where I meet Koral McCarthy, a tanned, blue-eyed thirtysomething swimming with

her four-year-old daughter in the cold, clear river at the beach’s western edge (the ocean here is too rough for swimming). McCarthy grew up a surfer girl in Wainiha, a slip of a town just past Hanalei with a large popu-lation of native Hawaiians, one of whom is her husband. She recently opened the Ohana Shop, a stylish anti- souvenir bou-tique that preserves traditional Hawaiian craftsmanship by selling design-minded objects like hand-carved bowls and minia-ture surfboards made by one of Kauai’s top board shapers, Bobby Allen. She represents a growing class of young North Shore en-trepreneurs who believe Kauai is special, al-most mystical, and that its culture and tight community can be preserved with conscious

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Saturday farmers’ market, which is rapturously attended by almost everyone on the North Shore and overflows with locally grown chard, bananas, juicy papayas, cacao, and coconuts with straws in them.

But few communal events are as pleasurable as drinking ginger margaritas around sunset at the St. Regis in Princeville. The hotel’s grand marble floors and dark wood paneling are delightfully out of step with the food trucks and barefoot culture of this place, and its bar terrace overlooks the east side of Hanalei Bay, giving everyone here—tourists and locals alike—a straight shot of the mountains and the electric-tangerine sun descending over the water. Tonight, Lyndie Irons, widow of pro surfer Andy (who passed away several years ago at age 32), her brother-in-law, Bruce Irons, and their respective chil-dren are at a table on the porch, glamorous surf royalty holding court up here in the sky as a smattering of locals paddle out to the break to catch the day’s last waves down below. “It never gets old,” Lyndie Irons had told me earlier in the week. “The beauty here, we never take it for granted—and I’ve traveled the world.”

small business. “There’s always going to be progress,” she says. “But this island has a way of taking care of herself. I don’t think she’ll ever be overrun by anything.”

M O E L L E R I S A L S O a young business owner who’s interested in redefining what it means to make a living here. Today, he’s walking us through his “garden,” a wild, unkempt expanse of herbs and flowers with exotic names like Thai Red Roselle, Panama berry, and Mexican mint marigold, all of which are twice the size of any herbs you’d find at a Whole Foods. “You’ve never tasted fresh ste-via before?” he asks me, tearing off a bright-green leaf. The island still imports roughly 85 percent of its food, but Moeller and other young organic farmers are working to change that, stocking restaurant kitchens across the island with local fruit, vegetables, and meat. He got his real start on the Big Is-land, at a sustainable operation owned by a tech billionaire, before returning home to Kauai with his wife and young daughters. Here, he connected with Eric and Lyn Tay-lor, philanthropists from South Africa who had bought 130 acres of undeveloped land on which they planned to run camps for dis-advantaged youth. Moeller now farms his massive herbs on two lush, rolling acres that look like paradise—or at least Jurassic Park, parts of which were filmed on land owned by the Taylors’ neighbors. “Kauai has the most idyllic growing conditions in the world,” Moeller says. That’s apparent at Hanalei’s

Kauai VitalsT O U C H I N G D O W N You can fly nonstop to Kauai’s Lihue Airport from nine U.S. cities, including Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

G E T T I N G A R O U N D The best way to navigate is by car. Both Dollar Rent a Car and Avis at Lihue Airport have a solid selection of all- terrain vehicles.

H O M E B A S ERentals are the way to go on the North Shore, and villa specialist Anne Pawsat-Dressler at Hawaii Hideaways has options ranging from two- to ten-bedroom (mostly beachfront) estates. For a shorter stay, consider the St. Regis on Hanalei Bay.

D O N ’ T H I K E I T A L O N E“Travelers don’t realize how wild our landscape is,” says Sue Kanoho of the Kauai Visitors Bu-reau. “They shouldn’t navigate on their own.” Guides from Outfitters Kauai can tell you where and how to ex-plore safely.

