Big, fancy resort hotels are normally not my thing. There is a sanitized sameness to many of them, detached from the life and culture of the places where they are located, that leaves me cold. So when I encountered the sprawling, 252-room Mauna Kea Beach Hotel during my family’s first visit to Hawaii’s Big Island
France
A Laissez Faire Approach to Wine Tasting in the Médoc
It was a hot night in late July as my husband, Matt, and I gathered for aperitifs with our friend, Caroline, and her parents at their two-hundred year-old, ivy covered house in St. Seurin de Cadourne. Across the road, the Gironde Estuary flowed north-west to the Atlantic, while millions of ruby-red grapes slowly ripened on
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Sweden
Carving out Some Time for Bronze Age History on the West Coast of Sweden
Three thousand years ago, long before Instagram, email and even pen and paper, the Bronze Age inhabitants of northern Bohuslän, on Sweden’s rocky west coast, communicated in a cruder but more lasting way: rock carvings. On the region’s exposed granite bedrock, scoured and polished smooth by the passage of glaciers, they etched out tens of
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Ireland
A Taste of Ireland
With the map of Ireland spread before me like a buffet table crammed with one delicious dish after another, I struggled to decide where to go on my family’s first visit to Ireland this past March. From Donegal in the far north to Cork and Kerry in the south, from the west coast’s Cliffs of
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Colorado
Uphill Skiing With Astrid at Ashcroft
We had barely gotten started and Astrid was already done with cross country skiing. “I hate this!” she yelled in frustration, her long, narrow skis and poles splayed in four different directions as she slid slowly backwards down the hill. I was about to launch into another explanation of how to go uphill on cross