This week on The Escapologist…

• Right Now in Travel, as Briefly as Possible

• The Space Rocks of California

Right Now in Travel, as Briefly as Possible

• It’s Milan Design Week and you have got to see this carousel by artist Laila Gohar that, instead of horses, has carriages in the shape of fruits and veggies. It’s on display this week at the Giardino delle Arti. (Milan Design Week, *Wallpaper)

• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, one of the architect’s most famous works, has reopened after three years of major restoration. The former private home in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, celebrates its 90th anniversary this year and is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. (Arch Daily)

• Seoul’s annual Outdoor Library program, which encourages reading in urban spaces, kicks off this week. Comfy seating, books to borrow, and literary events in sites across the city will mark the occasion. (Seoul Metropolitan Government)

• There is so much destructive legislation – pending and active – impacting US national parks and public lands right now. Know that these policies are unpopular, and talking to your reps makes a difference. Something else you can do: One major issue has been the removal and alteration of signage at national park sites, particularly signs describing civil rights history and climate change. A grass roots effort called Save Our Signs (SOS) is working to map and document these changes. You can join them.

• Has World Cup fever gone bust? In a report by the Financial Times, expected hotel demand for the World Cup has not yet materialized, even in big cities like New York. With jet fuel prices surging and Anti-American sentiment overseas impacting overall travel into the US, I am unshocked. (The Independent)

The Space Rocks of California

This is the second in a four-part series of shorts I wrote about Los Angeles in the pandemic. The first is Up, Up, and Over California.

The meteorites are in a room in the Geology building at UCLA in Westwood and I pay $9 for parking in a visitor’s garage, worried that I’m in the wrong spot.

Flash forward to a bad thought. Mental image of my rental Nissan being towed to the wilds of somewhere. A day’s worth of retrieving it.

I leave the garage and cross the street and try the doors of the Geology building and they are all locked. A digital keypad blinks at the side of each one, an ominous black rectangle with a red blinking light.

I make a slow lap around the building, trying every door. The web site says it’s open to the public. So it is. It must be. I am trying my fourth or fifth door when a voice behind me says,”Do you have a key to this building?”

“No,” I say. “Do you?”

He’s youngish, bespectacled, black-masked, wearing a backpack and holding onto some kind of metal sieve or strainer. It never occurs to me to ask him what it’s for. He pauses for a moment.

“Hold on,” he says. “I might know a way in.”

I follow a few steps behind and he introduces himself, makes small talk, and I tell him that I’m not a student. I’m a tourist. I came out of curiosity. He tells me then that he’s sort of between being a post-doc and a faculty member. I don’t ask questions about this.

He leads me under a concrete entry into what seems like a service entrance. There’s stuff around — buckets, sacks of what look like dirt. The detritus of construction. There’s a door that’s been propped open.

He leads me in and down white hallways lit with unseen fluorescent bulbs, up a flight of stairs. It attaches to a memory — the formality and insulation of academia. This quiet, the gleam of linoleum floors, in the middle of Los Angeles. I have not lived in this world for a long time, a space where all I had to do was learn things.

The man asks about New York and he tells me that his girlfriend grew up in Brooklyn — she misses the food.

Up two flights of stairs and it’s right there, with a sign on the door. We step in and a young woman, a student, surely, says, “Welcome! It’s the first day we’ve been open in two years!”

I read this on the web site, but I didn’t quite register. Closed for two years, this small room with its glass cases and pedestals, its explanatory dioramas.

It is a room full of rocks. Some of them are just out in the open, unprotected, with magnets stuck to them.

There are two men in the room who seem to be professors — both of them bespectacled, baseball hatted. One of them removes a magnet from the rock and taps the side of it against one of the meteorites. It is an abstract lump of a thing, no bigger than the air conditioner balanced precariously out the window in a New York City studio. The accompanying plaque says it weighs 800 pounds.

“Listen to how they sound.”

The rock sings, a pure kind of ringing. A temple bell. He takes the same magnet and reaches over to another meteorite. A different kind of ping.

As I make a slow rotation around the room, I see rocks from the moon. I see slices of steel etched with little cross-hatched lines, as coolly symmetrical as modern art. I see a shelf of fakes, accompanied by an explanation: people reach out to UCLA with rocks all the time, thinking they’re meteorites. Only about 1% of them end up being authentic.

All the while, the other professor is talking to the young woman — the one who greeted me. He’s explaining to her how the university came by its specimens.

“The Smithsonian,” he huffs, “They don’t pay for anything! Not even a finders fee!”

She nods and murmurs an occasional, “Oh wow,” as he tells her about the discovery of some of the rocks in the room, and I can feel her brain working. She’s interested, but cognizant of being mansplained to. The wows, the audible equivalent of nodding and smiling.

