All Blog Posts from Travel Guru

The opening of a new Four Seasons Hotel is always a time of great excitement for we of the travel-writing persuasion, particularly when it’s in our own backyard. I have nothing but good things to say about stays at the Four Seasons properties I’ve visited in Hawaii, London and Asia. To that end, I hauled myself up to Seattle recently to check out the new Four Seasons Seattle, which is located just a block south of the famous Pike Place Market, with sweeping views of the Elliott Bay waterfront.

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Hey, let’s look on the bright side of travel news here as we turn the calendar to 2009. Gas prices are down, everyone from the airlines to Amtrak is lowering prices on fares, Hawaii is still sunny and warm, and there are lots of great deals to be had on hotel rooms and travel packages. Paris still has chocolate shops, New York will open a new stadium for the Yankees, and the national parks of Utah haven’t yet been drilled, baby, drilled for oil.

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The recent retirement of the Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship stirs some memories in me, not all of them fond. But I didn’t experience the great oceanliner as a guest or a travel writer; in 1983, when I was still figuring out what to do for a living and how to become a writer, I worked briefly on the ship. At the time, it was the height of sea-going elegance, and for me, it provided my first glimpses at luxury travel.

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If you ever want to witness a dictionary-perfect definition of controlled chaos, you should peek into the kitchens of a cruise ship right around the dinner hour. I had the pleasure recently on a trans-Atlantic crossing of Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, with chef and “Global Culinary Ambassador” Jean-Marie Zimmermann as host. Despite his lofty title, Chef Zimmermann, who hails from the Strasbourg region of France, was charming and self-deprecating and quite a likeable guy. He also obviously knew what he was doing:

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Keoni Wagner, who is the Vice-President of Public Affairs for Hawaiian Airlines, came to town recently to point out that if your stock portfolio is in shreds, you might as well be weeping over the shreds in Hawaii.

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It came as something of a shock to me, as I was crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the Queen Mary 2, when the Captain announced that we would soon pass near the site of the Titanic sinking from 1912.

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Another great discovery that I made during a recent visit to London (besides a sensational cream puff at Fortnum & Mason that I discovered, and then ate), was the Stafford Hotel, which is tucked away on quiet, elegant St. James Place in Westminster, just around the corner from where Princes William and Harry live at St. James Palace.

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Native American-owned casinos are stepping up to the next phase of the travel business – building hotels, spas and restaurants to go with the blackjack and craps and slots – and it does my heart good to see what they’re creating. Reservations are absolutely awash in money these days because they’ve hit upon a very simple formula for attracting customers: People want to gamble, smoke, drink and stare at blinking, purring, jingling slot machines for hours at a time, and they’re perfectly happy to be entertained by cover bands and TV screens showing ESPN all day.

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With the recent news that an ice shelf the size of Manhattan broke off in the Arctic Ocean last month, I thought it might be a good idea to suggest a cool way to visit the Arctic while it’s still there. To that end, I suggest that you don parkas and mittens and check out the new Northwest Passage itinerary of Canadian-based Cruise North expeditions (Another travel tip: You might have to remove the mittens first before approaching your keyboard).

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They don’t call it a fringe festival for nothing. Right now through August 24th, the Edmonton Fringe Festival is taking place in the booming city in northern Alberta, which is pretty much on the fringe of civilization. After Edmonton it’s all oil-sand fields and prairie all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. Not a whole bunch of culture emanating from those oil-field roustabouts.

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