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Travel

IMG_0394 In previous posts I have mentioned that it is difficult to leave Telluride in any season, but in Summer, for me, it is hard to even contemplate. Susan left two weeks ago to finish a major commitment to get her teaching credentials in her yoga discipline, Viniyoga. I stayed in Telluride to hold down the fort until time to join her for her last few days at Mount Madonna, California, and to attend her graduation ceremony.

Because my days were not going to be too busy, of course I brought along some toys. I wasn't sure I would be using the kayak, but I wasn't sure I wouldn't, so it came along. I thought my mountain bike might be more versatile for our location than the road bike, so that came as well.

23 August, 2009 /
[click "Play" button to hear Susan X. Billings on Bali trip]

L1020693 Artist Susan X. Billings of mangoworkshops.com, an umbrella for artful travel, in conjunction with Telluride's Ah Haa School for the Arts, is offering a Bali Workshop that combines art, yoga, and Indonesian cooking, September 25 – October 2, in a tropical island setting.

Billings is the kind of protean talent who is out there to prove that all of life is art. A glimpse at one of her mixed media images tells the whole story: the work has nothing to do with '"isms" du jour or with art historians' creaky theories. It has everything to do with being an original, with a big soul and a richness of spirit.

04 August, 2009 /

IMG_4147 The Big Green Bus was on Main Street, Telluride for a few hours on Monday, July 27. Did you see it? The Bus is decked out with sustainable bamboo flooring, recycled glass counters, solar panels on the top to feed the systems on board, and its diesel engine has been modified to run on used cooking oil, filtered enough to keep the oil moving through the engine.

The mission of the Big Green Bus is to show how environmentally sound practices can positively impact our carbon footprint, and to encourage people to think about innovative solutions to climate change.

28 July, 2009 /

Travel writer Maribeth Clemente will be doing an event Tuesday, July 14th, from 1 to 3 p.m. at Between the Covers Bookstore.  July 14th is Bastille Day, the French equivalent of our 4th of July, and Maribeth, our resident French expert, feels it’s a...

13 July, 2009 /

Listing41 As anxious as we were to get home to Telluride, we dawdled leaving the Hastings' home in Indianapolis. It was just too pleasant to rush out. So we had a short drive on Saturday and decided to stop for the night in Kansas City. We often do not make hard plans in our travels, and, true to form, we had no reservations when we arrived. That flexibility has occasionally meant we had to accept less than we had hoped, but not this time.

We found the Q Hotel and Spa, which bills itself "Kansas City's 'Green Hotel'" and found ourselves surrounded with quiet luxury and a staff who, to a person, could not do enough for us. Susan spent quite a while with the reception folks, and came up with what turned out to be a great dinner reservation.

11 May, 2009 /

DSC_2264.cover.6x4 copy Lots of things were broken in the early 1990s: the economy and my arm. The country turned to the Man from Hope to fix the economic downturn. (Clinton did.) To fix the arm, the result of a horseback riding accident, I turned to a part-time Telluride local, world renowned hand and arm surgeon Dr. Hill Hastings of the Indiana Hand Center/Shoulder & Elbow Institute, our Indianapolis connection.

Meeting HIll was yet another in the endless variations on the theme of six degrees of separation: a friend of a friend, he happened to be in residence at his Telluride Ski Ranches home just three weeks before I was scheduled for surgery in New York. The man's genius was apparent after our first meeting: he had created architectural drawings of my arm, complete with moving parts to illustrate what needed to happen. He generously offered to participate in a conference call with my New York doc. Clint and I decided to jump ship and have him do the surgery.

10 May, 2009 /

IMGP0280 In Germantown, New York, we visited friends Jane Taylor and Frederic Ohringer, newly transplanted Telluride locals. Their new home is a newly renovated farmhouse from the 1800s. Their no-nonsense aesthetic features white walls and white floors that act as a giant canvas brightened for the whimsical iconography of their lives. The colorful, minimialist whole amounts to a beautifully executed inside joke between two artists – she a painter; he, a photograher-turned- farmer,  have almost always bucked prevailing trends with aplomb and a wink.

IMGP0285 In sharp contrast to the tasteful restraint of our friends' home, on a hilltop above the nearby town of Hudson sits the Persian inspired mansion of American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. It is one of those grand houses with a name: Olana. The best we can say about the place is that the views of the Hudson River and the Catskills are magnificent. Olana itself is chockablock with the kind of maximalist flourishes and really bad art (faux old masters Church purchased in Italy to wow his dinner guests) that are especially out of favor now in this economic meltdown.

It was on to Hackensack, New Jersey to visit my parents, where we can sit on their balcony and look out at Manhattan like kids hanging over a  fence, mouths watering as they witness a BBQ in their neighbor's backyard.

01 May, 2009 /

IMG_0346 After a brief stop at home in Telluride after our visits to West Coast family, Sus and I left on the next phase of our Spring travels on Friday, 17 April. For those of you who were watching Colorado weather during that time, you know it probably wasn't the most auspicious departure date. But, ever optimistic, we left anyway.

The webcams on Monarch Pass looked nasty, so we chose to go on I-70. That looked like a good decision until just short of Vail. With an electronic sign showing that Vail Pass was closed, we turned off at Minturn, drove in rain/snow mix for a few miles, then in heavy snow. At Leadville, we found that Fremont Pass was closed, and learned that Denver was getting hammered. We had planned to spend the night with friends in Denver- oops!, change in plan. A welcome beer (or two) and a burger at Rosie's in Leadville, then a little time to make a new plan, and time for bed.

27 April, 2009 /

Sus and I returned to Telluride for a few days. We're between visits to family and friends on the West Coast and more of the same in the East. It's great to be home, even for a short time, even if the main activity is...

14 April, 2009 /

Let me go on the record here: I don't like leaving Telluride, even in the off seasons. But if one is to travel, and there are good reasons (new places, family, friends, etc.) to do so, late March and early April seems as good a time as ever to make a move. Susan's parents, Bob and Bernice Levitt, for many years have spent a few months in Palm Springs, to escape the misery of the New Jersey winter. It has become a habit for Sus and me to go to California at the end of her parents' sojourn to spend a few days with them in the desert, then to take them to L.A. to stay with Sus's sister Debby for a few days before they return to Hackensack.

As one listens to the traffic on Highway 111, the asphalt artery linking Palm Springs with the valley communities all the way out to Indio, it's a little difficult to believe that quiet and peace reside a few hundred feet higher in the hills that border the highway to the South.

IMGP0249 Afew days ago, Sus and I were hiking up a popular trail that leads from 111, up past the elegant homes that cap the ridge leading up to the wild high ground above, up past the large modern house that was Bob Hope's home in Palm Springs, and on up to a promontory which overlooks the valley, the manicured lawns of the condo developments, the well-tended greens of the golf courses, watered by the "inexhaustable" resources of the Palm Springs aquifer, up to the beautiful desert landscape of the mountain.

31 March, 2009 /