From left: Hanalei Pier at sunset; a rooster wanders the northeast town of Kilauea; with Kauai’s ideal growing conditions, farmers are harvesting an increasing diversity of crops on the North Shore.

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B Y J U L I A C O O K EP H O T O G R A P H S B Y M A T T H I E U S A LV A I N G

As a new generation of architects and designers

take charge, Portugal’s

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a recent Saturday afternoon, the broad Ribeira das Naus esplanade overflowed with Lisboans. At one end of the waterfront park, a kiosk did a brisk business in Super Bock beer and fried croquettes. Couples sat on a terraced limestone “beach” abutting the Tagus River, while joggers trailed dogs on a walkway above the water. Soaring wire sculptures towered over hulking stone benches, and stalky trees grew out of curious plastic planters. On landscaped lawns pitched toward the river, towels and blankets

formed a mosaic of sunbathers; behind them, blinding-white houses and terra-cotta roofs dominoed up the hillsides.

Later that evening, farther inland, a smartly dressed crowd filed into the Teatro Thalia for a violin concert, past four sphinxes guarding a neoclassical entrance of pale Lisbon limestone. The theater rose be-yond it, a tawny concrete box wrapped on the ground level in black mirrored glass. Inside, the auditorium itself was enveloped by the

on Previous page,

from left: Terra-cotta roofs near Lisbon’s harbor; the promenade in Almada, across the Tagus River from Lisbon. This page, clockwise

from above: Conceptual artist Leonel Moura designed these planters, which double as seats, for Praça do Comércio Square; Manuel Henriques at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s headquarters in Sinel de Cordes Palace; a dusty rose–colored government building in the capital.

We are interested in breaking with the visual cliché of traditional Portuguese architecture.”

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ruins of an older structure: an irregular tumble of brick arches that surrounded the stage and the audience, like a crown held in place by reinforcing concrete.

Five years ago, none of this existed. Teatro Thalia’s columns fronted the overgrown shell of the Count of Farrobo’s private opera theater, inaugurated in 1843 and left to molder after a fire destroyed the build-ing 20 years later. Along the riverfront, trash littered the rocky coast-line. Such scenes of rot and ruin were hardly unique: The city council estimates that 12,000 of Lisbon’s buildings—roughly 20 percent—sit in varying stages of decay.

Not for long, it would seem. In the next few years, the city will wel-come a major art, architecture, and technology museum, dozens of restored and landscaped public squares, several high-rises, a sprawl-ing new cruise terminal, and countless additional shops, studios, and cultural spaces.

The 2008 global economic crisis left Portugal’s unemployment rate among college graduates at nearly 40 percent—a potentially devastating blow for Lisbon’s burgeoning art and architecture scenes, and for a city then being touted as Europe’s next design hub. But initiatives launched in the wake of the crisis and aimed at retaining and empowering local talent have begun to bear fruit. Once-stalled building projects and ren-ovations are nearing completion. Local firms are subverting expec-tations with inventive, energetic results. Lisbon’s foretold boom may have turned out differently than expected, but it’s a boom nonetheless.

“We are interested in breaking with the visual cliché of traditional Portuguese architecture,” Diogo Lopes told me in 2014. Warm and thoughtful, the Lisbon-born architect was a partner at Barbas Lopes Arquitectos, one of two firms behind the restoration of Teatro Thalia. He was appointed chief curator of this year’s Lisbon Architecture Tri-ennale before his recent death, at age 43, from cancer. “Portuguese architecture can be described cartoonishly as ‘white architecture,’ de-liberately plain, relying on craftsmanship and heavy materials,” Lopes said. He credited the persistence of these traits to their inherent quality, utility, and ease of use. Lopes’s prescription for innovation, therefore, was to combine historic references with material experi-mentation, unorthodox thinking, persistence, and pragmatism. He had no interest in just changing the facades of otherwise traditional structures. “We’ve had to reclaim the right and the need to build this city, to intervene in the city on all its scales, not just with lightweight interventions,” he said. And Lopes was not alone. For the last decade, a loose collective of local architects, along with a few foreigners, has been pushing the ancient city into the future.

