Travel | Americas | Smithsonian.com

Frank Gehry’s BioMuseo, New Science Museum in Panama

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Puente de vida The little squiggle of land connecting North and South America is a recent addition, geologically speaking. Around 15 million years ago, underwater volcanoes began forming islands. Then the movement of tectonic plates pushed up parts of the seafloor. By around three million years ago, the land bridge that we know today as the Isthmus of Panama had formed—allowing for a massive north-south migration of plants and animals, and an explosion of new species. So Panama is the ideal site for the BioMuseo (Museum of Biodiversity), due to open next summer. The $60 million building (left) was designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, whose works include the Guggenheim M

The Iditarod Is Being Threatened by Warm Temperatures

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 04:30:00 GMT

Sled dogs training in the summer in Nome, Alaska, the city that marks the finish line of the long-distance race. Photo: J. Stephen Conn There is less than a month to go until the annual Iditarod sled dog race—a 975 mile endurance race through the snow—is set to kick off from Willow, Alaska. Or, at least, that is the plan—unless persistently warm water ruins it, says Mary Pilon for The New York Times. Instead of subzero conditions, which are ideal for the sport, temperatures have been in the 30s and 40s. Rain has been falling in place of snow, and the annual snowfall has been just 29 percent of what it was last year. Though such a drastic year-over-year change is dow

Tour the Grand Canyon From Your Computer With Google Street View

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 01:30:00 GMT

Image via Google Street View The Grand Canyon is one of the greatest geological wonders in the world. A deep, twisting canyon that descends nearly a mile deep and stretches over 270 miles long, the canyon attracts millions of visitors each year. But the hike to the bottom is strenuous and steep, and for many Arizona is hard to get to. Never fear, wary travelers: Google has your back. Now, thanks to Google, you don’t need a plane ticket or hiking boots to experience some of the geologic magic. The World Wonders Project puts you there, on the famous Bright Angel trail that leads you from the south rim, sweeps down the Black Bridge, crosses the Colorado River and heads to the Phantom

Grand Central Terminal Turns 100

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:21:00 GMT

Grand Central Terminal, the country’s most recognizable transportation hub, celebrates its 100th birthday today. A legacy of the Vanderbilt family (whose adopted symbol, the acorn, sits atop the terminal’s trademark clock), Grand Central is more than just ticket booths, tracks and platforms, of which there are 44, making it the largest train station in the world based on platform number. It’s a city within a city, housing 50 shops, 20 eateries, five restaurants, newsstands, a fresh food market and multiple passageways to maneuver around it all. Its train and subway systems serve nearly 200,000 commuters daily. In total, every day more than 700,000 people pass through th

PHOTOS: The Best and Weirdest Roadside Dinosaurs

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:14:37 GMT

The concrete and plastic dinosaurs beside America's highways can be strange and beautiful. Tell us which one you think is the best

You've Never Heard A Music Box Like This

Mon, 14 May 2012 05:58:45 GMT

At first glance, the ramshackle structure looks like something out of Spanky and “Our Gang”—a kid-size shantytown cobbled together without adult supervision from old lumber and junkyard castoffs. This is no playground, however. The Music Box, in the historic Bywater section of New Orleans, is a new performance space consisting of nine shacks, rigged by a team of musicians, artists, inventors and tinkerers to coax novel sounds from salvaged building materials—musical architecture. “I thought that a fun way to grapple with what we meant by musical architecture would be to make a village of small structures, and for each one to be a sound artist’s laborato

Saved From Prohibition by Holy Wine

Wed, 16 May 2012 03:38:30 GMT

St. Anthony of Padua is not the patron saint of winemakers—that distinction goes to St. Vincent or St. Martin of Tours or, if you happen to be in Bulgaria, St. Trifon the Pruner—but perhaps he should be, at least in Southern California. Because when Santo Cambianica came to Los Angeles from Lombardy and founded the San Antonio Winery, it was his devotion to that saint and his church that would save the business. Like most of his compatriots, Cambianica was a Catholic, a very devout Catholic by all accounts, and thus he named his winery after St. Anthony, the patron saint not of winemakers but of lost things, of travelers, of the poor. If Cambianica was a traveler, he did not r

Paul Theroux’s Quest to Define Hawaii

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:21:13 GMT

Hawaii seems a robust archipelago, a paradise pinned like a bouquet to the middle of the Pacific, fragrant, sniffable and easy of access. But in 50 years of traveling the world, I have found the inner life of these islands to be difficult to penetrate, partly because this is not one place but many, but most of all because of the fragile and floral way in which it is structured. Yet it is my home, and home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening. Two thousand miles from any great landmass, Hawaii was once utterly unpeopled. Its insularity was its salvation; and then, in installments, the world washed ashore and its Edenic uniqueness was lost in a process of disenchantm

The Romneys’ Mexican History

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

My journey to the Mormon heartland of Mexico began in a gloomy bar in Ciudad Juárez, just a short walk from the bridge over the Rio Grande and the U.S. border. I ordered a margarita, a decidedly un-Mormon thing to do. But otherwise I was faithfully following in the footsteps of the pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many of whom once passed through Ciudad Juárez on their way to build settlements in the remote mountains and foothills of northern Chihuahua. Back in the late 19th century, the pioneers traveled by wagon or train. Neither conveyance is used much in northern Mexico these days. I arrived in El Paso from Los Angeles via airplane, and would

The 20 Best Small Towns in America of 2012

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 04:15:25 GMT

From the Berkshires to the Cascades, we've crunched the numbers and pulled a list some of the most interesting spots around the country

Winners Announced for National Mall Design Competition

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:09:34 GMT

The area between the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Capitol has seen better days, but architects are vying to improve the nation’s front lawn

Your Guide to Basquing in the Old West

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:10:03 GMT

Central California The California gold rush brought the first Basque immigrants to the United States in the 1840s. After the gold dried up, many of their descendants stayed in the Central Valley region, turning to the more stable professions of ranching and sheepherding. The modern community is tight-knit and proud of their heritage; the Kern County Basque Club throws one of California’s largest Basque festivals every year in an exhibition of traditional dances, pelota (Basque handball) matches and music by bands who travel from the home country. But, as you might expect, the most powerful cultural marker of the community is the cuisine. Bakersfield is the capital of American Basq

Indulging in American Basque Cuisine

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

There are a lot of reasons to go through Bakersfield, California, even if you don’t happen to be in the oil business or on your way to a mountain lake. Bakersfield is where the “western’’ in country and western was forged, and you can still hear the spiritual descendants of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens in the clubs. Dewar’s, out near the high school, may be the best unreconstructed ice-cream parlor in the country, famous for its banana splits and its peanut butter chews; the lunches of pasta and beans at Luigi’s, in business since 1910, speak of traditions that had faded in New York by the start of the First World War. But when you find yourself in Baker

The 20 Best Food Trucks in the United States

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:39:59 GMT

The food truck revolution is in full force as mobile restaurants around the country dish out tacos, BBQ and other great eats

How America Became a Food Truck Nation

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

If you want to see what eating in Los Angeles is like, beyond the gold-plated Beverly Hills bistros and the bottle-service clubs that count the Kardashians among their clientele, you could do worse than to pull into a deserted parking lot late at night, check the coordinates on your iPhone and watch the stretch of asphalt fill with hundreds of hungry people. They, and probably you, have been summoned here by a Twitter blast from the Kogi truck, a retrofitted catering van serving Korean short-rib tacos, kimchi dogs and other edible symbols of L.A.’s famous cross-cultural inclusiveness, dripping plates of food drawn straight from the city’s recombinant DNA. In the city that gave

The Mystique of Route 66

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Since I discovered U.S. Route 66 as a teenage hitchhiker, I’ve traveled it by Greyhound bus and tractor-trailer, by RV and Corvette and, once, by bicycle. Recently, when I wanted to return for another look, I headed straight for my favorite section, in Arizona, stretching from Winslow west to Topock on the California border. The last 160 miles of that route constitute one of the longest surviving stretches of the original 2,400-mile highway. I’m happy to report that Route 66’s obituary—written repeatedly since 1984, when the opening of I-40 enabled motorists to make the trip from Chicago to Los Angeles on five connecting interstates—was premature. What John S

The Sistine Chapel of the Andes

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:22:44 GMT

Perched on a central square in the Andean village of Andahuaylillas, Peru, the whitewashed church of San Pedro Apóstol seems unremarkable at first. But inside is an eye-popping kaleidoscope—a dazzling display of colorful murals, a coffered painted ceiling and an ornate gold-leaf altar—earning it the moniker of “The Sistine Chapel of the Andes.” The Spanish began constructing the Baroque church in the late 16th century, as they cemented their conquest over the Inca Empire. Most visitors to this part of Peru focus on Inca ruins—Cuzco is only 25 miles away—but its rural churches are worth a trip. An excursion to San Pedro and two other churches in n

A Smithsonian Botanist Suggests an Evotourism Site

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:35:17 GMT

To understand how life evolved, says John Kress of the National Museum of Natural History, you have to understand how interactions between plants and animals have evolved. With this in mind, the botanist recommends visiting Dominica’s Morne Trois Pitons National Park, where evotourists can observe a remarkable tryst between purple-throated carib hummingbirds and flowers called heliconias. “The plants produce nectar for energy, and the hummingbirds provide the transfer of pollen that allows the plants to reproduce,” says Kress. But what is amazing is how the two species co-evolved over time to fine-tune the exchange. “The males of this hummingbird species visit one

Evolution World Tour: La Brea Tar Pits, California

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In a city that celebrates glitz and glamour, one of the most popular destinations is a malodorous pool of goo. The La Brea Tar Pits, in a 23-acre park in the heart of Los Angeles and just minutes from Beverly Hills, is the only active urban paleontological excavation site in the United States. Over the past century paleontologists have found more than three million specimens—including saber-toothed cats, giant jaguars, mammoths and dire wolves. La Brea is “one of the richest ice age fossil sites in the world,” says John Harris, chief curator at the onsite George C. Page Museum. La Brea is essentially an oil field. Some 40,000 years ago, low-grade crude oil, known to geol

Evolution World Tour: Burgess Shale, British Columbia, Canada

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Think of it as biology’s Big Bang. About 542 million years ago, the earth’s most complex inhabitants were multicellular soft-bodied organisms. Then, over the next 20 million years, an extraordinary diversity of life-forms first appeared. Most of the phyla of the animals that now dominate the world got their start, including arthropods (ancestors of today’s spiders and crustaceans); annelids (worms); and the first chordates, the predecessors of all creatures with a backbone, human beings included. This burst of life (if an event lasting some millions of years can be described as a burst) is known to scientists as the Cambrian Explosion, the defining characteristic of the