“The irons, most of the biggest ones are in Washington or Chicago or New York.”

I like this, how he calls them irons. Like golf clubs. Or when people who know about aviation call airplanes “metal.” That sense of weight hurling through space.

In a case of rocks from Mars, someone has added a little plastic figurine of Marvin the Martian.

I sign the guestbook. I use the ladies room. I have trouble getting out, down those same corridors again. Just outside the meteorite room, there is a magnificent T-Rex skull and I am amused by the juxtaposition of the two things — prehistoric victim and celestial murder weapon in the same hallway for eternity.

The not-post-doc guy has disappeared, so I let myself out, unable to backtrack to the same way I got in. I break into the late afternoon light and it’s all green and brick. There are people walking around. Students who look so young. People in medical scrubs and lab coats.

I duck back into the darkness of the parking garage. The car is fine in its small space. No tickets. It’s still there.

I Google places for dinner, and speed away.

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This week on The Escapologist…

• This Week’s Travel Briefs

• Scratchpad: Santa Fe

This Week’s Travel Briefs

• NYC’s Sardi’s, the iconic theater district restaurant that’s been in operation for more than a century, will temporarily close in June following a change in ownership. It’s been acquired by the Shubert Organization, longtime Broadway theater owners and producers who own much of the surrounding real estate. The goal is not to radically change the restaurant but to give it an upgrade, including a new menu. It’s an interesting development, mostly because the Shuberts are not restaurateurs and don’t seem to have experience in the hospitality space, but they certainly know the neighborhood and its whims. My impression of Sardi’s is that the ground floor is mostly crammed with tourists who come to have an okayish pre-show dinner and see the caricatures of Broadway stars that cover the walls. Its landmark status is indisputable but the food quality? Not so much. The real action at Sardi’s has always been upstairs at the bar, where actual Broadway personalities, not just their two-dimensional representations, can be seen sipping very solid martinis after and between shows. The last time I was there, I saw Gavin Creel having drinks with Victoria Clark. Let’s hope the changes can preserve the magic. (MSN)

• I’m super excited to check out Frida and Diego: The Last Dream at the Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition created in partnership with the Metropolitan Opera. (MoMA)

• Visitors to the Vatican Museums can now view a newly restored version of Michelangelo’s famous fresco The Last Judgement. Restoration on the work included the removal of a filmy layer of salt that had accumulated on the surface over time. Where did the film come from? From the skin of the thousands of sweaty-ass humans who walk through the Sistine Chapel each day. If you’re heading there soon, enjoy! And also know that you’re gross. (AP)

• The new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are slated to open on April 19. Instead of organizing works chronologically or geographically, the gallery uses the earth’s major bodies of water – and the ideas of flow and interconnectedness – to display its works. The new building cost $724 million and has a squiggly concrete design by Peter Zumthor. (New York Times)

• Because I’m taking hope where I can find it these days, the Obama Presidential Center, with monumental design and a 19-acre campus by Todd Williams Billie Tsein Architects, opens on the South Side of Chicago on Juneteenth.

• The Paris Catacombs have reopened after a period of restoration. I also just read a memoir where the author steals a bone from the Catacombs, which made me cataclysmically angry. Don’t do this. It’s a crime and a moral affront and also, do you want that kind of bad juju in your house? (Euronews via MSN)

Scratchpad: Santa Fe

Status: I’ve been once, in 2024, and I immediately wanted to go back 20 more times.

Why now? It’s one of the shiniest jewels along Route 66, which turns 100 this month.

Sleep:

• La Fonda on the Plaza: This century-old icon, dubbed “Santa Fe’s living room” helped to establish Santa Fe’s pueblo revival style. Stop by Bell Tower, the rooftop bar, for incredible sunset views.

• The Inn of the Anasazi: Understated Southwest style is the hallmark of this Rosewood property, which does what you think it does – caters to a somewhat older, well-heeled traveler who will greet you with a wave and a, “No pictures, please.”

• Inn of the Turquoise Bear: This former mansion, which once hosted Willa Cather, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and D.H. Lawrence, among others, has smartly themed rooms that pay homage to its famous former guests.

• Inn of the Five Graces: This fever dream of a hotel has jewelbox rooms that combine global design influences – Native American, South Asian, Moroccan – into spaces that somehow feel uniquely Santa Fe.

Eat and Drink:

• Plaza Cafe – Santa Fe’s oldest restaurant – is a must for breakfast. (Pick your hot sauce – red, green or “Christmas.”) Be sure to find the cutaway spot on the wall that reveals the structure of the original adobe walls.

• For coffee, head to local roaster Iconik.