AT P R E S E N T, the skyline seems to hold as many cranes as cathedral spires. Much of the development is focused on two areas: the Tagus waterfront, in downtown Lisbon, and the suburb of Belém, which has become a culture hub. While many of these emerging structures make sly reference to the Portuguese vernacular, none of them will be remotely traditional, or deliberately plain.

One has already arrived: The new National Coach Museum, which opened in Belém last year, was designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Two galleries, set inside a massive white box, sit atop thick concrete columns and cubes of glass and steel. Da Rocha’s spare architecture contrasts cheekily with the museum’s centuries-old contents—velvet-and-silk carriages painted with cherubs and angels, their Baroque lines set against thin slashes of windows. Like so much of what’s rising in Lisbon these days, the

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museum slings Old Portugal aggressively into the twenty-first century. Across the road, the final touches are being added to the Museum for

Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT), a soon-to-open cultural center funded by EDP, Portugal’s electric company, and designed by English architect Amanda Levete’s firm, AL_A. Levete has sheathed the museum in shimmery, fish-like ceramic scales, a clever reference to the tiles cladding so many of Lisbon’s buildings and a visual corrective to the hulking brick turn-of-last-century power station next door. Low and curvaceous, MAAT’s form calls to mind the back of a whale, or an especially voluptuous serpent emerging from the riverbank.

Back in Lisbon, up in the hills, the Palácio Sinel de Cordes similarly slams old and new together. The eighteenth-century palazzo—with its double-height ceilings, grand staircase, and faded murals—served as a primary school before it was abandoned in 2006. Six years later, the

city lent it to the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, which, in partnership with a local design firm, has been renovating the space to provide offices for an architecture magazine, a design collective, and five other startups. A second phase of renovations will install a restaurant and bookshop in time for this year’s Triennale in October.

hat all this is happening just a few years after the economic crisis is perhaps surprising—and much of the architectural energy rippling through Lisbon today can be credited to a remarkably progressive and design-savvy city council. Ar-chitect Manuel Salgado, who along with Vittorio Gregotti conceived the Belém Cultural Center, one of Portugal’s prized institutions, has served as deputy mayor and head of urban planning for about nine years. Under his leadership, the city has introduced tax breaks for building renova-

tions, sponsored community-oriented design projects, and offered leasing grants for small businesses. These and other policies were intended in part to keep unemployed young architects and designers from fleeing for Brazil, northern Europe, or Dubai in search of jobs—and indeed, even as the bigger firms downsized, younger firms took the bait and stayed in town.

The new generation is more open to creative integrations of disci-plines—architecture and art, architecture and food, architecture and advocacy, architecture and performance—according to Triennale dep-uty director Manuel Henriques. “When you go into a field and there’s no jobs in what you were trained for, you adapt,” he told me. “The con-text forces you to make connections between different subjects.” To-day, Lisbon is blooming with collaborations and cross-pollinations. Local architecture firm Artéria teamed up with a group of activists in Mouraria, one of the city’s poorest yet most historic neighborhoods, to renovate and restore a decrepit building. The resulting cultural space, Mouradia—all polished concrete and bright-blue paint—hosts free DJ classes for teens and draws the neighborhood’s young artists for wine and Saturday-night concerts on the plaza outside. Meanwhile, a team of engineers and a designer founded Fruta Feia, a cooperative that’s significantly cut down on food waste in Lisbon. And the shop Cortiço & Netos, run by four brothers who inherited the business from their grandfather, offers a line of design goods composed of vintage tiles from demolished buildings and defunct manufacturers.

