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June/July Newsletter Now Available at ActiveTravels.com
Last month, we were excited to learn that Conde Nast Traveler chose ActiveTravels to design a 10-day New England itinerary for a family of four. We created a Dream Day Itinerary quickly, the editors were pleased with it, and now the story will be featured in their July issue, both in print and online. Also in May, Men’s Journal magazine hired me to be their resident travel expert, writing weekly columns for their website. Many of those stories were originally featured in this newsletter first: like introducing you to the new website, OptionsAway, and why we prefer Global Entry over TSA PreCheck. The Men’s Journal column is in addition to all the travel stories I still write for The Boston Globe, Washington Post, Yankee, Everett Potter’s Travel Report, and FamilyVacationCritic.com, among others.
Stella Retrospective At the Whitney
I finally made it to the new Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan over Christmas break. The new building is located on Gansevoort Street, just off 14th street on the western edge of the island. The day was unseasonably warm when we went, so we took full advantage of the outdoor balconies to stare at the view of the Hudson River down to the Statue of Liberty. From the outside, the Whitney looks small. Once you walk in, however, and peer at the oversized works of sculptor and artist Frank Stella do you understand the immense length of the new building. Very few art museums could put on a retrospective of Stella because one sculpture can take over an entire room. The Whitney does an impressive job of showcasing his works. See the show before it leaves on February 7th and then take a walk on the nearby High Line, the popular 1.5-mile linear park, built from the dilapidated ruins of an elevated railway. It has completely reenergized this once overlooked part of the city.
Climb Mount Moriah, Nevada
A four-hour drive from Salt Lake City, Great Basin National Park is a little-known gem where mountains over 13,000 feet rise dramatically from the desert floor. Wheeler Peak (13,063 feet) is the highest mountain in the park, but if you want diversity of terrain, local rangers suggest trekking the 11-mile Hendrys Creek Trail to the summit of 12,067-foot Mt. Moriah. The 5,000-foot vertical climb takes you through thickets of pinon pine and vast glades of aspen forest. At 11,000 feet, you reach the Table, Moriah’s rolling sky-high plateau. On the Table’s rim are stands of twisted bristlecone pines, which, at 3,000 to 4,000 years old, are the oldest type of tree on the planet. From here, it’s just a scramble up rocks to the summit. If visibility is good, you can look across an uninterrupted carpet of sagebrush for a good 100 miles.
Julius Jermanok Enjoyed The Ride
I was out of the office all last week, dealing with the unexpected death of my 83 year-old father. Jules Jermanok was a brilliant man, graduating at the top of his college class at the United States Merchant Marine Academy (Kings Point), before having an esteemed career at General Electric. He was my most trusted advisor, teaching me life lessons like “Enjoy the Ride.” Like him at one point of his working life, I was jumping from plateau to plateau, never satisfied with my current success. Highly ambitious, I was missing out on life, taking precious friendships and relationships for granted. So he taught me to chill out and enjoy the ride, to live life in the present.
Dream Trips 2010, Biking Vietnam
Vietnam is that coveted destination that’s jaw-droppingly beautiful, yet still not overrun with tourism. Traveling this lush, mostly flat country by bike (the locals’ preferred transportation method) is an ideal way to see it. Many biking outfitters like VBT, Backroads, and Butterfield & Robinson now offer guided bike trips across the country. Pedaling 15 to 50 miles per day, you’ll roll past untrammeled coastline, terraced emerald rice paddies, ultra-green mountains, and rarely visited rural villages. Many of the trips starts in Ho Chi Minh City and ends in Hanoi, so you’ll have time to explore urban Vietnam, as well. All include post-trips to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Sign me up!
Older Women Who Lift Weights See Cognitive Benefits
There’s an interesting story in the latest Archives of Internal Medicine, which I read religiously (just kidding), that talks about a recent Canadian study involving older women. Over the course of a year, The University of British Colombia divided 155 women in the 65 to 75-year old range into three groups—resistance training (lifting weights, using weight machines, or doing squats and lunges) once a week, resistance training twice a week, and a Tai-Chi based balance and tone training twice a week. The results: cognitive scores for the women who went to resistance training twice weekly were up 12.6 percent, once weekly up 10.9 percent, while those who only did Tai Chi fell 0.5 percent. So start pumping the iron!