“The Way Life Should Be” – Kennebunkport’s Hidden Pond resort, I discovered during two recent stays, epitomizes the state motto of Maine. Though no simple task, I was able to narrow my favorite things about the property into a short-list for “Five Things We Love,” published on the Virtuoso Life blog. For my longer piece on Hidden Pond, family travel, and summer vacations in K’Port, check out “Prime Time.”
A few of my favorite things, all in one spot: Stays at Hidden Pond resort in Kennebunkport, summers on the Maine coast, traveling with family – in this case, my oldest daughter/cover girl – and the April issue of Virtuoso Traveler. For anyone who’s ever lamented how quickly childhood passes, or suddenly realized how imperative it is to travel with our kids when they’re still young, “Prime Time” – my story about our visit to KPort last July (and the first in a trilogy of features based on family vacations) – will hopefully hit home.
Long live Portsmouth, New Hampshire – the third-oldest city in the U.S. and, incidentally, one of my favorite places on the planet. As a New Hampshire native who’s lived in Seattle for two decades, I still feel Portsmouth’s tidal pull, which brings me back every year to reacquaint myself with its lobster rolls, beloved tugboats, and brick-paved lanes that always seem to reveal some fresh find. For a few locally favored stops to explore on your visit, read “A Perfect Day in Portsmouth,” my quick guide to the city that I recently penned for The Virtuoso Life blog.
(*story excerpt included in post)
One of my favorite things about traveling home to New Hampshire in spring and summer: slipping into sleep by open windows at my parents’ house to the sounds of the surrounding forest: sudden, baritone calls of barred owls (“Who, who, who cooks for you?”), wild cackling of coyotes, and (accompanied below by my two-year old daughter: “Froggie, Dada?”), choruses of crickets, tree-, and peeper-frogs.
Summer bliss along the 1.25-mile Marginal Way footpath in Ogunquit, Maine, where my beautiful daughter flips off her shoes and meets her reflection in the sand.
Other path highlights: the views afforded from 39 seaside benches, each dedicated to those who walked this way in times past; a classic New England lighthouse (yes, I’m a New England nerd, but check out this live lighthouse webcam); and the lobster rolls at M.C. Perkins Cove, founded by Top Chef Masters and James Beard “Best Chefs of the Northeast” winners Mark Gaier and Clark Frasier.
A few key components of this week’s quasi midlife crisis road trip:
1. Good friends (Elder John and Old Man Kelly).
2. Minimal packing and little to no planning.
3. A surreal arrival at our starting point (in this case, Salt Lake City Int’l, where hundreds of LDS members had gathered to welcome back returning missionaries).
4. Waiting more than 30 minutes to eat Mexican food at a decent but decidedly overhyped SLC restaurant.
5. Graying manes blowing in the wind from a 435 horsepower Ford Mustang convertible (careful for sunburned balding spots).
6. Listening, unabashedly, to horribly antiquated music like the Grateful Dead and Jane’s Addiction while realizing that college occurred in a previous century.
7. A place of pilgrimage (in this case, Arches National Park) that provides plenty of silence and space to push pause, look around as far as you can see, and feel deeply alive.
8. Seeing the sunset in said place of pilgrimage with said good friends and a bottle of Laphroaig.
9. Exhausting all supplies of tiger balm the morning after a 28-mile mountain bike ride, collectively cursing the aging process, and then gaining immediate consensus to see Moab’s Fisher Towers from the car – rather than hike out to them as originally discussed – while driving the Upper Colorado River Scenic Byway.
10. Veering off the highway en route to SLC and stumbling upon Mom’s Café in Salina (a classic roadside diner lauded everywhere, it turns out, from Sunset to National Geographic), and capping off the trip with a slice of sour cream and blueberry pie that, all by itself, was worth traveling to Utah for.
Sleeping late (i.e., past 6:00 AM), sipping cocktails in silence while watching the sun set over the Pacific, swimming (yes, actually swimming) beneath waterfalls, drinking coffee unfettered from breakdowns, and strolling through botanical gardens without surprise bathroom breaks….
How nice is it to be exploring Oahu’s North Shore sans kids (sorry, daughters!) with my wife by my side (our first vacation together in nearly four years)? So nice. Here, some of our favorite moments so far…
It’s mid-October, which means that Colorado’s aspens must be fully in bloom. It also means that it’s been one full year since my last visit to the state – a visit that marked a much-needed return after a 16-year voluntary exile (see Time Travel: This One’s Personal) and that followed an invitation I received to stay at Gateway Canyons Resort, playground to Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks (see Gateway Canyons: A Curious Place). Though articles, like life, happen when they’re supposed to, I’m happy to have at long last published my story on the stay, written for the October issue of Virtuoso Traveler.
So much can happen in the span of 16 years. Take my own life, for example: In the summer of 1997, I was only 23 years old, living in the small mountain town of Durango in southwestern Colorado. Largely without direction, recently graduated from college, and reeling from a break up, I woke up one morning, loaded my black lab-golden retriever mix, Mable, and the few possessions I had into my beat-up Subaru wagon, and just drove off. Away. I had no idea where I was going or where my life might lead.
