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A Perfect Night in Portland, Maine in the Heart of Winter
To celebrate my wife’s birthday, we just spent a blissful night at Portland, Maine’s Pomegranate Inn and a sublime dinner at Fore Street. While the weather outside was frightful, we were cozy inside the Pomegranate Inn, warm near the fireplace. Few innkeepers can juggle modern art with 200-year-old antiques as skillfully as the Pomegranate Inn’s original owner, Isabel Smiles. Her eclectic tastes runs the gamut from faux marble columns and colorful mosaics in the living room to brightly painted walls created by local artists in the bedrooms. In fact, works of art cover the entire staircase and walls of the house, and remarkably, they all seem to fit together. It was hard to leave our room and face the blustery cold, but we didn’t want to miss Fore Street, the James Beard-award winning restaurant housed in a former wartime storage area. In the open-air kitchen, chefs busily sauté dishes on three long tables. Wood grilling local meats and seafood is Fore Street’s forte. We start with roasted Blue Hill bay mussels with chunks of pistachios. For our entrées, we shared Maine scallops, just off the boat, and tender arctic char. Happy birthday, Lis!
Miami’s Wynwood Walls Continues to Mesmerize
Last time I visited that street art museum they coined Wynwood Walls in Miami, I had lunch at the newly opened restaurant, Wynwood Kitchen & Bar. I remember walking inside and being blown away by the massive mural Shepard Fairey painted behind the restaurant’s bar. Just as exciting was the wonderfully whimsical and colorful work by Brazilian identical twins, Os Gêmeos, best known in Boston as the pair who created the beloved 70-by-70 feet mural of a boy in pajamas that overlooked Dewey Square for more than a year. On that first visit, I met the daughter of Tony Goldman, the real estate developer who wanted to do something special for the start of Art Basel in 2009. Goldman wanted to bring the crowd into the emerging neighborhood of Wynwood, nestled between the Design District and downtown. Much of the industry here once centered around shoe manufacturing. When that went into decline in the 1980s and ’90s, those buildings became derelict. That’s when Goldman stepped in and started to buy some of the properties, envisioning a lively arts scene.
Exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville
Top 5 Paddling Spots, Boundary Waters, Ely, Minnesota
Maybe it’s the 1,000,000-plus acres of seemingly endless wilderness—a whopping 1200 miles of canoeable waters through countless lakes, rivers, and ponds—that gets paddlers all dreamy-eyed over Minnesota’s northern frontier, the Boundary Waters. You can go days without seeing another person, replaced instead by moose, whitetail deer, black bears, beavers, otters, and those laughing loons. Wilderness Outfitters has been taking people away from civilization since 1912. Fish for smallmouth bass as you canoe from Mudro to Crooked Lake in early June, or wait for fall foliage in late September and you can paddle when moose are in heat. They also offer canoes and maps for self-guided trips.
Travel Outside the Box, Third Stop, Ghana
Time to Play in the Warmth
As we reach May, it’s time to get out of ski mode and talk about road and mountain biking, hiking, canoeing, sea kakaking, white-water rafting, rock climbing, beaches, swimming holes, road trips, you name it. Email me at goplay@activetravels.com if you have specific questions on an activity or region. In the upcoming months, we’re also going to reconfigure the Go Play section of the blog, changing it from a Q&A type of format to a reference using my 20 years of content. Click on a certain section and you’ll get a wealth of information from all my articles and books on the best outdoor recreation in that area. Thanks again for checking in!
Steve Jermanok