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Climb Mount Shasta, California

When a five-year-old sketches a perfect triangular cone of a mountain, they come pretty damn close to drawing Mount Shasta. Standing 14,162 feet tall, this snow-clad Northern Californian beauty (a 4-hour drive from Sacramento) can be seen from a 100-mile radius.  To reach its prominent summit, however, is no easy task.  Even in the summer months, you’ll need crampons and an ice ax.  These can be rented locally or you can opt to go with Shasta Mountain Guides who will teach you how to best trudge in snow as they accompany you on the trail. The 6.1-mile, 6,000 vertical feet climb starts at a stone building the Sierra Club calls Horse Camp. You might wish you were on a horse as the South face trail rises sharply past the frozen shores of 10,000-foot high Lake Helen to the icy slopes of the 13,000-foot high Red Banks. This is where your ice ax comes in handy since Red Banks has a good 35-degree grade. Reach the summit and you’ll be treated with views of 10,457-foot Lassen Peak, the Three Sisters in Oregon and the other volcanic peaks that make up the Cascade chain. Give yourself 13 hours for the uphill climb and a mere 1-2 hours for the descent, where you simply slide down on your ass.  The French have a lyrical name for this exhilarating downhill journey, glissade.  
 

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Gamirasu Cave Hotel in Cappadocia, Turkey

    “Urgup?  You stop in Urgup?” I asked the bus driver slowly in English as I pointed to our ticket.
    “Yes, Urgup.  Coming.  Coming,” the man replied as he continued driving like a maniac. Something was seriously wrong. We had passed Goreme about an hour ago and, according to my trusty guidebook, Goreme is only five miles from Urgup in the heart of Turkey’s intriguing Cappadocia region. 
    “Urgup, we’re going to Urgup!” my wife repeated loudly, approaching the point of hysteria. The driver nodded in agreement and grinned.
    We eventually arrived in Urgup seven hours later, in the middle of the night. A pack of wild dogs howled as they followed us to our inn. There was nothing wrong with my guidebook. In a rush, the driver had sped past Urgup to the next city. He didn’t speak our language, we didn’t speak his. Insanely frustrated, we arrived at the bus station, only to learn that the bus back to Urgup didn’t leave for another five hours.
    When we awoke the following morning in our Urgup hotel room, the strange scenery surrounding us seemed more bizarre than the previous evening’s events. We were inside a 1,000-year-old Byzantine monastic retreat carved out of a cave, now an 18-room hotel called Gamirasu. When Mount Erciyes poured lava over this region thousands of years ago, the volcanic ash formed a surreal, lunar-like landscape consisting of cone-shaped monoliths and layers of soft volcanic rock called “tufa.” Early Christians found the pervious terrain ideal for escaping persecution by Romans and Arabs. When wet, the tufa could be easily carved like soap to make caves out of the pinnacles as well as underground cities descending hundreds of feet below the surface.
    The first Christians came to the valleys of Cappadocia in the 4th century, led by St. Basil. They formed communities within the caves building living areas, bakeries, and workshops. The people of Cappadocia continue to live in these caves. The rooms are cooled by volcanic rock, which helps protect the 8th-century frescoes seen on the hotel walls.

I’m off to New York on Monday, back on April 11th. Have a great week!
 

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Row 34, A Great Addition to Portsmouth

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a smaller version of Portland, Maine, with its own great dining scene, one that I discuss in an upcoming story for Yankee Magazine. A 75-minute drive north of Boston, it’s ideal for dinner or an overnight. Lisa and I stayed at the Ale House Inn for a night in October and had a fun visit. This past Wednesday, I met my friend, Joel, in town from Seattle at Row 34. This is the sister restaurant to Row 34 in Boston’s Seaport District, a favorite that I always put on itineraries for clients headed to Boston and New England. We sat outdoors and dined on lobster rolls and a shrimp banh mi. They also feature their Row 34 oysters, farmed locally in Duxbury, Massachusetts, by one of the co-owners, Skip Bennett. If you can’t find a room at the Alewife Inn, check out the Residence Inn, just down the block from Row 34 and within easy walking distance of the historic buildings at Strawberry Banke and other excellent dining spots like Franklin Oyster House. 

