On the northern coast of Puerto Rico — about an hour’s drive west of San Juan, off a wisp of a road threaded through dense green foliage — there exists a long, empty beach that has haunted my dreams for years. On Google Maps, it appears as Punta Caracoles Beach, but I have always thought…
The Louvre Museum said it would raise its basic ticket price to 22 euros from 17 euros beginning next month in the latest sign that visitors may face higher costs ahead of next year’s Summer Olympics in Paris. The Louvre, which expects to have welcomed nearly 9 million visitors by the end of the year,…
She is a prodigious and skeptical reader, posing the queen of Sheba in contrast to Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” for example, or noting the marginalized characters in the colonialist-tinged detective novels of Agatha Christie and wondering about their stories. She analyzes guidebooks, from Baedeker to Lonely Planet. “Every time I pick…
The season of mittens and hot chocolate is upon us and if you’d rather spend a tranquil afternoon beside a fire than brave the crowds at a big ski resort, these snowy getaways are for you. Picture yourself in a luxury treehouse in the woodlands of Vermont, or a quiet cottage in the Catskills, or…
Despite a mediocre snow season last year, the Northeast measured more than 13 million skier visits, its strongest showing in eight years. Much of that interest was driven, no doubt, by the increasing use of multi-mountain passes, with skiers and boarders enjoying late-season snowfall as well as recent snow-making and infrastructure investments. There are more…
To reach the top of the Waldspritz sledding run above the village of Grindelwald in the Swiss Alps, I hiked 90 minutes into the backcountry, dragging a small runnered sled by a rope to roughly 7,400 feet. Above the tree line, the snow — a brilliant fondant whiting out granite ledges and filling meadows —…
Despite the La Niña weather pattern that dumped snowfall by the foot last winter at many mountain resorts in the western United States, global warming fundamentally threatens the survival of the ski business. In response, ski areas are increasingly investing in efficient snow-making and carbon emissions reductions. Some areas, especially in the West, are also…
On a recent evening in a dimly lit Japanese restaurant, nearly a dozen diners watched rapt from across the bar as a chef blowtorched a sliver of sturgeon until it was kissed with char. He topped the nigiri with crisped fish skin and a spoonful of caviar. The quiet veneration from the customers, the practiced…
“It looks like Canada,” said Nate Disser, our guide, indicating the lofty, snow-cloaked peaks around us. Later that day, when our group of 10 had skied to another high-alpine basin where craggy rock monoliths jutted up from ridgelines, Mr. Disser noted a resemblance to the Italian Dolomites. Yet we were in the San Juan Mountains…
At the end of my recent trip to Japan, I found myself at Haneda Airport in Tokyo with an hour or so to kill. So I went to the onsen. On the 12th floor of the Villa Fontaine Grand, a hotel attached to the departure terminal, I paid 4,800 yen, or about $33, for access…