Evolution World Tour: Ashfall Fossil Beds, Nebraska

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In the summer of 1971, paleontolo- gist Mike Voorhies and his geologist wife, Jane, were living out of a station wagon parked in a Nebraska cornfield—their latest stop on a road trip to collect information for a geological map. While there, they noticed a deep gully stripped bare by a recent rainstorm. Mike Voorhies hiked over to the ravine, where he discovered something odd. Throughout north central Nebraska, the ground contains a layer of silver ash, about a foot thick—the remnants of a massive volcanic eruption some 12 million years ago. But a cross-section of the gully’s walls revealed an ash layer ten feet deep. “I noticed a little jawbone with teeth. I jumped

Cristián Samper on Appreciating Evolution

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Cristián Samper is an evolutionary biologist and the director of Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. He spoke with senior editor Laura Helmuth about his own favorite evotourism sites, both within the museum and beyond. Which places have given you the greatest appreciation of evolution? I realize now I’ve been an evotourist all my life! Clearly the Galápagos is one of the places. If you’re a biologist, you have to study On the Origin of Species; it’s such a classic. In some ways, going to the Galápagos, for an evolutionary biologist, is like a pilgrimage to Mecca. Very interesting research is still being done there. The Grants, Pe

Evolution World Tour: Mount St. Helens, Washington

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Catastrophic events shape evolution by killing off plant and animal populations and creating opportunities for new species. When Mount St. Helens exploded, scientists seized the opportunity to study the aftermath. “It’s been an ecologist’s dream to stay here for decades to watch how life reinsinuates itself onto a landscape that had been wiped clean,” says Charlie Crisafulli of the U.S. Forest Service, who has worked on the mountain since shortly after its eruption. On May 18, 1980, at 8:32—a Sunday morning—the volcano set off the largest landslide in recorded history. Rock slammed into Spirit Lake, sending water up the hillsides and scouring the slopes

Evolution World Tour: Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In Charles Darwin’s day, the Galápagos Islands were perhaps the best place in the world to observe evidence of evolution by natural selection. They still are. The 19 islands are the tips of volcanoes that began emerging from the ocean some five million years ago, steaming with fresh lava and devoid of life. The plants and animals that dwell there today are descended from castaways that arrived by sea or air. Finches and mockingbirds were blown off course by storms; iguanas floated on rafts of debris; and the tree-like scalesia plants are the overgrown progeny of sunflowers that made landfall via airborne seeds. It’s easy to study the diversity of species here in part b

Evolution World Tour: Isle Royale, Michigan

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

First came the moose. About 100 years ago, some of the animals swam or walked across ice to Isle Royale, a fir- and spruce-covered island in Lake Superior. There they found moose heaven, nothing but forage. Next came the gray wolves. They arrived around 1950, after a cold winter allowed them to cross 15 miles of ice from the Canadian shore. They found a wolf idyll, all moose meat and a dearth of people, who had wiped out most of the wolves everywhere in the United States except Alaska. Last came the wildlife biologists, in 1958. They wanted only to watch nature take its course. Other people had preceded the scientists—Isle Royale had been a resort in the early 20th century and part

Keeping it Weird in Austin, Texas

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Hipsters of all stripes trek to Austin, Texas. By hipsters, I mean people who love irony but are suspicious of symbolism, who are laid-back without being lazy, who groom their music collections the way Wall Streeters monitor their stock portfolios, people whose relentlessly casual dress is constructed as painstakingly as stanzas in a pantoum. Hippie or hipster, liberal or libertarian, salaried professional or hourly wageworker, people of all stripes here often refer to their work as their “day jobs,” rather than their careers. You’ll find coffee shop baristas, retail shop clerks, bookstore cashiers as well as doctors, lawyers and computer programmers who view their real

Descending Into Hawaii's Haleakala Crater

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Entering Haleakala Crater, the enormous mouth of Maui’s largest volcano, in the Hawaiian Islands, feels like an exercise in sensory deprivation. At the crater floor, a desolate expanse of twisted, dried lava reached after a two-hour hike down a trail carved into its wall, the silence is absolute. Not a breath of wind. No passing insects. No bird songs. Then I thought I detected drumming. Was it the ghostly echo of some ancient ritual? No, I finally realized, it was my own heartbeat, thundering in my ears. In 2008, National Park Service acoustic experts found that the ambient sound levels within Haleakala crater were near the very threshold of human hearing—despite the populari

What We're Still Learning About Hawaii

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Haleakala originated as a vent on the seafloor about two million years ago. Eruptions of lava built up the volcano until it reached the sea surface less than a million years later; continued eruptions pushed it more than 10,000 feet above sea level and gave it almost 600 square miles of land. Haleakala eventually connected with another volcano to form the island of Maui. In fact, all the Hawaiian Islands are of volcanic origin. Most volcanoes—Mount St. Helens, say, or Mount Fuji—grow along the boundary between tectonic plates, where collisions melt the earth’s upper layers and fuel eruptions. By contrast, Hawaii’s volcanoes emanate from a “hotspot” unde

Six Sacred Sites of Hawaii

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:00:10 GMT

Take a tour of the idyllic sites across the many islands where native Hawaiians have longstanding spiritual connections

Sugar and Spice in Colombia’s Alluring Cali

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:29:31 GMT

One thing about Cali I quickly realize: caleños are passionate people. They’re intensely proud of their traditions in a way that’s both disarming and contagious. Perhaps this has to do with what’s sometimes perceived as the city’s secondary status. Though it’s not quite as bustling as cosmopolitan Bogota or as picturesque as Medellin, Colombia’s third-largest city is the country’s economic and industrial hub, even if it is often overlooked by travelers. There is also the climate: situated 3,290 feet above sea level in the fertile Cauca Valley, the city maintains a year-round temperature averaging in the low 80s, giving it an endless summer a

A Musical Tour Along the Crooked Road

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains are known for their speed demons. The moonshiners of old tore over country roads in 1940 Ford coupes, executing 180-degree “bootleg turns” and using bright lights to blind the revenue officers shooting at their tires. Legend has it that many of Nascar’s original drivers cut their teeth here, and modern stock car design is almost certainly indebted to the “liquor cars” dreamed up in local garages, modified for speed and for hauling brimful loads of “that good old mountain dew,” as the country song goes. Even now, it is tempting to barrel down Shooting Creek Road, near Floyd, Virginia, the most treacherous racin

New Orleans Beyond Bourbon Street

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Who can resist New Orleans? Gumbo and oyster po’ boys, jazz and funky blues, the French Quarter and the Garden District. Eyes light up, mouths water, toes tap. I’m obsessed with New Orleans—explaining its uniqueness to myself and to visitors. My need to understand the city is perhaps inescapable. When I was 15, my mother bought Chris Steak House with its small but loyal clientele. I bussed its 17 tables and learned how to butcher heavy short loins. Before long, Mom added her name, and the famous Ruth’s Chris Steak House chain of restaurants was born. Meanwhile, my father was making a name for himself too, running for mayor on a platform of bringing a gorilla to the

Lose Yourself in the White Sands

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 04:13:51 GMT

The disorientation that descends upon a visitor to White Sands National Monument is one of the best reasons for visiting it. Rarely are we sheltered from the barrage of sounds and sights in our daily lives. Advertising, ambient noise, screens and signs—a stream of visual references—keep us anchored. But standing in the middle of the largest gypsum field in the world, you may feel as if you are on another planet. Given National Monument status in 1933 by President Herbert Hoover, White Sands is located in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico. Formed by the slow erosion of gypsum from the surrounding mountains, the sands themselves are a sea of gleaming white dunes stretch

Drive the Road to Hana

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 03:57:25 GMT

The 52-mile, serpentine Road to Hana on Maui’s eastern coast is consistently ranked as one of the most scenic drives in the world. But, with over 50 bridges (many one lane) and 600 curves, it is no cakewalk to drive. “You know that yellow line down the middle of the road that’s supposed to separate it into two sides?” says Ward Mardfin, treasurer of the Hana Cultural Center. “We use that like an airplane. You center your car on that and go right over the middle of it.” It can take upwards of three hours to navigate the road, built in 1926, from Kahului in the north to Hana in the south. (Be sure to fuel up in Paia, the last sizable town before the highw

Whale Watching in Newfoundland

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 06:24:45 GMT

We should all be so lucky as the whales of the western Atlantic: they spend their winters mating in the Caribbean and then head north for the seafood buffet. Exactly where they feed varies by species, but the Grand Banks, the submarine plateaus just southeast of Newfoundland, offer a heck of a spread. That’s where the Labrador Current ferries nutrients down from the north, the Gulf Stream pushes warm water up from the south and sunlight penetrates the shallows—an ideal environment for starting an aquatic food chain, from plankton to fish to marine mammals. “It’s like a fast-food outlet up here for whales,” says Wayne Ledwell, director of Whale Release and Str

Alligators in the Everglades

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 06:53:25 GMT

It takes a certain amount of courage to visit the Florida Everglades. Other national parks have their dangers: hot acid pools in Yellowstone, rock slides in Yosemite, grizzlies in Glacier. But the Everglades may be the least human-friendly habitat to be one of the country’s great destinations. The Everglades is a vast, slow-flowing river that sweeps from central Florida to the Keys; aside from a few “hammocks” (islands) and seasonal dry spots, most of the territory is covered in grasses, mangrove swamps and shallow, murky water. It’s thick with snakes, including invasive Burmese pythons; it’s hot and muggy much of the year; and swarms of mosquitoes will pick

Costa Rica: Turtles and Birds

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 03:48:28 GMT

With jungle zip-lining, white-water rafting and fire spewing from the Arenal volcano, Costa Rica offers plenty of thrilling adventures and sights. What’s equally exciting is its wildlife. It’s not unusual to spot howler monkeys in trees or giant green iguanas on a bike path; packs of ring-tailed coatimundi roam freely even on busy roads. But if you want to see birds and turtles, patience pays off. Of the world’s seven species of sea turtles, five nest on protected beaches in Costa Rica. Through an amazing process of imprinting, adult female turtles may migrate thousands of miles to their natal beach to lay their eggs. The female leatherback turtle, which I observed in C

Hike the Appalachian Trail

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 03:50:43 GMT

Nature revives us, centers us, quiets us. It allows time for reflection. Hikers of the entire 2,181-mile Appalachian Trail are fortunate individuals, indeed, who take a good long physical, emotional and spiritual journey. Six years after Cliff Irving hiked the AT in 169 days with his adult son Derrick, he recalls the spell it cast on him. The trip made him further appreciate the beauty of the Eastern wilderness, he says, while it enabled him to experience the kindness of strangers and the friendship of fellow hikers. The AT is the longest continuous recreational footpath in America. Since its completion in 1937, more than 10,000 hikers have walked it from end to end—either in sec

The Historic Saloons of Central California

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 03:24:51 GMT

The owner of the Pine Street Saloon in Paso Robles, California, had a problem and requested that my traveling companions and I drop by to solve it. His security cameras were picking up a presence, but was it a mere illusion or something more ghostly? With that end goal in mind, our six-man entourage embarked on what just may be the most authentic and doable old-school saloon tour on the West Coast: a journey from the damp desires of Cold Spring Tavern in the hills above Santa Barbara to the Prohibition-beating trapdoors of the Elkhorn Bar in San Miguel near the Salinas River roughly 100 miles north, with more ghost legends, dollar bills tacked to ceilings and animal heads on walls than you