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Upriver from Belém’s museums, ambitious projects on downtown Lisbon’s waterfront are again moving forward after a recession- induced hiatus. A pair of mixed-use towers by the award-winning local firm Aires Mateus opened last year, and work continues on the new cruise terminal and a surrounding park. Last year, a city- sponsored competition put the winners in charge of renovating 31 plazas around Lisbon. And the heady list of design projects—be they grass-roots or starchitect-driven—goes on. There’s even a new walk-way up to the iconic Castelo de São Jorge, making the hilltop castle wheelchair- accessible for the first time.

And yet the change is measured enough that Lisbon still looks like itself. Current architects are worldly, modern, and inventive, but Por-tuguese craftsmanship, materials, and history all remain central to their projects. Product lines like Cortiço & Netos’s recontextualize traditional materials; new buildings nod to old.

“We have a generation of architects who’ve studied and worked abroad, yes,” Henriques said. “But we still use a lot of traditional Portu-guese materials and techniques—and we use them really, really well.”

Counterclockwise

from above: The Subvert Studio archi-tecture and design firm’s multidisciplinary team at a pavilion created for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Teatro Thalia’s performance space; at the Mercado da Ribeira, which was renovated in 2014.

The new generation is more open to creative integrations of disciplines: Lisbon is blooming with collaborations and cross-pollinations.

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Tips, tricks, and miscellany: Our editors’ guide to navigating the world.

B A D N E W SVirgin America—one of our Readers’ Choice

Awards mainstays—is no more. Alaska Airlines is buying the carrier for $2.6 billion (plus $1.4

billion in debt), which means the beloved brand, and its mood-lit planes, will cease to exist in 2018.

U N B E L I E V A B L E N E W SWith the goal of showing “real Sweden” to

the world, the tourism board for the Nordic nation launched the Swedish Number. Dial 46-771-

793-336 and be connected to a random Swede to chat about, well, whatever you’d like.

The Case for Visiting the Big City Right Now“With everyone heading to the coast, great hotels like the St. Regis in New York have more empty rooms in summer, which translates to deals for travelers,” says Century Travel’s Laura Epstein. “You’re more likely, for example, to get a free third night during a long weekend break. And city hotel room rates are about 20 percent lower than in the peak seasons (Fashion Week, the December holidays). Be flexible with dates, if you can. If a hotel has holes, they’re more inclined to offer you great savings for a room on those nights, so talk to them when inquiring and see what you can get.”

Brooklyn’s Coney Island.

G O O D N E W SJetBlue will add its popular business-class-style

Mint seats to more than 70 transcontinental and Caribbean daily flights in early 2017. Bring on the

fully flat seats, legit food (heirloom tomato salad, lobster risotto), and Birchbox beauty goodies.

T H E M U LT I - G E N E R AT I O N A L

S A G A S T H AT E V E R Y O N E W I L L

B E TA L K I N G A B O U T

T H I S S U M M E R

Not exactly beach reading, these

books will be fodder for your own

family reunion.

Barkskins, Annie Proulx

(Scribner)

In her first novel in over a decade,

Proulx follows the families of two

French immigrants in 1600s Quebec

through a 736-page, 300-year-spanning

epic about colonization and

deforestation.

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

(Knopf)

This buzzed-about debut from a young

Ghanaian writer tells the fate of the

descendants of two half sisters in

eighteenth-century Ghana, one raised

wealthy and the other enslaved and

shipped off to America.

The Nearly Indestructible Camera

The $279 Olympus TG-870 is waterproof, drop-proof, crush-proof, and sand-proof. In other words, it’s built to withstand most summer vacations. Plus, its 16 MP camera sensor is better than your smartphone’s, and thanks to built-in Wi-Fi, you can easily share your photos on Instagram the second you take ’em. Unless you’re underwater (getolympus.com).

$177Average cost of a five-

star hotel room last year in Panama City, which,

according to Hotels.com, is home to the world’s most

affordable luxury hotels. The most popular five-star

property in the city is the Trump Ocean Club

International Hotel and Tower Panama.

