Peanut butter and jelly, ice cream and cake. Things that have stood the test of time, and taste. But light and sound—those have been around much longer than the others, and their impact is elemental. At Sensorio in Paso Robles, you can feel that impact, sometimes in subtle tugging at your eyes and ears, sometimes in dazzling sweeps of color and feeling. Sensorio is Fourth of July with a graduate degree. Where it is, is the rolling hills of Paso Robles, California. What it’s made of is 3 miles of […]

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Paso Robles, you know it: that quaint, semi-rustic town you stop at for a bite and a glass of wine on your drives between LA and San Francisco. Well, in between drives, Paso Robles has grown up, and in the best of ways. These days, Paso is more of a first (though less expensive) cousin of Napa’s St. Helena—you’ll definitely want a second glass of wine. And you’ll want to stay a spell. The town retains its California Western feel, but now there’s more Saturday night polished cowboy boots than […]

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Photo by Alice Bourget When I was around 10, I tagged along to my brother’s Boy Scout meeting, where one activity was making art projects. Given instruction, I sprayed a clothespin with glittery red paint and spelled my name out on the top bar with glued alphabet macaroni. That might be my highest artistic achievement, so perhaps I don’t have a credible basis to judge the quality of the crafts I’ve seen in Ecuador over the past month. But damn, they are good. My girlfriend Alice and I have been […]

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When I was 16, I hitchhiked with my older brother from Los Angeles to Vancouver. Being lean and hungry types, we knew we needed fortification for the long journey. So it made perfect sense that we’d load our backpacks—already substantial, with their sturdy wood and metal frames—with canned foods of every type. Chili, fruit cocktail, soup. That one of the laden backpacks now weighed about as much as a sports car wasn’t that daunting until a day or two into the trip. We were young, after all. Two summers later, […]

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Ahh, NOW I see why those Old Fashioneds were appearing on our table like multiplying rabbits. Those canny mixmasters at the MGM Springfield’s Commonwealth bar were thinking if I had a snootful, I’d likely order their $25,000 “Indian Sidecar” drink, which is made with a 1901 Croizet cognac. Oh, I guess I should mention: if you do buy the drink, it also comes with a new Indian motorcycle. Why a 1901 cognac and why an Indian bike to go along with it? There’s an MGM method to this madness: Springfield […]

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Like many of the luxury resorts of Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay has a wealth of ways to entertain and amuse its guests. Naturally there’s an expansive casino, where rollers high and low can thrill to the spin of the wheel and the flip of the cards. There’s the Shark Reef Aquarium, which has plenty of teeth (piranha tank, anyone?) to sink your sights into, plus stages plumb-filled with stars, like Nashville Unplugged, where stories mix with songs to give you an earful. And it’s hard to miss Michael Jackson, […]

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I have to release the joke from the top: Cirque du Soleil’s “O” is a wholly immersive experience. Yes, “O,” (a phonetic rendering of the French eau for “water,”) is a water world: water is the flowing stage—often the literal stage—of the mesmerizing theatrics and flourishes of acrobats and dancers, trapeze artists and contortionists, clowns and lovers, all jumping into, out of, on top of and below the enormous pool, in which water is the most elemental of its elements. Immersive indeed. Before I get into the account of what […]

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It’s a fine feeling to be a stranger at a big party and feel fully welcome. It’s an even better feeling when everybody at the party seems like they are having the time of their lives. And if the party goes on for 17 days straight, well, I guess that’s 17 days of good feelings—though you might want to nap now and then. In Stuttgart, Germany, they’ve been having a whale of a party for a mere 200 years or so. I was just at the 199th year, and if […]

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For a portion of the population, a car is just a utilitarian thing: go from Point A to Point B, hope you don’t run out of gas, and wash it every six months or so. But for some people, myself included, cars are an exuberant expression of ingenuity, excitement and progress. The automotive industry and its dynamic productions are colorful parts of the pageant of world history. And if you want to see some remarkably varied, thoughtful and outright thrilling accounts of that history, you must visit the Mercedes and […]

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  Many years ago, I was a passenger in a ’57 Chevy driven by a maniacal friend. The steering wheel came off in his hands while he was making a turn—and he laughed. Though it seemed unlikely then (particularly because I thought survival was dubious), that wheelessness was a benchmark for unusual driving experiences to come, many of which produced the same sensation of bewilderment, shock and terror. Filter in the unsettling elements of driving in a foreign country, and you have an uncharted laboratory for uncanny experiences behind the […]

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  It may sound like a crock of balderdash to start out a review of a luxury resort with a statement about how happy the employees seem. Or that the property has transformed an area by emphasizing local hiring and local artists. But cross my heart, the service people weren’t smiling at Maryland’s MGM National Harbor resort because they were Westworld robots. And the place has such regional roots that the very clay from the property construction diggings was the literal hands-on material for a giant artwork map that greets […]

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Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar There’s a plummy quote from Thoreau’s Walden that must open this discussion: “Not till we are lost … not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves … Henry David was centering on getting lost in nature there, and thus freed of some of the day-to-day material constraints and pressures, but the message applies well to writers, and to the value of getting “lost” in travel. Value sometimes in getting literally lost, and thus having to rely on wits and resources to gain […]

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If the Buddha was driving in heavy urban traffic, would he honk? Much as that sounds like some wisecracking riddle, it’s a thought that occurred to me while my taxi’s driver was navigating the maelstrom of traffic in Yangon, Myanmar. Yangon has over five million people, and at times during my days in the city, it seemed that most of them were behind the wheel. Yet, though traffic surged, darted and inched, drivers seemed patient, and honks—if you can discern the intent behind a honk—seemed polite. I attribute that to Buddha. The […]

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I was in such a hurry to get to the Micronesian island of Kosrae, such a hurry to see its isolated beauty, such a hurry to begin my first year of teaching—in such a hurry to be out of my old life and in this new. After arriving, I wanted to jump right in, get my new house settled, fill it with food, set up the computer, arrange my classes and office, drive the length and breadth of the landscape and snorkel my fool head off in the island’s gleaming […]

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What do you do when your senses are simultaneously confused, excited, alarmed and enthralled? If you’re at a performance of Zarkana, Cirque du Soleil’s dramatic and mesmerizing visual bombardment at ARIA Las Vegas, you go with it. And going with it will be mighty gratifying. Many theater pieces engage your brain, perhaps with some later follow-through in your body. Zarkana envelops you. The lushly resonant music alone penetrates your body and seems to move through you into the seats behind. Even the lighting seems tangible: reds sizzle, blues seem to […]

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