Few high-end travel aficionados would pick West Virginia as a likely spot for a destination resort. Sandwiched as it is between north and south, east and Midwest, it seems neither here nor there, and tends to conjure images of backwoods Appalachia rather than upmarket sophistication. The state’s slogan — “Wild, Wonderful West Virginia” –carefully omits […]
How often in these hectic times does one travel to an unfamiliar resort destination with high expectations, only to have them all exceeded, time suspended, every whim anticipated? Almost never. But we recently had exactly that experience at Casa Majani in Punta Mita, Mexico, and the Spoiled Guest will tell you all about it. But […]
The Spoiled Guest travels a lot, and this means, inevitably, paying an airline to take us where we’re going. We’ve observed over the last few years a number of key principles of dress and decorum while traveling by air and, taking a breather from our peripatetic reviews, we’d like to share a few of them with […]
The little island of St. Barthélemy –St. Barts, as it is most popularly known — lies nestled in the delicate southward crescent of the French West Indies, east of Puerto Rico, a stone’s throw from St. Maarten. We’ve visited it almost every winter for over twenty years, most recently this last February, 2015. It’s French […]
It’s a two-hour flight from Sydney to Hamilton Island, the main jumping-off point for destinations on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. For divers, this is a Mecca that only the most jaded and world-weary can resist. We’d wanted to go for years, and our first choice for lodging would have been the legendary Lizard Island, another […]
Travel in the current age has become more of an inward journey than a geographical or cultural one. The lobby of every urban hotel now resembles the airport one left to get to it, and all airports are in the end the same. Cities borrow ceaselessly from one another’s cuisines, architectures, and entertainments, until only […]
More and more often in recent years, my wife and I have found ourselves in a certain sub-genre of vacation spot: a small, once-exclusive resort that was started by a visionary or crackpot entrepreneur (often one and the same) back in the Sixties or Seventies and enjoyed several decades of well-deserved allegiance from devoted clientele, […]
We spent the first day or so of our stay on Laucala Island (pronounced “Lauthala” in proper Fijian) in a state of stunned disbelief, wandering around our “villa,” its huge bedroom suite with sunken living room, walk-through dressing area, and enormous stone- and pebble-lined bathroom, across the breezeway to the “lounge,” out to the big […]
The Wakaya Club and Spa is located on the island of Wakaya in the northeastern division of the nation of Fiji. You get there from the mainland U.S. by a 9-hour flight to Nadi (pronounced “Nandi”), then a 45-minute flight on the resort’s private plane (for which there is a fare of $300 per person). […]