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NA

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AN

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ER

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y D A N I L O A G U T O L I

Don

’t G

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Aft

er

the

Oly

mpi

csYo

u’re

alr

eady

flyi

ng a

ll th

e w

ay to

Rio

de

Jane

iro,

flflso

why

not

add

ano

ther

stop

or t

wo?

Her

e, 12

So

uth

Am

eric

an d

estin

atio

ns th

at a

re e

asily

reac

hed

by p

lane

, car

, or h

elic

opte

r fro

m th

e G

ames

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el In

tel

Rio

20

16

Th

e a

dv

en

ture

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ins

in M

an

au

s,

wh

ere

yo

u’l

l h

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ab

oa

rd t

he

12

-pa

ss

en

ge

r G

ad

ea

n, a

14

0-f

oo

t y

ac

ht,

fo

r a

w

ee

klo

ng

ch

art

er

cru

isin

g o

ne

of

th

e w

orl

d’s

lon

ge

st

riv

ers

. Yo

u’l

l s

ee

pin

k d

olp

hin

s,

ba

rbe

cu

e o

n

sa

nd

ba

rs, a

nd

fi

sh

fo

r p

ira

nh

as

a

lon

g t

he

wa

y. 4

hou

rs to

Man

aus

1. Ta

ckle

the

Amaz

on.

5

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROL SACHS; ADRIAN GAUT; © GARDEL BERTRAND/HEMIS/CORBIS

14

Stay

in B

razi

l

2. S

ail t

hrou

gh a

ctua

l pa

radi

se.

Bra

zil i

sn’t

know

n fo

r nau

tical

ex

plor

atio

n, b

ut th

ere’

s no

be

tter

way

to d

o A

ng

ra

do

s

Re

is, t

he g

atew

ay to

roug

hly

350

sm

all i

slan

ds, t

han

by s

ea.

Hop

a fe

rry

or c

hart

er a

sa

ilboa

t and

cre

w w

ith th

e he

lp o

f a lo

cal t

rave

l spe

cial

ist

(see

“How

to M

ake

It H

appe

n”)

to h

it th

e be

ach

at ru

gged

ly

beau

tiful

Ilha

Gra

nde—

whe

re

you

can

stay

at t

he s

eclu

ded,

sh

oref

ront

Asa

lem

hot

el—

and

othe

r uns

poile

d is

les.

3

5 m

inut

es o

r 3

hou

rs

3. M

ake

an a

rchi

tect

ural

pi

lgrim

age.

The

cou

ntry

’s c

apita

l, B

ra

síl

ia, i

s fil

led

with

Osc

ar

Nie

mey

er’s

mon

umen

tal,

free

-flo

win

g bu

ildin

gs, i

nclu

ding

th

e N

atio

nal C

ongr

ess

and

the

Met

ropo

litan

Cat

hedr

al.

1¾ h

ours

4. S

umm

er li

ke a

cel

eb.

The

upp

er-c

lass

enc

lave

of

Bú

zio

s c

augh

t Am

eric

ans’

at

tent

ion

in 19

64 w

hen

Brig

itte

Bar

dot f

amou

sly

stol

e aw

ay

to th

e to

wn

with

her

Bra

zilia

n bo

yfrie

nd B

ob Z

agur

y. S

ince

th

en, c

eleb

ritie

s fr

om

Mad

onna

to M

ick

have

dip

ped

thei

r toe

s in

thes

e bl

ue-g

reen

w

ater

s. If

you

hav

e da

ys to

sp

are,

rent

a v

illa;

for s

hort

er

stay

s, u

se C

asas

Bra

ncas

B

outiq

ue H

otel

& S

pa, w

hich

is

clo

se to

the

beac

hes,

as

your

hom

e ba

se.