• For almost everything else, there’s The Shed, another stalwart that’s been open since 1953. Order massive plates of chili, enchiladas, and tamales.

• If you need a romantic spot for a date or a celebratory evening with friends, head to James-Beard-Award-winning Zacatlan, where chef Eduardo Rodriguez is updating classic Southwest dishes with modern Mexican flavors.

See and Do:

Yes, of course, go to the Indian Market, noodle around the art galleries and gem shops, and browse your morning away at Collected Works bookstore. Here are some other bits to consider…

• The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture has a staggering collection of Native American artifacts, but its rotating exhibitions are a highlight. In a city filled with art that sometimes feels like it’s commenting on the Native American experience from the outside, this museum stresses the opposite.

• Meow Wolf, the always zany, sometimes profound, forever entertaining art collective started right here. The “immersive” experience has visitors climbing through, under, and around a house that tells a story – and hides a few sinister secrets. Look for allusions to 1950s alien abduction narratives, religious cults, and vintage comic strips.

• An hour outside Santa Fe, Bandelier National Monument preserves the former homes of the Ancestral Pueblo people on 33,000 hikeable acres. You’ll see the remains of domestic and agricultural structures, petroglyphs, and cave shelters.

• Painter Georgia O’Keefe lived in New Mexico for more than 40 years and this museum holds the world’s largest collection of her work. It also contains studio objects, personal items, and even clothes that O’Keefe wore. Keep an eye out for the silver “OK” brooch that Alexander Calder designed for O’Keefe. It was on display when I visited but on further research, it appears to be a reproduction. The location of the actual brooch, as far as I can tell, is unknown. Yes, this will in fact bother me for the rest of my days.

Farther Afield: Chaco Culture National Historic Park, about a three-hour drive from Santa Fe, is considered to be one of the most important historic sites in the United States, if not the world. Bearing a UNESCO World Heritage designation, this incredible collection of ruins is the remnants of a major cultural center of the Ancestral Puebloan people.

You may have seen this site in the news lately. The current administration is pushing to remove a ten-mile “buffer zone” around the site where mining and oil drilling activities are banned.

Follow: The Santa Fe Opera for updates on their summer season and performances in their grand, open-air theater.

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This week on The Escapologist…

• Checklist: The Route 66 Centennial

• Essay: What Happens in Tulsa

Checklist: The Route 66 Centennial

This year marks the 100th anniversary of of Route 66, the first highway to connect the Midwest to the West Coast along a single unbroken route from Illinois to the Santa Monica Pier.

Winding across eight states and past some of the continent’s most striking scenery, it is bucket list travel writ large – the kind of thing that everyone and their dad (quite literally) wants to do someday, and no wonder. It’s hard to find a single US attraction that has so many layers of knotty cultural meaning – the rise of the automobile, the romanticized American west, midcentury nostalgia, the road trip as freedom. And on and on.

Of course, there are tons of events planned for the anniversary across the entire route. Here are a few interesting tidbits to check out ahead of the celebrations at the end of April and into May.

• Though Route 66 technically begins on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, the epicenter of this year’s celebrations is Springfield, Missouri, which sits directly on the route and is considered the “birthplace” of Route 66 because local officials suggested the name. (Route66Kickoff.com)

• The TODAY Show will broadcast live from Springfield on April 30, and the town is hosting a number of special events including a speaker series, a car show, and a caravan rally. (Today.com)

• The United States Postal Service is releasing special stamps commemorating the centennial. They’ll be available on May 5. (United States Postal Service)

• Route 66 travels through the tribal lands of more than 25 indigenous tribes. The American Indigenous Tourism Association just released American Indians and Route 66, which helps travelers see the Mother Road through the eyes of its original inhabitants. There’s also an itinerary that includes indigenous sites along the route. (American Indigenous Tourism Association)

• Many places along Route 66 – local businesses, classic signage, and landmarks – are in need of preservation and restoration. The National Trust for Historic Preservation offers grants to do just that. Additionally, the Trust also is supporting a measure before Congress that would name Route 66 National Historic Trail and open it up to additional funding. (National Trust for Historic Preservation)

• I am still learning about the close alignment between Route 66 and the Green Book, a travel guide published from 1936-1964 that helped black motorists travel safely and comfortably to destinations across the US. The National Parks Service offers a solid intro, and the list of extant (and not) Green Book sites along Route 66 is fascinating. For a more general look at the history of the Green Book, check out Driving While Black by Gretchen Sorin. (NPS, Bookshop.org)

• Google Arts & Culture has created a visual guide that lets you explore major landmarks and learn some history. (Google)

• Because I’m never one to pass up a beautifully designed, ultra-niche travel guide that is more or less useless for planning a trip, I give you Wildsam Route 66. You are welcome. (Wildsam)

What Happens in Tulsa

Standing at the foot of the Golden Driller in Tulsa, Oklahoma, there was not much else to do but take pictures. I clutched a 110 film camera and the day was clouded over, the sky a solid sheet of gray spitting the occasional bout of angry slantwise drizzle. We were umbrella-less and underdressed, both of us in Dr. Marten boots and coats that were defenseless against wind or rain.