 
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Biking Isle-aux-Coudres

To reach Isle-aux-Coudres, you take a free 15-minute ferry from the mainland. Once there, it feels as if all the woes of modernity are washed away, replaced by the salty air of the St. Lawrence and a serene island from yesteryear. If you were looking for a good workout, you could speed around the 23-km circumference of Isle-aux-Coudres in little over an hour. But then you would miss the stone houses and their carefully manicured potted plants in the windows, the rocky shoreline that creeps into the vast river at low tide, and the ski trails of Le Massif that slice down the mountainside on the opposite shores. If you don’t take your time, you won’t stop to snap photos of the small chapels not much larger than doll houses, tour a working windmill and watermill from the 1820s, and sample the hard apple cider and tasty apple and pear mistelle from Verger Pedneault. Most importantly, if you don’t slow down and appreciate the island on two wheels, you won’t meet the wonderful people, like Patricia Deslauriers, owner of Motel L’Islet, a professional jazz bassist who now owns a lodging on a peninsula that juts out of the southernmost part of the island. She wakes up every morning to a sunrise and goes to bed after a glorious sunset. She also brings world class musicians to the island every Sunday for concerts that often attract over 1,000 people. Then there’s the maitre’d at Hôtel Cap-aux-Pierres, who spends his winters at Langkawi, the cluster of islands off Malaysia in the Andaman Sea. Or the world champion kitesurfer who now teaches her sport to others at her kitesurfing and yoga studio on the island. Isle-aux-Coudres is a magical island, one where you foolishly spend one day and soon realize you should have spent a week.
 
I’m off to Quebec City for a little more biking on my last day. I’ll be back on Monday to talk about the lodging and food on my trip. I want to thank Cynthia Lacasse at Tourisme Quebec for helping to design a perfect week of multisport adventure in Lac-Saint-Jean, Saguenay, and Charlevoix. Next time, you come to Quebec City, make sure you extend your trip by at least 3 days to see this spectacular region of the province. Have a great weekend and keep active! 
 
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Quick Escape: Provincetown, Massachusetts

June and September are our favorite months to visit P’town, before or after the summer crowds arrive. Stay with our friends at the Salt House Inn, smack dab in the center of Provincetown (with parking, no less). Then go whale watching, bike up and down the dunes on the unique Province Lands Bike Path, see the glorious pine warblers swoop from pine to pine just inland of the parking lot at the Province Lands Visitor Center, and, of course stroll the stretch of beach at Race Point surrounded by the sea. For dinner, head to that P’town classic, the Mews, to dine on lobster risotto, pan seared scallops, or almond crusted cod. Remember that you can take the 90-minute high-speed ferry from Boston’s Long Wharf to Provincetown and avoid an often congested drive. 

 
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Favorite Travel Days in 2011, Rafting and Rock Climbing with Austin-Lehman Adventures in Alberta

Each January, I like to look back at the prior year of travel and pick my five favorite travel days that come to mind. Not to boast about where I’ve been on assignment, but to point you in the right direction. You’ll be happy to find yourselves in any of these five locales.

in late July, my family of four took a memorable six-day, five night trip into the Canadian Rockies with the highly reputable outfitter, Austin-Lehman Adventures. Based in neighboring Montana, few if any outfitters know this mountainous terrain better. Each day was jam-packed with adventure, like taking a glacier walk on the famous Icefields Parkway, biking down a backcountry road surrounded by snow-capped peaks on the outskirts of Banff, and taking walks away from the masses to a lonely lake in Lake Louise. Yet, it was hard to top the day we spent in Kananaskis Valley, an hour outside of Calgary. In the morning, we rafted the Kananaskis River and the afternoon rock climbed on the face on Mt. Yamnuska. The river was a rip-roaring ride on glacial-fed waters that certainly cooled down when splashed. My 15 year-old son, Jake, got a wake-up call when he was thrown out of the raft and we had to pull him back in.

At Yamnuska, I followed my daughter up the rock face twice, peering down over the U-shaped valley once atop. It was wonderful to share my love of adventure with my wife and kids and to be in the more than capable hands of the ALA guides. My kids had never rafted or rock-climbed before that day and are now hooked on both sports. My detailed story on the six-day trip will appear in The Boston Globe this spring and I’ll be sure to pass that along. 

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Cemetery Hopping in Boston

I spent the past week checking out two local cemeteries in Boston, Mount Auburn and Forest Hills, for a story I’m writing around Halloween for American Airlines’ in-flight magazine. Surprising as it might sound, many folks venture to these cemeteries not to remember a loved one, but to stroll under the towering trees, jog, bike, and bird watch. Created in the first half of the 19th century, these are America’s first garden or rural cemeteries, built with a landscaping aesthetic in mind. They became incredibly popular with locals who came to breathe in the fresh air and picnic on the grounds. In essence, they were the first urban parks in America, created 40 to 50 years before Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston. Today, wandering into these two cemeteries is like taking a walk in a Victorian-era estate, down shady paths, under centuries-old oaks, cypress, and beech trees, next to lily-pad laden ponds. At Mount Auburn, climb the steps of the Washington Tower for panoramic vistas of the city.

The next two weeks, I’ll be traveling in France and the UK and will not be doing my daily blog. However, if I feel inspired, I might sporadically write from the road. Hope you’re enjoying the summer and staying active!
 

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