Springtime Splendor in Yosemite

Tue, 24 May 2011 09:19:56 GMT

The front desk at Yosemite National Park’s Wawona Hotel – the largest Victorian hotel in a national park – is flanked with white columns, making it look a bit like the veranda of a Southern mansion. But the woman working the daybreak shift at the desk in late April had anything but sunny climes on her mind. She frowned as she wrote the daily weather report on a board that visitors would consult throughout the day as they made their plans. “Forty percent chance of snow,” she muttered. Two workmen who had come inside to get coffee groaned loudly. “Forty percent chance of snow over 8,000 feet,” she continued. “Let’s just hope it stays

Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel, Finally Restored

Tue, 24 May 2011 08:11:27 GMT

When management at the Ahwahnee Hotel – Yosemite’s fabulous Arts and Crafts style lodge built in 1927 – wanted to fix damaged chandeliers in the dining room last year, they feared having to settle for costly and inferior replacement parts. No problem: Phoenix Day, the San Francisco firm that provided the original fixtures for the room, had been saving the original molds for the past 83 years. The giant metal chandeliers along with the soaring 34-foot ceilings and walls of wood and stone make the room look like a Viking palace. A nattily appointed Viking palace, as the dining room along with many other parts of the Ahwahnee just underwent a $12 million refurbishment. In

A Michigan Museum of Shipwrecks

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:46:53 GMT

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, located at Whitefish Point in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, was founded in 1978 by a group of teachers, divers and shipwreck enthusiasts who were interested in exploring the area around Whitefish Point. The museum is home to 19 different exhibits incorporating artifacts that were raised from wrecks, ship models and a memorial to those lost in the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. In addition to the museum, visitors can also see the restored lighthouse keeper’s quarters, the fog signal building, the surf boat house and the Whitefish Point bird observatory. “We were hoping to find shipwrecks and we were successful, as far as that went,”

Destination America 2011 - Michigan's Upper Peninsula, California Missions and Morkiami Gardens

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:05:00 GMT

The summer splendor of the Great Lakes, architectural beauty of central California and Japanese gardens of southern Florida

The Wonderful Wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 06:00:00 GMT

From the summit of 1,327-foot Marquette Mountain in northern Michigan, the view offers a pleasing mix of industrial brawn and natural beauty. Dense pine forests descend to the red sandstone churches and office buildings of Marquette, the largest town (pop. 20,714) in the Upper Peninsula, or UP. In Marquette’s harbor on Lake Superior, the world’s largest body of fresh water, a massive elevated ore dock disgorges thousands of tons of iron pellets into the hold of a 1,000-foot-long ship. Closer to my lofty perch, a bald eagle plunges toward unseen prey in the lake’s blue waters. For more than a century, the UP has been the summer playground of Midwesterners. From the early

A Tour of California's Spanish Missions

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Shirley Macagni, a 78-year-old retired dairy rancher and great-grandmother of seven, is an elder of the Salinan tribe, whose members have inhabited California’s Central Coast for thousands of years. Macagni calls her oak-dotted ancestral region, a largely unspoiled terrain of orchards, vineyards and cattle ranches, a “landscape that still stirs people’s imaginations.” Spanish settlers, arriving in the late 1700s, would decimate the tribe through smallpox, servitude and other depredations; resistance was dealt with harshly, and, says Macagni, fewer than a thousand Salinan survive today. The Spaniards’ legacy is complicated, and, Macagni feels, it is unfair t

Florida's Lush Japanese Gardens

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach, Florida, devoted to the showcasing of Japanese arts and culture, constitutes an oasis of tranquillity in the midst of suburban sprawl. Established in 1977, the museum—bearing the name of the Japanese-American benefactor who donated land for its site shortly before his death in 1976—features one of North America’s premier Japanese gardens. Landscape architect Hoichi Kurisu was born in Hiroshima, educated in Tokyo and today is based in Portland, Oregon. He labored for nearly two years on his creation, completed in 2001. Kurisu established a series of six separate yet linked gardens spanning 1,000 years of horticultu

Visiting Bosnia via St. Louis

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:08:21 GMT

St. Louis, MO - Driving down Gravois Avenue can be geographically disorienting. The same road takes you past Grant’s Farm, an Anheuser-Busch property where a herd of iconic Clydesdales entertains visitors, and the Bevo Mill neighborhood, where you’ll note a high concentration of bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants and corner stores advertising European goods. You are now in Little Bosnia, where you cannot leave hungry. Visit any one of the many Bosnian eateries in St. Louis, and you will find no shortage of affordable, satisfying, authentic fare. You will be stuffed with homemade breads, sausages and pastries topped off with a strong cup of Turkish coffee or perhaps a snort of

Boston’s Farm-to-Table Renaissance

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:36:01 GMT

When chef Barry Maiden enters the walk-in fridge of Hungry Mother, the Cambridge restaurant he co-owns, he becomes visibly excited, and not just from the chilly air. “We got these greens in today,” says Maiden, tearing open a bag of mixed cresses from a local farm and popping a few leaves into his mouth. As he munched, Maiden said the same thing as the handwritten label on the bag: “Spicy.” Farm-to-table cooking has swept the United States, and in the Boston area the movement is fueled by a sense of history and a respect for farmers who wrestle crops from a climate that is rarely described as forgiving. It makes sense that the local foods movement was largely born

Cleveland’s Signs of Renewal

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

On Saturday mornings when I was 11 or 12, my mother would drop me off at the Rapid Transit stop nearest our home in Pepper Pike, an outlying suburb of Cleveland. There, I would board a train for the 30-minute trip to an orthodontist’s office downtown. Despite the prospect of having my braces fiddled with, it was a trip I could hardly wait to take. From my seat on the train, nose pressed to the window, I was spellbound by the city to which I have lately returned. First came the procession of grand houses that lined the tracks along Shaker Boulevard in Shaker Heights—in the 1950s, one of the most affluent suburbs in America. Set behind giant elms, their picturesque fairy tale fa

A King Cake Special Delivery

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 09:36:21 GMT

Worrying about possibly choking on a pink plastic baby hidden in your cake is not your average worry when contemplating dessert, but then nothing surrounding Mardi Gras in New Orleans is quite average. This particular dessert—with the ensconced plastic baby—is the Mardi Gras classic: the king cake. Though Mardi Gras comes directly before Lent, the season which precedes the Christian holiday of Easter, king cake history is not based on Easter tradition, but Christmas tradition. The “king” in king cake refers to the three kings or wise men who visit Jesus upon his birth. That holiday is called the Feast of the Epiphany, Twelfth Night, or (more appropriately for our co

Canyoneering: Much More Than a Hike in the Park

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 04:19:19 GMT

“Whoo hooo” echoes through Yankee Doodle slot, a rocky gash in Dixie National Forest, not far from Utah’s Zion National Park. My son, Joe, is celebrating midway down the canyon’s biggest rappel, a 130-foot drop that starts with working your way around a large boulder, then requires a mid-course correction, swinging from one slab of angled rock to another. At the sandy bottom, in the shade of a lonely tree, we rest and enjoy the view. “It looks like someone took a knife and carved the rock,” says my daughter, Ann Burns. She’s gazing up at the fluted wall of golden Navajo sandstone, encircling a patch of sky blue. This is our first foray into cany

In Texas, a Locavore’s Liquor

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:40:09 GMT

For most of the past century, any spirit produced in Texas was moonshine, much of it low-quality hooch mixed for bootlegging. After Prohibition, it was legal to distill — once you obtained requisite permits — but few ever bothered to register their operation with the government. “The people in Texas come from a line of frontier marchers. They’re kind of like, ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’ says Bert “Tito” Beveridge. Beveridge, a square-faced fortysomething with a quick grin, is recounting his early moments in the liquor business: making habanero-infused vodka for friends, quitting his day job and finally licensing his distillery in th

On the Trail of Harriet Tubman

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 10:33:03 GMT

The flat terrain and calm waters of Maryland’s Eastern Shore belie the dangers of the journeys escaping slaves made to reach freedom in the North. Burs from the forests’ sweet gum trees pierced the runaways’ feet; open water terrified those who had to cross it. As they crept over, around or through marshes and creeks and woodlands and fields, the fugitives relied on the help of Eastern Shore native Harriet Tubman and other conductors of the Underground Railroad resistance network. On previous trips to the Eastern Shore, I had biked sparsely traveled roads past farmland or sped by car to the resort beaches of the Atlantic. After reading James McBride’s novel Song

The Wildlife of T.C. Boyle's Santa Barbara

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Eighteen years ago, over the Labor Day weekend, I moved with my family to Montecito, an unincorporated area of some 10,000 souls contiguous to Santa Barbara. The house we’d bought was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909 and had been on the market for well over a year, as the majority of prospective buyers apparently didn’t want to negotiate the soul-wrenching, divorce-provoking drama of restoration it required. Built of redwood, with a highly flammable (and, as I was later to learn, leaky) shake roof, the house was in need of a foundation, earthquake retrofitting and rat eviction, as well as innumerable other things we didn’t want to worry ourselves with that first wee

Danville, Virginia: Hallowed Ground

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:00:00 GMT

I grew up on Lee Street in Danville, Virginia, the last capital of the Confederacy, and I attended Lee Street Baptist Church and Robert E. Lee School, where I played the role of General Lee in our fifth-grade pageant much more convincingly than Martin Sheen did in the film Gettysburg. Lee was the street of my boyhood, my paper route, my deepest roots. It was lined with glowing maples, and we seldom had to interrupt our ball games to let a streetcar pass. The house that my grandfather built in 1909 faced the juncture of two cemeteries. To the left ran the stone wall around the Danville National Cemetery, which everyone called the Yankee cemetery, because that’s where Union soldiers w

A Breathtaking New Bridge

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Jamey Stillings has been a professional photographer since 1983. His work has taken him across the country and to Nicaragua, India and the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. In March of 2009, he was between assignments when he decided to take what he calls a "photo road trip" from his home in Santa Fe to the Mojave Desert to scout some solar-power plants there. He didn't make it to the power plants that day. A sight at the Hoover Dam intervened: two legs of an incomplete arch had been anchored into opposite sides of a canyon about a quarter-mile south of the dam; they were held up by steel cables stretched over towering concrete pillars. Clearly, an epic bridge was underway. "I look

Under the Spell of San Miguel de Allende

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

In 1937, after several months spent traveling through Mexico, a gangly, 27-year-old Chicago native named Stirling Dickinson, who had been somewhat at loose ends since graduating from Princeton, got off a train in San Miguel de Allende, an arid, down-on-its-luck mountain town 166 miles northwest of Mexico City. Taken from the ramshackle train station by a horse-drawn cart, he was dropped off at the town's leafy main square, El Jardín. It was dawn, and the trees were erupting with the songs of a thousand birds. At the eastern side of the square stood the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, an outsize, pink-sandstone church with neo-Gothic spires, quite unlike Mexico's traditiona

