We’re delighted to have just discovered the Santa Barbara Urban Wine Trail, where we fell in love with four different wineries…and that’s just the four we tried. [Read more...]
Tips on Traveling in Bali
By 3 Comments
Here’s a map of Bali so you can see the island’s main attractions.
A Balinese Way of Life
By 2 Comments
Young people in Bali are expected to marry young, have as close to four children as possible (one for each element), and stay in the village where they were born, working at/for the business of their parents.
We met one young woman of about 22 who was working in a dress shop geared towards tourists, but hadn’t left her village in three years; that trip had been to a beach town 20 minutes away.
Travel is unexpected in a culture that demands a strict adherence to ritual. Access to a vehicle isn’t always a given, either; every road is full trucks with multiple loads and of families (with both babies and small children) on single motorbikes. [Read more...]
A Santa Barbara “ReTweet”…I Mean, Retreat
By 2 Comments
Three nights of gorgeous sleep later, we’re just back from a long weekend in Santa Barbara…having entirely unplugged for the sake of our marriage.
After two weeks of working like dogs and communicating mostly by IM, we fled to the refuge of a new summer ’09 deal called Retweet with Broughton Hospitality, choosing their cozy Inn of the Spanish Garden property as our home base.
Broughton apparently has hotels in Palm Springs, Santa Monica, Solvang, San Simeon, and Chicago, too, but we had Santa Barbara’s cool breezes and lush flowers on our minds. [Read more...]
Ubud, Bali
By 3 Comments
Continued from The Heart of Bali: Part Two
Our last destination in Bali was the artisan town of Ubud.
This increasingly tony tourist village was discovered by wealthy expat Europeans in the 1960s, and rediscovered by scores of devotees of Elizabeth Gilbert’s follow-your-bliss memoir, Eat Pray Love. Surrounded by the jungle and a wide river, here you’ll find both solitude and crowds, little gem hotels, some wonderful restaurants, a large shopping district, a holy monkey forest, and a royal palace. In almost every storefront you can find handcrafts that range from jewelry to stonework to wood-carving to oil painting.