Sixteen years and some months later, an assignment in Gateway (200 miles northwest of Durango) afforded me an opportunity to return, seeking long overdue perspective on my past and present vis-à-vis this town. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that “You can’t go home again,” but I lean toward Bob Dylan’s take on the subject in his song, “Mississippi”: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” Paul Theroux, though, perhaps said it best. Regarding those places we revisit, Theroux writes in Dark Star Safari, “You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.”
So true. Today as I tour Durango, so much has changed. The natural food co-op where I worked for a spell seems tired somehow, so much less vital than I recall. The ranch where I baled hay has grown considerably, its roadside placard now trumpeting the grass-fed, “locavore,” farm-to-fork phenomenon that was so quietly in style here even before the national trend. The house where I once lived, that sheltered so many young people coming and going, momentarily marooned between college and the next stages of their lives, is still surrounded by towering pines and scrub jays, but is now a family’s home by the looks of its basketball hoop and kids’ bikes laid across the lawn. The nearby saloon where my housemates and I passed winter nights is now abandoned and in decay, so reminiscent of the burned down bar in Richard Hugo’s “Death of the Kapowsin Tavern,” a poem I remember reading regularly back then.
Still, for me of course, what’s changed most significantly is myself. Like Hugo, “I can’t ridge” any of the past or its remains “back again from char” – which is a good thing. Walking streets I once walked, contemplating scenes previously so meaningful to me, and viewing Durango at dusk from its highest vantage point, it occurs to me again how life itself is synonymous with change, and just how many great things have graced my own life (friends, family, career, and home) since I was last here.
This time as I leave Durango, headed north on I-550 along severely steep mountain passes toward Silverton, Ouray, and ultimately, Grand Junction and my return flight to Seattle, there’s no need to look back. Lava-bright aspens light the mountainsides along roads with no guardrails and drop-offs so sudden that the only option is to look ahead, and, just for a moment as I pause for a roadside photo, at my phone for a perfectly timed message from my wife: “Drive safely,” she writes, “I can’t wait for you to be home.”
My god it feels good to be streaming solo across the American Southwest again (it has been years), surrounded only by space and time. Physicists have yet to explain where either phenomenon comes from, a mystery which is of course understandable to those of us with families and fulltime jobs. But today I was able to find both (along with a healthy dose of silence) while traveling the vast and vacant roads of Western Colorado.
Today there was no music, no computer monitors, no meetings, no text messages to distract my thoughts as the scenery passed from mountains clad in autumnal oak brush to red-rock canyons covered in sage to recently tilled farmland boasting religious slogans of the purported saved.
Such landscapes (and especially the exquisite late afternoon sunlight near Cortez) called for breaking out my wide-angle lens (Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8), and, something I fear I’m able to do even less often these days: stopping, momentarily stepping away from things, and seeing.
There’s very little to the town of Gateway, Colorado: a diner (shut down, it seems, for some time), a post office (is it open?), a general store (still under construction). Blink on the drive through – about an hour from Grand Junction along the Unaweep-Tabeguache Scenic and Historic Byway – and and you’re sure to miss it. All the better, I say. Retired, reticent settings such as this so often store the best secrets, and in the case of Gateway, can quickly lead to revelation.
Just a few paces past “town” lies Gateway Canyons Resort, the brainchild of Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks. Over the past weekend I’ve had the opportunity to explore the resort and sample some of its draws, including soaring over 300-million-year-old red-rock formations in a helicopter, driving a convertible Bentley down quiet canyon roads, and riding horseback through valleys ablaze in brush oak and scented with sage.
It’s an eclectic and, truth be told, privileged playground for sure. And although a few of the activities feel as extravagant and over-the-top as the Discovery Channel’s lineup (see “Amish Mafia” or “Moonshiners”), what strikes me most is the number, and quality, of people I’ve met here (staff and guests alike), who, thanks to Hendricks’ vision, have found a place to pursue their passions. Take, for instance, the restoration specialist who maintains Hendricks’ impressive collection of vehicles at the on-site auto museum, the retired marine who leads guests on heli-tours (including a couple on their 64th anniversary over a mining camp they inhabited during the first years of their marriage), the horse whisperer who’s able to match even the most trepid rider with the right steed, and the brothers who I watched sail their small aircraft (again and again) past the Palisade (see bottom photo) before flying off to their next adventure.
There’s certainly no chance of being bored here (did I mention that guests can also learn to drive pro-Baja trucks on the resort’s off-road racetrack?). But what I’ve most appreciated about this place after, and even despite, all its activities, is the seclusion it has provided simply to sit, slow down, and watch the Palisade behind my casita soak up the setting sun and then slowly assimilate into the starry night. It’s during these shows that I most understand why Hendricks selected this spot as “the place” for his playground, and why his general manager so readily confided to me (twice, no less) that he never wanted to leave.