Zozobra: The Boogeyman of Santa Fe

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 09:05:11 GMT

Darkness has fallen over the city of Santa Fe, and the crowd is getting restless. “Burn him! Burn him!” the revelers shout into the warm September air. Before the throng –about 23,000 women, men and children – a 49-foot-tall marionette hangs from a pole on a rise above Fort Marcy Park. Soon, Zozobra, named for a Spanish word that roughly translates as “anxiety” or “anguish,” will go up in flames, along with the city’s collective gloom. Looking like a hideous but nattily dressed tall, thin clown, with Mick Jagger lips, a shock of blue hair, big ears and a white skirted tuxedo with a gold bow tie, Zozobra moans in protest. Jaws flappin

Twice Charmed by Portland, Oregon

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Portland and I have both changed over the decades, but this city hooked me back when I was a book-drunk adolescent with a yen for stories and adventure. This is the town I ran away to, and half a century later that skewed fascination still shapes my perception of the place. These days Portland is liberal and green. We have recycling, mass transit, bicycles, high-tech industries and so many creative types that the brewpubs and espresso shops have to work overtime to fuel them. It’s still far from perfect. But despite the familiar urban problems, there’s a goofy, energetic optimism afoot. A popular bumper sticker reads, “Keep Portland Weird,” and a lot of us try to l

Carving Out the Condor Trail

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 09:34:35 GMT

Upon reaching the grassy meadow known as Bear Camp, there was no mistaking the loud and clumsy clamor coming from the conifer groves just off the the trail. A few steps into the bush later, we found ourselves a football’s throw away from a black bear nervously pacing the base of a cedar tree. Despite our less-than-subtle presence, which included two rambunctious dogs being held at bay, the bear didn’t flee, so Bryan Conant knew something was amiss. His expert eyes — honed from 15 years of exploring and, more recently, mapping this rugged backcountry terrain of the Los Padres National Forest — quickly scanned up the tree’s trunk settling on movement some 75 or

Las Vegas: An American Paradox

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:00:00 GMT

The last box is packed and taped shut, the moving truck will be here first thing in the morning. My footsteps echo loudly through the empty rooms. It’s 7 p.m. I’m supposed to meet friends for dinner on the Strip—one last meal before leaving Las Vegas. I’d love to cancel, but the reservation is in less than an hour. I fall into a chair and stare at the wall. It’s quiet. In two years I’ve never heard it this quiet. I wonder if something is wrong with Caligula. I think back over the past two years, or try to. I can’t recall specifics. Places, dates, it’s all a blur. For instance, what was the name of that crazy club where we went that time? T

Kayaking Alaska in the Exxon Valdez’ Shadow

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 09:09:37 GMT

Foamy salt water sloshes up onto the little trawler’s windshield, its wipers working feverishly to keep the view clear for captains Pete Heddell and Adam Tietz. The two men bob in their seats, rigged with springs to absorb the shock of the waves, while eight of us—three friends from Anchorage, two from Portland, one from Chicago and my husband and myself from Washington, D.C.—sit on benches facing each other. Gnawing on beef jerky, we alternate our gazes between a map of Blackstone Bay, in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, and the actual bay outside the foggy windows. “A minke whale!” exclaims Heddell. We all quickly look starboard and see a black dorsal f

Cassadaga: America’s Oldest Spiritualist Community

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 03:29:34 GMT

Seated across from the medium, eyes closed, my hands in hers, I listen as she prays for a healing white light to fill me, for the spirits and guardian angels always surrounding me to share their guidance. I am anxious and skeptical about this encounter. Will my reading consist of sweeping generalities applicable to anyone? Is this for real? The medium releases my hands and sits back in her chair. When she begins to describe the swirl taking place in my brain, I am amazed. “You go over every word in your mind before you put it down,” says the medium, the Rev. Arlene Sikora, 70. “You just want it just so, and you want your people to feel what you’re feeling, and you

Reinventing Rio

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:00:00 GMT

When it comes to Rio de Janeiro there is no avoiding the obvious. The city may be as famous for its Carnaval, soccer, flesh and fun as it is infamous for its hillside slums and organized crime. Yet its defining feature remains its breathtaking setting. No visitor can ever forget viewing the city from on high for the first time. Even natives—the Cariocas—stand in awe of its grandeur. How could I feel different? I, too, was born there. As a writer friend, Eric Nepomuceno, put it, “only Paris comes close to matching Rio in self-love.” Mountains rise to the east and west and protrude like giant knuckles from inside the city itself. Stretching to the north is a vast bay

Tracking History Through Rainbow Bridge

Tue, 25 May 2010 02:14:17 GMT

“My great-grandfather’s family didn’t much like the culture of the early 20th century in the West,” says Harvey Leake of John Wetherill, a well-known explorer and trader in southern Utah at the turn of the 20th century. “He didn’t believe in dominating nature, but in trying to accommodate it, and that included native peoples.” Wetherill participated in numerous expeditions into the gorgeous, forbidding slick-rock canyons above the Colorado River, often crossing the Arizona line. He and a few others are credited with the “discovery” of Rainbow Bridge, a massive natural rock formation almost 300 feet high from the base, with a span of 27

Jamie Katz on “The Soul of Memphis”

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:07:27 GMT

Jamie Katz is a longtime magazine editor and writer. In the fall of 2007, he served as a consulting editor to Smithsonian’s special issue, 37 under 36: America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences, and he continues to write for the magazine, both print and online. His interest in music, particularly jazz and blues, landed him his latest assignment, a travel story about Memphis. I recently spoke with Katz about his experience reporting “The Soul of Memphis.” What drew you to this particular story, about Memphis? Can you describe how it came about? My father was a jazz musician from Baltimore, and I’ve always been fond of those proud, older, historic ci

Canoeing in Okefenokee Swamp

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 03:03:21 GMT

When I first read about the Okefenokee Swamp as a 10-year-old boy, I immediately wanted to go. I pictured a muddy jungle perfect for exploring; a flooded forest filled with snakes and alligators. But for some reason, my parents weren't eager to plan a family vacation to a soggy wilderness on the border of Georgia and Florida. Nearly two decades after I first heard of the swamp, I set off in March to canoe across it with four friends. I soon found that the swamp was much more varied than my childhood image. Habitats in Okefenokee range from shallow lakes to sandy forests. “Unless you see all sides of the swamp, you really don't see the swamp,” explains Grace Gooch, a ranger at

A Culinary Adventure in Vermont

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:28:39 GMT

Vermont may be best known for its maple trees—a source of both scenery and syrup—but the Green Mountain State also has a budding reputation as a food scene. With more than 100 gourmet food and beverage producers listed by the Vermont Specialty Foods Association, there’s too much good stuff to digest in one article, but here are a few suggested places to stop, sip and sample on your next visit to the state. CHEESE Artisan cheese-making has really taken off in Vermont in the past decade, as evidenced by the University of Vermont’s decision to create an Institute for Artisan Cheese. There are at least 40 makers of cow’s, goat’s, and sheep’s milk ch

Memphis Blues, Mississippi Delta Roots

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:53:43 GMT

Untutored Yanks like me are sometimes surprised to learn that the fertile Mississippi River Delta extends all the way up to Memphis, Tennessee. But the influence of Mississippi—both the river and the state—is palpable in the Bluff City. Dig into almost any important Memphis phenomenon or personality—blues-tinged or not—and you’re liable to find Mississippi roots. “Memphis is the capital of the Delta, and we’re on the spine—Highway 61,” the blues historian and filmmaker Robert Gordon told me over lunch one day on the south side of Memphis. “All roads in the Delta lead to 61, and 61 leads to Memphis.” So it came to me one bl

The Soul of Memphis

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:00:48 GMT

Look up almost anywhere in downtown Memphis, and you might spot a small white birdhouse perched atop a tall metal pole—a chalet here, a pagoda there. The little aviaries add a touch of whimsy to a town that has known its share of trouble. “People like them,” says Henry Turley, the real estate developer who erected them. “I’m proud of those birdhouses.” Turley built them because he has concentrated his business efforts on the older, westernmost part of his hometown, near the Mississippi River—where mosquitoes are thought to swarm. That’s no small matter in a city whose population was once devastated by yellow fever. “People complained

Filoli: Garden of a Golden Age

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:00:00 GMT

In 1917, William Bowers Bourn II and his wife, Agnes, stepped across the threshold of the Georgian manor he had built 30 miles south of San Francisco. Bourn, heir to California’s Empire Mine gold fortune, had sited the estate on 654 acres and surrounded it with 16 acres of formal gardens. He called it Filoli, a name he came up with by combining elements of his life’s credo: “Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life.” Today a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Filoli remains the sole intact estate from an era when San Francisco’s wealthiest families created grand showplaces south of the city in the years after the 1

Vermont's Venerable Byway

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:00:00 GMT

The Robert Frost Cabin lies ten miles west of Route 100, near the midway point in the road’s 216-mile ramble through valleys, woods and farmlands between Massachusetts and Canada. Although I had driven to Vermont many times to ski, I had always taken the interstate, hellbent on reaching the slopes as quickly as possible. This time, however, I followed “The Road Not Taken,” to quote the title of one of Frost’s best-known poems, pausing at the Vermont cabin where he wrote many of them. I crossed over covered bridges spanning sun-dappled rivers, past cornfields and grazing cows, into a landscape punctuated by churches with tall steeples and 18th-century brick houses b

The Story of Thunder Mountain Monument

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:38:27 GMT

There are many unusual sights in the vast emptiness along I-80 east of Reno. Steam belching from the hot spring vents near Nightingale. Miles of white gypsum sand with hundreds of messages scripted in stones and bottles. And near the exit to Imlay, a tiny town that used to be a stop for the first transcontinental railroad, an edifice of human oddness. Thunder Mountain Monument looks as if the contents of a landfill popped to the surface and fell into a pattern over five acres that is part sculpture garden, part backyard fort, part Death Valley theme park. I discovered the monument five years ago on a road trip and have visited it every year since. Not far from the dirt parking lot—

The Mustang Mystique

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT

To create her haunting, intimate photographs of wild mustangs, Melissa Farlow staked out water holes across the West. In Nevada’s Jackson Mountains, she slathered on sunscreen; in Oregon’s Ochoco National Forest, she wore snowshoes. Visiting a South Dakota mustang preserve on a Sioux Indian reservation, she was lost in fog for what seemed like hours; at last she heard a soft nicker from a horse just 20 feet away, hidden in the mist. When Farlow was photographing a herd in Oregon’s remote Steens Mountain area, a pinto stallion charged out of the sagebrush at her, hooves churning. “All of a sudden I just sat down,” Farlow said. It worked. Seemingly assured of

