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Marijuana Tours Start to Bud in America

In the November election, residents of Oregon, Alaska, and Washington, DC, all voted to legalize marijuana. Excited to hear that news were a growing number of travel companies from Colorado and Washington that are already offering tours to cannabis lovers, comparable to visiting wineries or craft breweries. Kush Tourism offers the Colorado Highlife Tours and Washington Evergreen Tours, where clientele visit the local marijuana growers, discuss the varietals, delve into the medicinal qualities of the cannabis, even visit glass blowers that specialize in bongs and glass pipes. Cannabus is a mobile marijuana lounge stationed in Seattle and likely to hit the road to Portland, once pot stores open in Oregon in 2016. TravelTHC compiles a list of pot-friendly homes and apartments where you can spark up no problem. With the Denver Post hiring a marijuana critic to taste all the varietals (recently profiled in this New York Times story), pot is no longer a joke reserved for Cheech and Chong. It’s serious business and I see more active travel companies like Backroads joining the fray, similar to their Napa or Loire Valley trips. A culinary tour would be agreeable to older, high-end travelers who wouldn’t mind getting stoned, then feasting on a four-course Oregon farm-to-table dinner. 

 

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Headed to the National Parks This Summer? Download the Just Ahead App

If you want the feel of having your own personal park ranger by your side as you drive through America’s most spectacular scenery, then do yourself a favor and download the Just Ahead audio guide. Just Ahead utilizes GPS technology to know exactly where drivers are on the road, and delivers stories and maps relevant to their exact location. The app points out not-to-miss features while also helping drivers avoid getting lost by providing suggested directions. It works without an Internet connection or cell phone service. Simply turn it on and enjoy a narrated tour that describes the history, geography, and wildlife of each national park. 

 
Just Ahead guides are currently available for the following national parks: Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Zion and Cedar Breaks, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, and Canyonlands and Arches. Additional park guides are in production and are expected to roll out in time for the busy summer travel season. They include Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Badlands, Black Hills, Petrified Forest, Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley, and Mesa Verde. The Just Ahead app is a free download, while guides range from $4.99 to $9.99.
 
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Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition Comes to the Hyde Collection this Summer

At first glimpse, Lake George’s narrow width could be mistaken for a long rambling river. It’s not until you veer downhill from the honky-tonk shops and hotels of Route 9N to the docks below that you appreciate the grandeur of this body of water. Step foot into a sailboat, like my family has done for the past 35 summers, and the narrow passage becomes an immense lake dotted with pine-studded islands and shadowed on either side by the verdant mountains of the southern Adirondacks. 

 
The cool waters and green hills that serve as solace and repose for me have been a source of inspiration to many artists over the years including the early American Luminists of the 1850s, sculptor David Smith, and most notably, Alfred Stieglitz and his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe. This June, The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York will unveil a blockbuster summer exhibition featuring 58 paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. “Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George,” organized by The Hyde Collection in association with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, will explore the influence that living and working in Lake George, New York had on the art and life of the famous American painter. 
 
O’Keeffe’s art was introduced to Stieglitz on his fifty-second birthday, January 1, 1916.  By the summer of 1918, they were involved in one of the most sensual and artistically symbiotic relationships in the modern era. For the next 16 years, she would spend a good portion of her summer in Lake George with the man she would eventually marry in 1924.  The romance with Georgia O’Keeffe drove Stieglitz into a picture-taking frenzy.  O’Keeffe’s sexually evocative flowers and leaves filled her canvases while every inch of her body filled the lens of Stieglitz’ camera.  
 
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San Antonio Week—Strolling Through San Antonio Botanical Garden

It reached 90 degrees yesterday in San Antonio, but I kept nice and cool for part of the afternoon on the East Texas Pineywoods path at the San Antonio Botanical Garden. Shaded by tall sycamores and cedars, you loop around a pond, staring on the opposite shores at a circa-1850 log cabin straight out of East Texas. The 38-acre botanical garden is a placid retreat anytime of year, but it’s hard to top the springtime when roses in the Rose Garden, cactus flowers in the Cactus and Succulent Garden and the wine cup, a purple wildflower, on the Hill Country trail are all in bloom. And don’t get even get me started on the sweet-smelling jasmine at Watersaver Lane. I took a big whiff and had a natural high for the rest of the afternoon. A Japanese maple’s leaves were a tad crimson inside the bamboo walls of Japanese Garden. What got my attention, however, was a turtle sunbathing atop a rock formation that resembled a turtle. An architectural highlight was the glass-coned conservatory rooms that house rare palm trees, like the prickly bark of the Zambia palm, lush ferns, desert cacti, even an indoor waterfall. San Antonio offers a slew of intriguing sites, from the Alamo and other missions to the San Antonio Museum of Art, but don’t make the mistake of missing the botanical garden. It’s a gem.  

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Kempinski to Launch First Caribbean Hotel on Dominica

Unlike the rest of the Caribbean, the attraction in Dominica is not the beach, but a lush mountainous interior ripe with every tropical fruit and vegetable imaginable and bathed with so much water that around every bend is another raging waterfall, a serene swimming hole nestled in the thick bush, or a hidden hot spring to rest your weary body after a day in the outdoors. Indeed, this island closest to Martinique has become an affordable haven for the active traveler who yearns to hike through a jungle-like forest (see my story for The Boston Globe). 

 
So it came a surprise that the upscale European hotelier, Kempinski, chose Dominica to launch their first Caribbean outpost. They’ll be partnering with Range Developments, who will debut their first property, the Park Hyatt St. Kitts in December 2015. The 101-room resort will be on one of the rare beaches on Dominica, Douglas Bay on the north shore of the island. Stay tuned for an opening date. 
 
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The Opening of L’atelier des Lumières in Paris

Paris’ art scene will get a breath of fresh air when L’Atelier des Lumières opens in April to the public. Devoted to immersive art experiences, each year the Atelier will showcase a major exhibition offering a digital perspective on one of art’s biggest names, allowing you to step inside the world’s most famous artworks. Covering a whopping 2000 square meters, L’Atelier des Lumières is set to utterly transform a 19th-century factory, with innovative, 8 meter-high projections cloaking its walls. 

 
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Top 5 Bike Rides in North America During Fall Foliage, Prince Edward Island

Take a chunk of Vermont and plop it down in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and voila, you have Prince Edward Island. This sylvan setting lends itself well to road biking, especially in the fall when the summer crowds are long gone and the maples provide a colorful backdrop. The Canadian Pacific railroad that once connected Prince Edward Island’s small villages last roared through the interior in 1989, leaving in its wake hundreds of kilometers of track. By 2000, the tracks were pulled and the line replaced with a surface of finely crushed gravel, creating a biking and walking thoroughfare called the Confederation Trail. Crossing the entire island, the trail starts in Tignish in the west and rolls 279 kilometers to the eastern terminus in Elmira. One of the most scenic stretches starts in Mt. Stewart in King’s County along the sinuous Hillsborough River. You’ll soon reach St. Peter’s Bay, a large inlet dotted with mussel farms and lobster traps. After crossing a bridge that rewards you with glimpses of the island’s fabled red cliffs, you’ll arrive at the rolling Greenwich Dunes, a perfect place to bring that picnic lunch. Stay at Inn at St. Peters, a favorite stopover in PEI for many of our clients. 

 

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