35

min

utes

or

3 h

ours

5. D

o So

uth

Amer

ica’

s m

amm

oth

falls

.B

ook

a ro

om a

t Bel

mon

d

Hot

el d

as C

atar

atas

—it’

s in

side

Igu

aç

u N

ati

on

al

Pa

rk

,

so y

ou’ll

hav

e th

e br

eath

-ta

king

vie

ws

and

trai

ls a

ll to

yo

urse

lf in

the

mor

ning

s

and

even

ings

, whe

n ot

her

visi

tors

are

n’t a

llow

ed.

2¼

hou

rs

6. S

ee a

min

ing

baro

n’s

impr

essi

ve a

rt c

olle

ctio

n.T

he in

door

/out

door

co

ntem

pora

ry a

rt m

useu

m

Inh

oti

m is

sur

pris

ing—

not

just

for i

ts s

ize

(bui

ldin

gs a

nd

inst

alla

tions

are

sca

tter

ed

acro

ss 2

,50

0 lu

shly

land

- sc

aped

acr

es) b

ut a

lso

for i

ts

off-t

he-b

eate

n-pa

th lo

catio

n in

the

Bra

zilia

n co

untr

ysid

e.

The

col

lect

ion,

ow

ned

by

min

ing

mag

nate

Ber

nard

o

de M

ello

Paz

, has

art

-wor

ld

cred

, with

wor

ks b

y O

lafu

r El

iass

on a

nd A

nish

Kap

oor.

70

min

utes

+

2 h

ours

7. T

rek

a m

ind-

blow

ing

sand

scap

e.W

ith n

early

60

0 s

quar

e m

iles

of p

ristin

e w

hite

san

d du

nes,

riv

ers,

and

fres

hwat

er p

onds

, L

en

çó

is M

ar

an

he

ns

es

Na

tio

na

l P

ar

k m

akes

for

a su

rrea

l adv

entu

re. W

heth

er

you

expl

ore

by fo

ur-w

heel

-dr

ive

or k

itesu

rf b

oard

, the

ot

herw

orld

ly la

ndsc

ape

rival

s an

ythi

ng o

n th

e co

ntin

ent

(incl

udin

g th

e B

oliv

ian

salt

flats

). G

ettin

g ar

ound

take

s tim

e, s

o bu

dget

at l

east

a

wee

k. L

odge

s an

d ca

bins

are

ba

sic,

but

som

e to

ur

com

pani

es (l

ike

Mat

ueté

) pr

ovid

e th

eir o

wn

upgr

ades

. 3

¼ h

ours

+

4 h

ours

8. B

e ch

arm

ed b

y Br

azil’

s pr

ettie

st c

olon

ial t

own.

Ever

yone

love

s th

e go

rgeo

us

low

-slu

ng s

ixte

enth

-cen

tury

to

wn

of P

ar

aty

, kno

wn

for i

ts

smal

l hot

els

in re

nova

ted

man

sion

s (a

t Cas

a Tu

rque

sa,

ever

y gu

est g

ets

a pa

ir of

H

avai

anas

on

arriv

al).

The

re’s

no

t muc

h to

do

but h

it th

e pa

lm-b

acke

d sa

ndy

beac

hes,

but a

fter

figh

ting

crow

ds

in R

io, t

hat m

ay b

e ex

actly

w

hat y

ou’re

look

ing

for.

4

5 m

inut

es o

r 4

hou

rs

9. R

elax

on

the

beac

h

with

the

beau

tiful

peo

ple.

Fash

ion

type

s an

d la

psed

hi

ppie

s ha

ve tu

rned

the

rem

ote

fishi

ng v

illag

e of

T

ra

nc

os

o in

to a

n id

yllic

, st

ylis

h es

cape

on

the

Atla

ntic

. S

tay

at th

e 11

-bun

galo

w U

xua

Cas

a H

otel

& S

pa, o

pene

d

in 2

00

9 by

form

er D

iese

l cr

eativ

e di

rect

or W

ilber

t Das

, w

ho fi

lled

it w

ith v

inta

ge

furn

ishi

ngs

and

colo

rful

art

. 1½

hou

rs +

1½

hou

rs

Or G

o B

eyon

d

10. P

arty

in B

ueno

s Ai

res.