Tips on Roads Less Traveled in Monument Valley

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:03:25 GMT

Too many Monument Valley visitors make the mistake of just driving through for a few hours at mid-day, in mid-summer; the bright summer sun flattens and washes out the landscape. They miss the wonderful shadows—on and from the monoliths--of early morning and late evening, and in the desert’s blast-furnace summer heat and brightness, few visitors spend much time outside of their air-conditioned cars. The other seasons, or early or late hours of the summer, offer much better vistas. Lucky winter visitors can see the valley and rock formations dusted in snow, an incredible sight. Full-moon nights are otherworldly; on moonless nights, stargazing—far away from light pollution-

Behind the Scenes in Monument Valley

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:00:00 GMT

As Lorenz Holiday and I raised a cloud of red dust driving across the valley floor, we passed a wooden sign, “Warning: Trespassing Is Not Allowed.” Holiday, a lean, soft-spoken Navajo, nudged me and said, “Don’t worry, buddy, you’re with the right people now.” Only a Navajo can take an outsider off the 17-mile scenic loop road that runs through Monument Valley Tribal Park, 92,000 acres of majestic buttes, spires and rock arches straddling the Utah-Arizona border. Holiday, 40, wore cowboy boots, a black Stetson and a handcrafted silver belt buckle; he grew up herding sheep on the Navajo reservation and still owns a ranch there. In recent years, he has be

Sticking Around Lafayette, Indiana

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:00:00 GMT

I grew up on a back road in a stretch of flat farmland in west-central Indiana. When school was out, the summer bookmobile was my lifeline. It would park near the railroad trestle, in a half-moon of gravel, and I would load up on novels and feel secure, knowing that when chores were done and softball games over, I had a story to read. When I was 16, my parents moved us to Maryland. We drove through the curvaceous Appalachian Mountains. Ever after I have craved hills and mountains and travel, but I have almost always made my home in small towns or on back roads near small towns. I thought I would never go back to Indiana, yet after years of nomadic life, I did return, a little over two deca

Buckhannon, West Virginia: The Perfect Birthplace

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:00:00 GMT

I grew up in the dense, verdant Appalachia of the ‘50s and ‘60s. For me, “hometown” refers to a small town, home to generations of family, a place whose history is interspersed with family stories and myths. Buckhannon was a town of 6,500 or so then, nestled in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains of north-central West Virginia. I left for college, but went “home” for years to see my divorced parents, and then to visit their graves in the rolling cemetery that splays its green acreage on either side of the winding road where my father taught me to drive. I know now that I loved Buckhannon, that its long history and layers of stories made it the perf

Savoring Puebla

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Despite (or because of) its monumental scale, its crowded, buzzing intensity, its archaeological and political importance, Mexico City's zócalo, or central square, is—for all its beauty and grandeur—not the sort of place where most of us would choose to hang out: eating lunch, meeting friends, watching people go by. But a two-hour drive southeast from the capital, Puebla has at its heart a gorgeous historical center, a hundred-block showplace of Colonial and Baroque architecture. And its handsome zócalo is the gentle heart of that heart. Pause for a few moments on one of its wrought-iron benches, and you think you could stay there forever. Lined with shady trees

The Ghost Wineries of Napa Valley

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:52:24 GMT

Atop Howell Mountain, one of the peaks that frame California’s wine-soaked Napa Valley, the towering groves of ponderosa pines are home to one of the region’s legendary ghost wineries. Born in the late 1800s, killed off by disease, disaster, depression, and denial in the early 20th century, and then laid to solemn rest for decades, La Jota Vineyard — like its countless sister specters found throughout the region — is once again living, breathing, and making world-class wine. And for those who care to listen, this resurrected winery has plenty to say about everything from America’s melting pot history and the long-celebrated quality of West Coast wine to strate

Pico Iyer on “The Great Wide Open”

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:50:35 GMT

In addition to being an essayist for Time magazine for more than 20 years now, Pico Iyer writes ten articles or so a month for other newspapers and magazines all over the world, from The New York Times to The Financial Times and The New York Review of Books to magazines in Hong Kong and Germany. He has also authored several books, which deal with globalism and travel, Cuba and California, and, most recently, the Dalai Lama, subject of his latest book, The Open Road. His travel story “The Great Wide Open,” about a recent trip to Alaska, appears in Smithsonian’s November issue. For this story, editors here asked you where in the world you would want to go to write a story

Alaska's Great Wide Open

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:00:00 GMT

We were flying what seemed only inches above a slope of the 20,300-foot-high Mount McKinley, now more often called by its Athabaskan name—Denali. Below our six-seat Cessna was a glacier extending 36 miles from the great peak. The doors of the little plane were open so that a photographer swathed in gloves and sweaters could lean out and capture the scene. I tried not to think about the statistic I'd spotted that morning on a bulletin board, a tally of the year's climbing figures at Denali: "Missing/Fatalities: 4." It was a sparkling August morning—eight inches of snow had fallen four days before—and the snow line, after a chill and rainy summer, was already hun

Taking the Great American Roadtrip

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The mixed blessing of America is that anyone with a car can go anywhere. The visible expression of our freedom is that we are a country without roadblocks. And a driver's license is our identity. My dream, from way back—from high school, when I first heard the name Kerouac—was of driving across the United States. The cross-country trip is the supreme example of the journey as the destination. Travel is mostly about dreams—dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, c

Captain Bligh's Cursed Breadfruit

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:00:00 GMT

An hour out of the maelstrom of Kingston's traffic, the first frigate bird appeared, and then, around a bend in the road, the sea. There are few beaches on this southeastern side of Jamaica, nothing resembling the white sands and resorts on the opposite shore, around Montego Bay. While Jamaicans might come to the village of Bath, where I was now headed, this part of the island is little visited by outsiders. Six miles inland I and my guide Andreas Oberli—a Swiss-born botanist and horticulturist who has lived in Jamaica for nearly 30 years—arrived at Bath, seemingly deserted at this late morning hour. A pretty village of sagging, historic houses, it had formerly been a fashiona

Telluride Thinks Out of the Box

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:00:00 GMT

One way to think about Telluride, Colorado, is as Aspen's younger, less glamorous, not so naughty sister. Telluride watched with envy and alarm as Aspen was transformed from low-key to outlandish, tomboy to sex symbol, its small businesses succumbing one by one to chic urban counterparts, haute-couture and -cuisine replacing Wranglers and hamburgers, hot tubs instead of horse tanks. Aspenization, I've heard it called. It conjures up a cautionary tale, the story of a town that made deals with developers, forsook its roots in ranching and mining and sold its soul for a hefty check. Aspen residents saw too many of their open spaces filled with mansions and gated communities replete with movi

Thornton Wilder's Desert Oasis

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzer Prizes, the admiration of his peers and success at the box office and bookstore. Ever accessible, he gave lectures, responded to queries about his plays and even acted in them. But eventually he tired of strangers asking him what the ladders in Our Town symbolized or what metaphor readers should take from The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder had been so famous for so long that, nearing 65, he felt worn down. He wanted a break, he told the Associated Press in March 1962, so that he could "refresh the wells by getting away from it all in some quiet place." Wilder's travels over the years had taken him to spas, aboard cru

Sugarloaf Key, Florida: Keeping Good Company

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In my case, anyway, geography is hard to disentangle from biography. For almost 20 years I endured the aesthetic deprivations of a lower-middle-class suburb so that my children could go to the town's first-rate public schools. Then the kids grew up and moved out and, independently of that, my marriage crumbled. I made a mad midlife dash to Key West, where I had a few friends and soon took up with a good-looking, outdoorsy local. We liked our Old Town condo well enough, but eventually, worn down by the all-night pool parties in the guesthouses next door, decided to look for a place of our own "up the Keys," where the property was cheaper and the nights still as death. The second,

Buenos Aires: a City's Power and Promise

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

"When I moved here, you had to learn how to speak Spanish," says Wendy Gosselin, a translator from Brighton, Michigan, who runs her own business and relocated to Buenos Aires a decade ago. "Now you go into a restaurant and everyone's speaking English." Not long after Michael Legee moved to Buenos Aires from London in 2004, the 34-year-old management consultant opened the Natural Deli, a market and café offering organic fare. The concept of health food seemed so alien one local woman asked, "What are you trying to cure?" But business took off, and within a year Legee added a second deli. He's aiming for ten. "I don't have much competition," he says. Sam Nadler and Jordan Metzner, w

Fairhope, Alabama's Southern Comfort

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

I grew up in the Alabama foothills, landlocked by red dirt. My ancestors cussed their lives away in that soil, following a one-crop mule. My mother dragged a cotton sack across it, and my kin slaved in mills made of bricks dug and fired from the same clay. My people fought across it with roofing knives and tire irons, and cut roads through it, chain gang shackles rattling around their feet. My grandfather made liquor 30 years in its caves and hollows to feed his babies, and lawmen swore he could fly, since he never left a clear trail in that dirt. It has always reminded me of struggle, somehow, and I will sleep in it, with the rest of my kin. But between now and then, I would like to walk

Big Sur's California Dreamin'

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

"Young people were living in cars and under the bridges," says Don McQueen, recalling the 1960s in Big Sur, the 90-mile stretch of California coast where the Santa Lucia Mountains plunge into the Pacific Ocean south of Monterey. "Once, I saw smoke coming from a field just north of here and went up to find two dozen hippies, their naked kids running around, and fires going. Fire's always a danger in Big Sur." McQueen, 80, is a commanding figure—6-foot-8, size 15 boots. "Some of the newcomers were worthless," he adds, "but some were OK. We were so stuck in the mud around here. The new people shook things up." I first traveled to Big Sur in the f

Harboring History in Pensacola

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

It's late afternoon in Gulf Islands National Seashore. Along some 20 miles of pristine ocean-front beaches here in northwest Florida, the water is crystal clear; one can wade into gentle surf to peer down at starfish and sand dollars. Pelicans and sea gulls wheel across the sky. Dolphins pop up above the waves, their sharp dorsal fins silhouetted against a horizon where the turquoise Gulf of Mexico meets an iridescent blue sky. The unspoiled shoreline is virtually unaltered from the time Spanish explorers first made landfall here nearly five centuries ago. Yet this marine wilderness lies only a few minutes' drive from the center of Pensacola, the lively and historic city of 56,000 at the

Chicago Eats

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The people of Chicago, that stormy, husky, brawling kind of town, sure know how to tie on the feed bag. Has any other American city patented so many signature foods? There's deep-dish pizza, smoky Polish sausages, Italian beef sandwiches au jus, and, of course, the classic Chicago-style hot dog: pure Vienna Beef on a warm poppy-seed bun with mustard, relish, pickled peppers, onions, tomato slices, a quartered dill pickle and a dash of celery salt. Alter the formula (or ask for ketchup) and you can head right back to Coney Island, pal. For better or worse, it was Chicago that transformed the Midwest's vast bounty of grains, livestock and dairy foods into Kraft cheese, Cracker Jack and Oscar

