Travel

Thirty miles from San Francisco, Sonoma County is one of the world's great destinations. With beautiful farmland, a dramatic coastline, fields of wild flowers, world-class wineries and upscale restaurants, the valley offers travelers, especially oenophiles and foodies, the best of the best.

My wife and I needed some serious R&R. We wanted a trip somewhere casual, where we wouldn't get stuck in traffic jams, could enjoy beautiful countryside, have some good meals and do a bit of wine tasting. So we put our suitcases in the car with a plan to explore Sonoma County, from the inland wine growing valleys to the coast. There is nothing like a road trip to clean out the cob webs and refresh the soul.

Driving on Sonoma County's two-lane black-tops in summer, the sun owns the sky, shining down on well-tended fields and big-sky landscape. Mustard flowers blanket the fields, corn grows tall, the vines are fat with ripening grapes and cattle stroll lazily across green pastures in search of shade.

Largely agricultural, mom and pop businesses are much more common in Sonoma than in Napa, which is dominated by wealthy investors and large corporations. The 200 wineries along Route 12 and Highway 101--near the towns of Schellville, Sonoma, Glen Ellen, Kenwood, Sebastopol, Graton, Forestville, Fulton, Windsor, Healdsburg and Geyserville--are family run, for the most part.

Straight to God's Ear

Dogs howling at the moon. I roll over and from bed I look up to eighteen thousand feet of snow-covered peaks, shimmering in the moonlight. Shit, I gotta catch a plane! I throw on my clothes and race down the stairs, grab my last pair of underwear off the clothes line, stuff them in my pocket, throw my bag on my head, stumble through the turnip patch and onto the trail. I drink in the vista one last time. Fields of blooming mustard greens tint the valley a hazy yellow, tall poplar trees line the paths, and every little house sports a well tended vegetable garden.

The stream that winds its way through Leh and past the giant prayer wheel nurtures it all. In this remotest corner of India, one spin of the wheel and your prayers go straight into Gods ear. Beyond the village, as the stream peters out, the view is a vast barren moonscape of chocolate mountains, where not so much as a blade of grass grows. In the distance on all sides, the biggest platinum mountains I’ve ever seen. I lope through the village at dawn, past the monastery and the stark grey palace carved out of the hillside in the center of town. The air is thin, the bag is heavy and I’m out of breath. I flash a smile at my taxi driver and he waits while I duck into the bakery to grab a cup of Ladakhi tea, brewed from toasted barley and fermented yak butter. Its hot and salty, and it feels good on my dry lips.

I’ve always been an icing on the cake kind’a’gal.  You know us: we devour frosting, flee crumbling cake remains.  And desserts with powdered sugar and oozing jellies that all fall down inevitably on clothes never seem worth the lbs. or the dry cleaning $$.  So, when I recently found myself headed to Austria to cover the Salzburg Global Seminar: Cultural Institutions Without Walls, the last thing on my mind was leaky pastries: culinary institutions without walls….that is, until I was asked by Amy Ephron to, if I was in fact going to Austria, write about the infamous Sacher Torte.

Ischia, the biggest of the three islands in the Gulf of Naples, isn’t big.  You can circle its rocky, 34-kilometer perimeter by boat in less than an hour. 

And while you’re doing that, may I suggest you pause, as everyone does, to leap into the Tyrrhenian Sea, where you’ll encounter (1) volcanic thermal waters, and (2) the fish you’ll be eating later that evening.

Ischia differs from its more famous neighbor, Capri, in ways that are readily apparent.  You can feel it’s more laid back.  You can see there are far fewer yachts anchored in its bays. You can walk down every one of its cobblestone streets and never pass a Prada, Ferragamo, or Dolce & Gabbana shop.

Instead, it has terme – spas – rich with rejuvenating mineral salts from underground hot springs.  Most of the bigger hotels have at least one pool filled with these healing waters.  And then there are places like Giardini di Poseidon, a kind of elaborate therapeutic theme park set down along the beach of Citara, where every 'ride' – and there are 22 of them – is a plunge into a thermal pool of a different temperature.