Boo

k a

Park

Sui

te a

t the

Pa

laci

o D

uhau

–Par

k H

yatt

in

leaf

y R

ec

ole

ta,

have

a w

ood-

grill

ed ri

b ey

e at

Mira

nda

in

Pal

erm

o, th

en d

rink

Fern

et

and

Coc

a-C

ola

at th

e Fa

ena

until

wel

l pas

t mid

nigh

t. 3

½ h

ours

11. T

ick

Urug

uay

off y

our l

ist.

In th

e w

alka

ble

seas

ide

capi

tal

of M

on

tev

ide

o, y

ou’ll

find

pa

stel

col

onia

l-er

a bu

ildin

gs

and

rest

aura

nts

like

Jaci

nto,

w

here

che

f Luc

ía S

oria

ser

ves

light

, veg

etab

le-c

entr

ic d

ishe

s su

ch a

s a

leek

and

pum

pkin

ta

rt. S

tay

at th

e 15

-roo

m A

lma

His

tóric

a B

outiq

ue H

otel

, ov

erlo

okin

g do

wnt

own’

s Z

abal

a S

quar

e.

3 h

ours

How

to M

ake

It H

appe

n If the idea of driving

Brazil’s famously chaotic

highways doesn’t sound

like a vacation, call on

Brazil travel experts

Paul Irvine of Dehouche,

Jill Siegel of South

American Escapes, or

Martin Frankenberg of

Matueté, who can coordi-

nate drivers, guides,

and logistics. Find them

at cntraveler.com/

travel-specialists.

12. E

at a

nd d

rink

your

w

ay th

roug

h Sa

ntia

go.

With

gre

at h

otel

s (T

he

Sin

gula

r), r

esta

uran

ts (B

orag

ó),

and

win

e ba

rs (B

ocan

áriz

), C

hile

’s c

apita

l is

one

of S

outh

A

mer

ica’

s be

st fo

od c

ities

. 4

¾ h

ours

“Mos

t tra

vele

rs

say

that

a v

isit

to

Para

ty is

the

high

light

of t

heir

entir

e st

ay in

Br

azil,

” say

s tra

vel

spec

ialis

t Jill

Sie

gel.

“Rai

n fo

rest

– co

vere

d m

ount

ains

fr

ame

turq

uois

e w

ater

s, a

nd th

e vi

llage

seem

s to

have

st

oppe

d in

tim

e.”

Ave

rage

cos

t of a

flig

ht

from

the

U.S

. to

Rio

th

is A

ugus

t, ac

cord

ing

to K

ayak

. For

S

epte

mbe

r trip

s, it

dr

ops

to $

754.

1,001

DOLL

ARS

9

4

J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6 / C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R 103I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y P E T E R O U M A N S K I

Travel Intel

CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2016 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

VOLUME 51, NO. 6, CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER (ISSN 0893-9683) is published monthly (except for a combined issue in June/July) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. S.I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman Emeritus; Charles H. Townsend, Chairman; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President & Chief Executive Officer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial Officer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.

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On a flight, I always

My favorite airport is

The first thing I do

in a hotel room is

The next city I want to visit is

7 Number of weeks in advance you should book your Labor Day airfare for the best deal, according to the flight-search site Hipmunk. This year, that means buy on July 18.

Reader Tom H. contacted British Airways multiple times about his refund, but it wasn’t

until Ombudsman called that he got his money back. If you’d rather avoid the hassle, consider cut-ting your airline out of the equation entirely by using a private shipper. Luggage Forward, for example, guarantees on-time delivery of bags and is particularly handy when sending bulky items such as golf clubs, surfboards, and—yep—bikes.

Last summer, I flew to Bologna, Italy, on British Airways for a cycling vacation.