Highlights & Hotspots

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Spoleto Festival USA Charleston, South Carolina May 22 – June 7 A work by Japanese dancer-choreographer Hiroaki Umeda and a punk-rock operetta from Brooklyn, based on the life of actor Peter Lorre, are among this year's global performing-arts highlights. Red Earth Native American Festival Oklahoma City, Oklahoma June 5 – 7 More than 100 tribes, Navajo to Iroquois, gather for events including a three-day ceremonial dance competition and a parade showcasing traditional dress. Dairyfest Marshfield, Wisconsin June 5 – 7 Got milk? A down-home breakfast starts things off in a town (and state) where cheeses from cheddar to Colby, yogurt and more, take top billing. Swamp Stomp

Searching for a Mother-in-Law Sandwich

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Cruising the streets one day with food writer Mike Sula of the Chicago Reader, I caught a glimpse of what you might call the underbelly of the city's rich gastronomic culture. It's not always a pretty sight. On Western Avenue, we drove by a little diner where you can order a French fries sandwich. "It's actually a sloppy, disgusting mess, dipped in gravy, smothered in cheese sauce," Sula said, "but some people love them." In fact, he told me, there's a thriving subculture of Chicago gourmands who dote on such oddities—the kind of folks who appreciate an old hot dog stand with a hand-lettered menu board, especially if they stumble upon some rare and pleasing twist on the familiar sta

Boise, Idaho: Big Skies and Colorful Characters

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

I stand at the window, 7 in the morning, and watch snow drift across the backyard. Dawn is slow and pale. I drive my 4-year-old twin sons to preschool. The sky swirls; the roads are ribbons of slush. Fog washes between the upper stories of downtown Boise's few tall buildings. We are passing the Hollywood Video at Broadway and Park when a doe comes skittering onto the road. The intersection is six lanes across and the Toyota in front of us flares its brake lights and 40 or 50 cars in all directions follow suit. We slide into a dangerous, slow-motion ballet. Behind the first doe come five more, radar-eared, panicky, dancing across the centerline. A truck beside us grinds up onto the curb.

Endangered Site: Herschel Island, Canada

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:00:00 GMT

If you found yourself in the Arctic Circle in winter between the 1890s and early 1900s, then Herschel Island was possibly the best place to be. Hundreds of American men—some with families—would spend months there in the middle of nowhere, their whaling ships trapped by ice as the crewmen waited for warmer weather to pursue their prey, the bowhead whale, through the Beaufort Sea. Herschel Island hosted grand balls, theatrical performances and even sports leagues. The whalers worked hard and played hard—sometimes, too hard. Five men died during a baseball game in 1897 when a blizzard struck before everyone could take shelter. Then, in 1907, the whaling market collapsed. Pe

Endangered Site: Port City of Coro, Venezuela

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:00:00 GMT

A strong breeze blows along the southern coast of Venezuela's Paraguaná Peninsula, which is surely how Coro got its name, a derivation of the Caquetío Indian word curiana, meaning "place of winds." Today, the Caribbean port—arguably the first to call itself the "windy city"—is one of South America's oldest and best-preserved colonial towns, retaining much of its original layout and many of its early earthen structures. Coro was founded by the Spanish in 1527 as the first capital of the Province of Venezuela. But just a year later, King Carlos I of Spain leased the province to the Welsers, a German banking house, to repay loans worth around 850

Endangered Site: Centennial Baptist Church

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In 1905, the Reverend Elias Camp Morris and self-taught architect Henry James Price, both of whom had been born in slavery, built the Centennial Baptist Church in Helena, Arkansas. Its Gothic Revival style stood out in the small, delta neighborhood; the building featured square towers with brick corbelling, double-hung lancet windows and a gabled roof. In the years that followed, Centennial emerged as a center of leadership and a beacon of pride for the African American community. It hosted civil rights leaders Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois, entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker and, more recently, Governor Bill Clinton, who visited the church in 1989 to announce a renovation plan for do

Endangered Site: Chan Chan, Peru

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:00:00 GMT

During its heyday, about 600 years ago, Chan Chan, in northern Peru, was the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on earth. Ten thousand structures, some with walls 30 feet high, were woven amid a maze of passageways and streets. Palaces and temples were decorated with elaborate friezes, some of which were hundreds of feet long. Chan Chan was fabulously wealthy, although it perennially lacked one precious resource: water. Today, however, Chan Chan is threatened by too much water, as torrential rains gradually wash away the nine-square-mile ancient city. Located near the Pacific coast city of Trujillo, Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú civilization, which las

Endangered Site: Historic Route 66, U.S.A.

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Writing about the Joad family's journey from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to the promised land of California in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck famously called Route 66 the "mother road." But today it's more of an impoverished great-grandmother. The 2,400-mile highway, which starts in Chicago and passes through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona before ending in Los Angeles, will turn 83 this year—and it's not aging gracefully. Derelict gas stations, restaurants and trading posts, often vandalized, line its rural stretches, their neon signs long since dimmed. Developers are bulldozing quirky motels to make room for generic high-rises. And in places

My Kind of Town: Charleston, South Carolina

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:00:00 GMT

One spring afternoon I was sitting at my office desk when I heard the sounds of a ruckus outside. And I do welcome a ruckus. My office is on the ground floor of the Confederate Home, where widows lived after the Civil War and old ladies still live today, with the extra studio apartments rented to artists and writers. It's a quiet place hidden away in the busy heart of town, amid lawyers and tourists and Charlestonians out for a stroll. In good weather I leave my two big windows open, knowing something interesting will waft in from Chalmers Street. If I'm lucky it might be oompah music from nearby Washington Park, or a snippet of conversation from passersby who're unaware that I'm only thre

The Vineyard in Winter

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Here's what I love most about my town: its edges. In three directions, Vineyard Haven ends abruptly, as a town should, surrendering, gracefully and completely, to farms and fields and watery expanses of harbor and salt ponds. Within minutes, you can leave town behind and be lost on a woody trail, eye to eye with a ewe or out on the whitecaps with a sea gull. Because of these edges and what lies beyond them, it smells good here. The breezes that blow through my kitchen window mostly carry briny scents, tangy with ocean. But when the wind shifts south, there might be rich dark smells of loam or hints of hay from newly mown fields. I love maritime things, so I also love the way it sounds her

Lexington Is Kim Edwards' Old Kentucky Home

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:00:00 GMT

When I moved to Lexington, Kentucky, 12 years ago, I often had the sense of having taken half a step back in time. It was nothing I could pinpoint exactly. Though Lexington is small enough that I can drive to pretty much any part of town in 15 minutes, it has all the cultural amenities you'd hope to find in a city of 255,000. There's an opera house and a symphony, organic food stores, farmers' markets, art films at the Kentucky Theatre, a terrific independent bookstore, a bluegrass music festival in June and an art fair in August. In recent years, condos have cropped up all over downtown, reflecting a new interest in urban living. It is a contemporary place. Still, the past keeps drifting

Snapshot: Deer Isle

Mon, 19 May 2008 01:00:00 GMT

Origins: People have lived on Deer Isle and its dozens of rocky surrounding islands since at least 11,000 B.C. Around 8,000 B.C., a culture arose that included sophisticated tools, land and sea trade, and made extensive use of the islands' rich clam and mussel beds. Lore, if not the archaeological record, suggests that Vikings explored the islands in the 11th century A.D. By the 16th century, several Algonquin-speaking groups had settled the area, most of whose members left or fell to disease or battle after the first white settlers arrived in 1762. The appeal: Lobstering, rather than tourism, remains Deer Isle's primary economic engine. And thanks to the Haystack Mountain School of Craft

The Life Aquatic with Bruce Mozert

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Central Florida has many clear springs, but in the 19th century, Silver Springs also had location, location, location: connected to the outside world by the Silver, Ocklawaha and St. Johns rivers. After the Civil War, steamship-borne tourists including the likes of President Ulysses S. Grant and Harriet Beecher Stowe would flock to the springs to marvel at the sight of aquatic life seemingly suspended in space. Through the first few decades of the 20th century, whether they came by rail or by car, tourists continued to go to Silver Springs. But by the 1930s, the place needed a new image—or images—to keep them coming. For almost half a century, Bruce Mozert supplied those images

Colombia Dispatch 1: Revisiting Colombia

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Back in 2006, after I had quit my job teaching high school, I went on vacation to Ecuador and on a whim, decided to take the bus north, curious about a country I had heard about often but understood little. I arrived in a Colombian village on a large mountain lake, where blooming flowers and soldiers toting enormous guns surrounded quaint alpine-style houses. The village on La Cocha, as the lake is called, was not under siege. The military presence assured that Colombian day-trippers felt safe spending a sunny afternoon on the water, though there were only a handful of tourists that day. The area surrounding the lake was the site of guerrilla activity and drug trafficking; billboards alon

Colombia Dispatch 2: The Slums of El Pozon

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Our green SUV bounces up the dirt road on the edge of El Pozón, a vast impoverished neighborhood on the outskirts of Cartagena, a major port and tourist center on Colombia's Caribbean coast. We stop beside a field of several acres dotted with makeshift black and blue tents hurriedly built out of scrap wood and plastic sheeting. The entire field is covered with ankle-deep mud from an intense thunderstorm that just passed through. I step out of the car along with Maria Bernarda Perez, the coordinator of Cartagena's new emergency social development program. As we approach the camp, men with machetes, followed by women and children, stream toward us, all calling for help. They crowd ar

Colombia Dispatch 3: The Pedro Romero Program

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Perched along the Caribbean, Cartagena attracts busloads of tourists who enjoy the quaint colonial streets of the historic downtown. The city is surrounded by centuries-old walls built by the Spanish to keep out pirates and other invaders. Today, the city of nearly a million inhabitants is also ringed by slums and plagued by gangs, prostitution and drug dealers. Maria Bernarda Perez, my guide for my trip to el Pozon and the coordinator of the city's emergency social development program, hopes to change that. After spending the last 15 years working for the city's poor, she's hopeful that the new mayor's "Pedro Romero" program can finally make a difference. The new program aims t

Colombia Dispatch 4: Palenque: An Afro-Colombian Community

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Centuries ago, escaped slaves built isolated forts in the jungles that surround Cartagena, once Colombia's main port for incoming slaves. Today, the Afro-Colombian inhabitants of San Basilio de Palenque, a village just over an hour from Cartagena, have preserved many of the customs of their African ancestors. I wander around the dusty streets and of the small town on a scorching hot day, listening to residents speaking a local Creole tongue. A mixture of African languages with Spanish and Portuguese, it sounds a lot like the Bantu languages of central Africa. Although the town now has electricity and running water in most homes, locals still gather at the creek to wash clothes, chat and b

Colombia Dispatch 5: The Kogi Way of Life

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Driving east along Colombia's coast past the port of Santa Marta, lush green jungle quickly envelops the two-lane highway. Glimpses of the turquoise Caribbean waters shine through the trees, while the 18,000-foot snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains occasionally loom high above the forest. The Kogi tribe calls this region "the heart of the world." The Kogi have clung to their traditional way of life in these mountains since the Spanish conquest 500 years ago. In recent decades, they have been caught in the crossfire between guerillas, paramilitaries and cocaine traffickers. As a result of this violent contact with outsiders, the Kogi call the rest of the world "l

Colombia Dispatch 6: Accordion Rock Stars in Valledupar

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

The small city of Valledupar is famous as the birthplace of vallenato, an upbeat accordion-driven folk music that plays constantly in streets, shops, buses and restaurants across northern Colombia and has become popular across Latin America. I came to the clean, quiet streets of the city, an off-the beaten corner of the country near the Venezuelan border, to follow up on an article I wrote for Smithsonian's June issue on vallenato music. Children here dream of being accordion stars the same way kids in America practice guitar hoping to become rock stars. With that in mind, I head out to Andres "Turco" Gil's accordion academy on the outskirts of the city. The young children at Gi

Colombia Dispatch 7: Turning Guns into Guitars

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Colombian musician Cesar Lopez had a moment of inspiration in 2002 when he noticed a soldier in Bogota holding his rifle the same way Lopez holds his guitar. "They are two objects that you carry the same way," he says, "But they mean two completely different things." He decided to take weapons that had been used by guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Colombia's conflict and turn them into something positive. Lopez collaborates with luthier Alberto Paredes to create an unlikely guitar with a body made out of an inoperative gun. He calls it an "escopetarra", a hybrid between the Spanish words for guitar and shotgun. It's an instrument of peace, Lopez explains,

Colombia Dispatch 8: The Tagua Industry

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

During World War I and World War II, some of the buttons on U.S. military uniforms were carved out of tagua, a durable white nut about the size of a golf ball that grows on a South American palm tree. The material was cheaper than ceramic or metal, so exporting tagua became a major industry in Colombia and Ecuador beginning around 1900. By the second half of the 20th century, demand halted with the popularization of plastic. Today the material is mostly forgotten in the United States. But tagua is making a comeback, this time as a decorative novelty. While Ecuador now has a burgeoning tagua trade, Colombia's resources are only starting to be retapped. In Bogota, I visited La Tagueria, a f

Colombia Dispatch 9: The Story of Medellin

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Medellin has undergone an amazing transformation in the last 5 years. In the 1980s and '90s, Colombia's second-largest city was a war zone known as one of the most violent cities in the world and the center of Pablo Escobar's drug cartel. Police were afraid to enter many areas as street gangs and guerrilla and paramilitary groups fought for control of neighborhoods. Military crackdowns in the early 2000s quelled the violence, and peace agreements with illegal armed groups came about in late 2003 through a demobilization process that gave amnesty to most combatants who laid down their arms. Murders in the city of about 2 million are now down from a peak of 6,349 in 1991 to 653 in 2007. In

Colombia Dispatch 10: Education for Demobilized Forces

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

The fifth-grade class in downtown Medellin was unlike any I had ever seen. In front of the young female teacher sat about 13 men in their 20s and 30s, all formerly guerrilla or paramilitary soldiers in Colombia's long-running conflict. As part of peace agreements, they turned in their arms to the government in exchange for amnesty and an education. "What do you plan on doing when you finish school?" I ask the class. "What, when I grow up?" says one man of about 30, to general laughter. He explained that he had been taking woodworking classes on the weekend. "After getting out of here I can hopefully be somebody in life." Statistics show that more than 80 pe

Colombia Dispatch 11: Former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Enrique Peñalosa's controversial work as mayor of Bogota, Colombia's capital, from 1998 to 2001 has made it an unlikely model for cities worldwide. The city of about 7 million inhabitants lies in a nearly constant gray chill at around 8,600 feet in elevation. The north is full of luxury apartments, modern shopping malls and efficient highways, but Bogota is also a magnet for the poor and refugees. There are vast slums of dirt roads and shanties and a conspicuous homeless population in the heart of downtown. Peñalosa says he worked hard to change inequalities through reforms that cracked down on cars and benefited pedestrians and the poor. "We tried to make the city for

Colombia Dispatch 12: Still Striving for Peace

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

In the nearly six weeks I spent criss-crossing Colombia on long bus rides, I was often amazed by the friendliness and optimism of its people. If I asked for directions, I was invariably accompanied to my destination to make sure I found it. A quick chat often evolved into a lively conversation and invitations to dinner or connections with friends in other cities. People told me how frustrated they were with the Colombian stereotype of drugs and violence, that most people lived normal lives and there is so much more to the country. The steamy atmosphere and tropical rhythms of the Caribbean lowlands seems like a completely different country than the Andean chill of cosmopolitan Bogota. Eac

California Academy of Sciences: Greening a Higher Ground

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Greening a Higher Ground San Francisco, California—The biggest green roof in the state, atop the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, is an undulating two-and-a-half-acre landscape of steep hills, wide meadows and nearly two million plants. Three stories above ground, it has the city's largest concentration of native vegetation. Planted with hardy, drought-tolerant flowering varieties such as beach strawberry and stonecrop, the roof attracts birds, bees and other pollinators like the Bay checkerspot, a threatened butterfly. The museum, completely rebuilt on its original site over the past three years, reopened in September with a rain forest, planetarium, the worl

Southern Comfort

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:00:00 GMT

It doesn't take long in Houston to realize that the beauty of the place is in the sky. The swamplands and fields that became the fourth-largest city in the country are almost entirely flat, and the availability of cheap land and an exuberant appetite for sprawl have kept most of the town low-slung and horizontal. So the sky seems vast, and from any parking lot you can watch big white towers of cloud sail up from the Gulf of Mexico 50 miles to the south as if they were navigating the ship channel beneath them. The expanse of sky is so wide, there's often more than one thing going on. Rain may darken the western rim while a fierce sun illuminates cloud towers in the center and a brilliant bl

Points of Interest

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:52:41 GMT

The Soul Man of Modern Dance Washington, D.C.—On March 30, 1958, an ensemble of nine African-American dancers cobbled mostly from Broadway shows debuted a work at New York City's Young Men's Hebrew Association, a low-cost venue for up-and-coming artists. Choreographed by 27-year-old dancer Alvin Ailey, Blues Suite echoed the bawdy music halls of his native Texas. It redefined modern dance, adding energy, robustness and physicality to traditional restrained moves. Two years later, Ailey unveiled Revelations, a three-part work set to the spirituals he remembered from Southern black churches. Borrowing from ballet, jazz and ethnic dance, Ailey created his own style, recruiting dancers c

Acadia Country

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

At only 1,530 feet, Mount Desert Island's Cadillac Mountain, in Maine's Acadia National Park, lays a singular claim to fame: it is the highest point on the eastern coastline of the Americas, from Canada all the way south to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. But for anyone standing on Cadillac's summit on a brilliant summer afternoon, it's the view, not the statistic, that dazzles. To the west, ponds and lakes glisten in dense forests. To the east, a green tapestry of pine and spruce trees stretches to the outskirts of Bar Harbor. Beyond that seacoast village, yachts and sailboats ply the icy Atlantic waters off the four Porcupine Islands in Frenchman Bay. At low tide, it's possible to cross the s

Ancient Citadel

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Peering up from the base of a sandstone mesa rising from the plains of central New Mexico, it's possible to make out clusters of tawny adobe dwellings perched at the top. The 365-foot-high outcropping, about 60 miles west of Albuquerque, is home to the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America—an isolated, easily defensible redoubt that for at least 1,200 years has sheltered the Acoma, an ancient people. The tribe likely first took refuge here to escape the predations of the region's nomadic, warlike Navajos and Apaches. Today, some 300 two- and three-story adobe structures, their exterior ladders providing access to upper levels, house the pueblo's residents. Althou

Back to the Frontier

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Inside a log cabin on the Indiana frontier, a rugged-looking man in a rumpled linen tunic, trousers of rough homespun and heavy black boots sat at a crude table piled high with pelts. He looked up as I stepped inside. "Welcome," he said. "What furs do you have to trade today?" Just outside, a fire smoldered near two bark-and-reed huts, the dwellings of local Lenape Indians. In a nearby clearing, a deer hide, dangling inside a wooden frame used for skinning and stretching, dried in the sun. A log shed next to the cabin housed a bark canoe, hung from the rafters. Only 40 minutes earlier, I had been driving in an air-conditioned car, radio blaring, cellphone at the read

End of the Road

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Midnight on the Mississippi. In the antebellum city of Natchez, high on a bluff overlooking the river, lights are winking off in the Victorian mansions and plantation homes emblematic of the Old South. But down here on the riverbank, inside the Under-the-Hill Saloon, André Farish (the proprietor here until his son, André Jr., recently took over) has all night to recount some of the legends surrounding the history of Natchez. "U.S. Grant may have slept up at Rosalie Plantation, but he spent his evenings down here," Farish says, as more customers fresh off the paddle-wheeler Delta Queen push through the door. "He had one of the biggest [benders] of the war here t

Destination America

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

The Chicago Blues Festival Chicago, Illinois June 5 to 8 Texas guitarist Johnny Winter opens four days of performances showcasing such greats as guitarist B.B. King and singer Koko Taylor. International Festival of Arts & Ideas New Haven, Connecticut June 14 to 28 Music, dance, theater and speakers from around the world open in many venues, including the New Haven Green, a public space laid out in 1638. Juneteenth Celebration Houston, Texas June 19 On June 19, 1865, two months after the Civil War ended, a Union general traveled to Texas and declared slaves there to be free. This year's celebration includes zydeco, blues and gospel concerts. North American Indian Days Browning, Monta

Muskrat Love

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:39:16 GMT

Late winter on the marshes of Maryland's Eastern Shore is a soggy affair. Fog hides the stands of loblolly pines—practically the only green things growing at this time of year—and in the rain even the great blue heron looks a bit bedraggled. It's muskrat weather. And muskrat—baked, stewed and microwaved—is what's for dinner at this K-8 school way out in the wetlands of Golden Hill. Here local watermen have gathered, as they always do on the last weekend in February, for an amalgam of sporting contests and snacking opportunities billed, rather grandly, as The National Outdoor Show. With the muskrat cook-off just moments away, Marlene Meninger's muskrat potato skins

Points of Interest

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Not So Dead Death Valley, California—In a land deemed dead, there's no greater adventure than searching for life. Bumping along in a four-wheel-drive and covering about 400 miles of the 5,300-square-mile desert, I found surprising biodiversity in this brittle landscape punctuated by mountains and canyons. Wildflowers carpeting the hillsides watered by snowmelt from Telescope Peak, the park's highest point at 11,049 feet, are expected to continue into June. I spotted bighorn sheep and red-tailed hawks on the craggy rock walls and wild burros in the shade of mesquite trees. Even though it's one of the driest places on earth—averaging less than two inches of rain annually—D

You got a problem with that?