I checked my bike and gear, and when they didn’t arrive on time, the airline said that it would reim-burse me for a temporary bike rental and the purchase of new cycling shoes and clothes while it tracked down my things. But when I filed my receipts for a total of $759.87, my refund request stalled. Can you help? Tom H., Squamish, B.C.

Q

A

O M B U D S M A N

Checked Please

Need help solving a travel problem? Ombudsman offers advice and mediation: E-mail ombudsman@cntraveler.com.

M O R E A R T T O L O V E

London’s Tate Modern will open a new Herzog & de

Meuron–designed wing called the Switch House on

June 17, increasing the size of the museum by a massive

60 percent. Here are three tips on making the most of

a visit, from members of the Tate team.

1. Get There Early The wing’s first exhibition—

of twentieth-century photography collected by Sir

Elton John—will draw crowds, so be there by 10 A.M.,

when the doors open. Weekdays are typically less trafficked than weekends.

2. Don’t Miss This Piece Solemn Process, an abstract,

room-size, multimedia installation by Romania’s

Ana Lupaş.

3. BYO Guide The new Tate app has rich

annotations on every piece in the collection and helpful

maps for navigating the museum complex.

16,000 Miles Logged Last Year

Architect Andres Soliz Paz, of the firm Escobedo Soliz, whose Weaving the Courtyard installation takes over N.Y.C.’s MoMA PS1 this summer, on the importance of airport design and a long playlist.

When my dad was 15 years old, he was a paperboy in Staten Island, New York, and entered the Young Columbus contest sponsored by the newspaper and Parade magazine. His essay won him an all-expense-paid trip to Portugal and Spain alongside 92 other paperboys from around the country. On April 15, 1965, my grandparents dropped off their son, who’d never been farther than Washington, D.C., at JFK’s then newish TWA Terminal by Eero Saarinen. “It’s fascinating that my parents were fine with handing me off to strangers for two weeks,” my dad recalls. “All they asked was when they had to pick me up.” On Easter Sunday he saw a bullfight in Lisbon, then he and the group were off to the beaches of Gibraltar and the Alhambra in Granada. In Madrid, the last stop, my dad snuck out after curfew. “I remember walking around the city alone. I felt so free.” He doesn’t remember exactly where he picked up this castanet—“maybe at a flamenco club?”—but he bought it, along with a silk scarf and an ashtray, for my grandmother. “Though I did bring home a souvenir for myself,” he says. “It was a Beatles record I found in Madrid titled Dinero.” L AU R E N D E C A R L O , A R T I C L E S E D I T O R

His Longest Route

Souvenir

106 C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 6

PR

OP

ST

YL

ING

BY

EL

IZA

BE

TH

PR

ES

S

P H O T O G R A P H B Y S T E P H E N L E W I S

Chronic Dry Eye can limit your ability to perform daily

activities that involve your eyes. Over time it can have

potential consequences for your eyes—damage to the

front surface of the eye, increased risk of infection, and

effects on your vision. The good news is that treatment

options are available.

It may surprise you that if you’re

experiencing any of these symptoms,

you may have Chronic Dry Eye disease:

© 2014 Allergan, Inc., Irvine, CA 92612, U.S.A. APC83KE14

YOUR YOUR

DRYDRYDRYEYESEYESEYES

DON’T DON’T DON’T DENYDENYDENY

TAKE ACTION NOW

➼

➼ SCHEDULE a medical exam

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ophthalmologist to see if

you have Chronic Dry Eye.

Don’t wait.

GO TO mydryeyes.com,GO TO mydryeyes.com, mydryeyes.com,GO TO

TAKE a brief questionnaire eye

doctors use to assess Chronic

Dry Eye, and SHOW the results

to your eye doctor.

u Dryness/itching

u Burning/stinging

u Feeling like

something is

in your eye

u Sensitivity to light

u Blurry vision

u Problems wearing

contact lenses

u Watering eyes