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

In my experience, many people believe that New Yorkers are smarter than other Americans, and this may actually be true. The majority of people who live in New York City were not born here. Indeed, more than a third were not born in the United States. New Yorkers, then, are people who left another place and came here, looking for something, which suggests that the population is preselected for higher energy and ambition. Also for a willingness to forgo basic comforts. I grew up in California, where even middle-income people have a patio on which they can eat breakfast and where almost everyone has a car. In New York, only upper-income people enjoy those amenities. The others would like to

Urbane Renewal

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:07:45 GMT

Before ever I had set foot in Boston, it lived in my imagination as a natural home. It was the place in the United States where, long before my birth, my parents had been happiest, when my French father was a graduate student at Harvard and my Canadian mother worked at secretarial jobs that sounded, to my childhood ear, impossibly glamorous, at the Browne & Nichols School and at Houghton Mifflin. Their young lives, in a tiny apartment on a cul-de-sac at the louche outer limits of Cambridge—on the Somerville line, no less—were rendered mythical by their stories: of their condemned apartment building, where everything sagged on the verge of collapse; of Mrs. Nussbaum's conve

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:19:40 GMT

Ice may be dwindling in other places, but every year in this Adirondack Mountain village (pop. 5,000), there's a spectacular buildup of it, in the form of an ice palace. Complete with towers, arches and crenelated ramparts, it's the centerpiece of Saranac's Winter Carnival. The townspeople make the palace themselves with 1,500 huge ice blocks cut from a frozen lake, then shine colored light through the translucent blocks, turning the structure a dazzling red or perhaps a cool blue-green (and occasionally revealing a dead fish). Saranac Lake began throwing the carnival in 1887 to cheer up the patients at the local tuberculosis sanitarium during the long winters. This year's event (February

Points of Interest

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:15:14 GMT

Rocks of Ages Moab, Utah—The sandstone spires, balanced rocks, slot canyons and huge arches seem to call out to be explored. Or photographed. With its dramatic red rocks and perpetually blue skies, Arches National Park is about as photogenic as a place can be. The surreal landscape of the 73,000-acre park is a testament to the power of the elements—and time. Like much of North America, the northeastern corner of Utah lay underwater 300 million years ago. The sea dried up and left a mile-thick layer of salt, which was eventually covered by windblown sand and other sediments, forming rocks. Salt oozed upward, splitting the rocks, and then water cracked them open further as it fr

At Home. For Now

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:03:19 GMT

I don't think about home very much. I mean, the concept of home—the direction finder we're all supposedly equipped with, that leads us onward (or back) to the place we belong, where we'll be...what? Happy? At peace? At rest? Permanent? I'm not really sure. Which is one underlying reason I don't think about home much. I don't know what it means. Oh, I know some of what home means—to other people. That direction-finder idea is somebody else's. Home means, simply enough, where you come from, where you're born and where they always have to take you in (though we all know they don't). Home can also partake of "final matters"—where you want to be, in the last analysi

Breaking into Alcatraz

Tue, 01 May 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Frank Heaney can't escape Alcatraz. In 1948, then just 21 years old, Heaney became the infamous federal prison's youngest guard ever. He later went back as a tour guide and still visits once a month to talk to people and autograph his book, Inside the Walls of Alcatraz. Which is where he takes us now. What made you want to be a prison guard? I was born and raised in Berkeley, and from there you can see Alcatraz. In fact, there's a street in Berkeley called Alcatraz, and all the way down Alcatraz Street you can see Alcatraz. I had a high interest in prisons because I had a cousin who worked in Folsom. I was in the service during World War II for a while, got out in '46 and was going to co

Beyond Jamestown

Tue, 01 May 2007 04:00:00 GMT

It was a champagne day on the James River: blue sky, puffy white clouds, sun sparkling on fast-moving water. With Jamestown slipping behind us, we headed downstream in the wake of Capt. John Smith, the first Englishman to explore the broad waters and many rivers of the Chesapeake Bay. Captain Smith—no relative, I'm sad to say—was among that original band of dreamers and schemers who came ashore on the banks of the James 400 years ago, in May 1607. The settlement they established at Jamestown gave the English their first enduring toehold in the New World and wrote the opening chapter of our national narrative. The 400th anniversary of that event will be celebrated May 11 to 13

Jewel of the Tetons

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Who doesn't love the tart taste of forbidden fruit? Hiking through a pine forest high in Wyoming's Teton Mountains, I felt as if I'd been issued a pass to a secret world. This particular slice of the West, a scenic parcel of lakeside wilderness known as the JY Ranch, has been off-limits since 1932, when philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. claimed it as a summer retreat. Few people have ever seen beyond its entrance, a discreet gate on the gravel Moose-Wilson Road, or the wooden buck-and-pole fences that mark its boundaries. But this September the property will be open to the public—as a new Rockefeller donation to the Grand Teton National Park. Clay James, the longtime Rockefeller

Snapshot: Tikal

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Read about Tikal National Park in Guatemala below, then click on the main image, or here, to begin a slideshow about the region. Origin: Archaeologists believe the Maya settled the area as early as 800 B.C., but the city itself was not founded until six centuries later. The Maya abandoned it around A.D. 900 for unknown reasons. In 1848, Colonel Modesto Méndez, governor of Guatemala's El Petén department—the vast northern section of jungle where Tikal is located—wrote the first official report on the site. The Guatemalan government established the 222-square-mile Tikal National Park in 1955. The appeal: Tikal is one of the largest ancient lowland Mayan cities ev

Some Don't Like It Hot

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 04:00:00 GMT

About Atlanta, people say just the opposite of what they say about New York City: It's a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there. Especially in the summer. Atlantans regard enthusiastic vacationers with dismay. We'll scramble some salty eggs for their breakfast and lay a pat of butter on their grits to get them started. We'll set the translucent plastic gallon-jug of Publix sweet iced tea sweating on the table among the coffee mugs. After that, they're on their own. "What are we doing today?" our first-time guests from Oregon ask expectantly on the first Sunday morning after their arrival. We regard them balefully. "Don't you mean, what are you doing to

Have Roots, Will Travel

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 02:30:14 GMT

Many people are lured to Los Angeles because they think it has no history and they can escape their pasts and reinvent themselves. That's not me. My great-great-grandmother—a single mother with an entrepreneurial spirit—came here from Washington State to start her own business. My great-grandfather came from a small village in China and became the patriarch of Los Angeles' Chinatown. This makes me a fifth-generation Angeleno, and I'm pretty confident you won't meet many people like me. (In the interest of full disclosure, I was born in Paris, where my parents were students, but I don't count that six-week aberration.) My sons are sixth-generation Angelenos—as rare around

The New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Jerry Gandolfo didn’t flinch when a busload of eighth-grade girls began shrieking at the front desk. The owner of the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum simply assumed that John T. Martin, who calls himself a voodoo priest, was wearing his albino python around his neck as he took tickets. A few screams were par for the course. Deeper in the museum it was uncomfortably warm, because the priest has a habit of turning down the air conditioning to accommodate his coldblooded companion. Not that Gandolfo minded: snakes are considered sacred voodoo spirits and this particular one, named Jolie Vert ( “Pretty Green,” although it is pale yellow), also furnishes the little bags of

Titan Missile Museum

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

In 1963, the United States armed 54 missile silos with launchable nuclear bombs, which could travel some 6,000 miles each and kill millions of people, flash-blind hundreds of thousands and leave a blanket of nuclear fallout. Beginning in 1982, as a result of a nuclear deterrent modernization program, the Defense Department destroyed the silos and mothballed the missiles. But one silo and its defanged missile near what would become a retirement community in southern Arizona called Green Valley, were preserved as a museum, a monument to the cold war. The Titan Missile Museum, 25 miles south of Tucson, celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Take a one-hour tour or opt for a $80 “t

The Kansas Barbed Wire Museum

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

“Barbed wire was a lifesaver for this region,” says Brad Penka, president and curator of the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum, in La Crosse, Kansas. Let him count the ways: keeping animals, crops and vehicles apart and helping to make the treeless plains fencible and the United States a food exporter.

There are more than 2,400 variations of barbed wire. The first U.S. patent for a barbed fence attachment was issued in 1867. But it was not until 1874 that Joseph Farwell Glidden, a De Kalb, Illinois, farmer, patented a strand in which the barbs were held in place by twisted wire. Called “The Winner,” it would become the signature fencing of the American West.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

To find the Museum of Jurassic Technology, you navigate the sidewalks of Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, ring a brass buzzer at a facade that evokes a Roman mausoleum and enter a dark, hushed antechamber filled with antique-looking display cases, trinkets and taxidermic animals. After making a suggested $5 “donation,” you are ushered into a maze of corridors containing softly lit exhibits. There are a European mole skeleton, “extinct French moths” and glittering gems, a study of the stink ant of Cameroon and a ghostly South American bat, complete with extended text by 19th-century scientists. The sounds of chirping crickets and cascading water follow your steps. Op

Ladew Topiary Gardens

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The best place for watching the fox hunt at Harvey S. Ladew’s estate in Monkton, Maryland, is with the naked ladies. You stand among them under expansive trees, where the fox hunt never ends, regardless of season. That is because Ladew sculpted his life-size hunting scene—with fox, running hounds and mounted riders—out of living yew hedges. Ladew, a socialite transplanted from Long Island, New York, lived hard, partied hard and planted exuberantly before he died in 1976 at age 89. Today, his antique-stuffed house and his topiary gardens attract over 30,000 visitors a year. In one section of the gardens, one finds a statue of Adam and Eve: Adam accepts the forbidden frui

The Ava Gardner Museum

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Off Interstate 95 in Smithfield, North Carolina, is an outpost of mid-century Hollywood style: the Ava Gardner Museum. Born in nearby Grabtown, Gardner would have been happy living life as a secretary behind a typewriter—and she might have had her sister not pulled her into a New York photography studio. A portrait of her demurely gazing out from underneath a simple straw bonnet attracted the attention of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio, and the 16-year-old beauty was signed to a contract, well on her way from being a poor country girl to an international star. Initially known for her leggy publicity photographs and decadent social life—which included high-profile marriag

The National Museum of Health and Medicine

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Victorian-era museums of medicine often seem like freak shows—corridors lined with displays of giant skeletons, deformed fetuses, amputated feet and cancerous lesions. But they were established with a noble purpose, as places where doctors-in-training could study actual specimens. The National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington D.C., which was created at the start of the Civil War to further the research of military field surgery and now is open to the public, is no exception. In 1862, Surgeon General William Hammond instructed Union doctors on the front lines to send him “specimens of morbid anatomy...together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed.” The A

The California Surf Museum

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Started in a restaurant in 1986 in Encinitas, California, the California Surf Museum is finally—four locations later—in a space big enough to call home. The new address is courtesy of the city of Oceanside, about a 35-minute drive north of San Diego. Leaning against a wall and hanging from the ceiling are 55 surfboards selected by curator Ric Riavic, a surfer and former school gardener, to show how surfboards have evolved. The oldest board, made of sugar pine in 1912, is seven feet long and weighs over 100 pounds. The newest, formed in 2008 and owned by four-time world champion surfer Lisa Anderson, is made of fiberglass, is nearly ten feet long and weighs around four pounds.