We took a taxi from downtown to the Tulsa State Fairgrounds where the driller stands as sentinel and host, 76 feet tall and painted gold, the word TULSA emblazoned on his belt buckle. We were too young to rent a car and we’d arrived in Oklahoma without a clear solution to that problem in a place where public transportation was more a suggestion than a city service. We waited for buses that never came. We bummed rides from friends who lived in town. And we called taxis because – we certainly didn’t know – you couldn’t just hail one on the street.

Built for a 1952 petroleum exhibition, the driller stands with legs splayed in swaggering self-confidence, one elbow propped up on an oil rig. He looks into the distance, as though he’s regarding a field of oil derricks that stretch to the horizon. He’s made of plaster that covers a steel frame and he’s currently the seventh-tallest statue in the United States. Given the definition of his solar plexus, it’s not entirely clear if he’s wearing a shirt, but he’s definitely wearing gloves, his oilman’s hat, and workman’s boots. The weather does not seem to faze him.

Decades later, it is still hard for me to surround this excursion with any kind of sensible context. It is, like all matters of the heart, hard to explain. But the short story is that our favorite band was Hanson, and we were in Tulsa, their hometown, to see what they saw.

Hanson, for the uninitiated, is a band consisting of three brothers who wrote, recorded, and played the kind of sunshine-laden, garage-forged American pop-rock that has never quite been cool, but has had its cultural moments. One of them came in 1997 when their first single, “Mmmbop,” went to number 1 on the Billboard singles chart. Taylor Hanson, the band’s angel-faced lead singer, was fifteen years old. Drummer Zac was eleven. Eldest brother and guitarist Isaac was seventeen, like us.

My best friend Corinne and I were obsessed – young enough to scream at concerts and swoon over cute boys but old enough to grasp something… else… whirling around this anomaly of a band. The songs spoke to our yearning teenage hearts. (“All I care about is you and me and us and now,” sang Taylor in his gravel-caked, post-pubescent tenor on “If Only.”) But the more we learned about Hanson – a hobby fueled by a wondrous new toy, the internet – the more we grasped that while we were all approximately the same age, there was a broad cultural divide between us.

The Hanson boys were the three eldest of seven homeschooled children. They were raised in the Tulsa suburbs in an evangelical Christian household and while there were no direct religious messages in their music, there was also a marked absence of the opposite. No sex. No drugs. Angst was delivered in soothing tones. There were sweet, heartfelt songs about their late grandmother, about feeling awkward as a teenager, about standing for “principles.” As a girl trying to pick through the rubble of mid-1990s popular music – of hypersexualized Britney Spears, of the strippers-and-cocaine ethos of Guns n Roses, of Kurt Cobain’s suicide – Hanson was a balm.

I had divorced parents, a working mom, and a father who was either absent or combative, depending on the day. I had one sister, a spotty attendance record at Sunday mass, and crippling anxiety about AP exams and college applications. It is no wonder that this whole other kind of teenager – seemingly gentle, earnest, wrapped in family and protected from chaos – became a point of fixation.

I think we went to Tulsa just to see if it was real.

I did not have a passport. I had only flown on an airplane one other time in my life, to go to Orlando on a trip with my high school chorus. I had never traveled anywhere without a supervising adult. It never occurred to me that there were things to see in and around Tulsa that were not directly related to Hanson, partly because fandom can be so myopic, and partly because I simply did not know how to travel. How do you know how to travel if you’ve never traveled?

To give you a sense of my total inexperience not just with travel but with life, there was a moment when Corinne and I seriously discussed traveling to Tulsa from Boston by Greyhound bus. The thought of purchasing an airplane ticket boggled the mind. When it came time to book, I did so over the phone, not quite trusting the internet with so important a task, or so much of my money.

Everything we saw on that trip, like the Golden Driller, feels frozen in its own bubble. Sites, events, entire days existed entirely without context, one odd moment after the next. Walking across a divided highway under churning green skies, wondering if the tornado sirens would go off. Seeing the city’s skyscrapers at a distance, how they seemed to spring up all of a sudden, sandy and gray, amidst miles and miles of fields. Eating at a lunch counter that looked like it had tumbled directly out of the 1960s, where I spotted something on the menu I had never heard of – chicken-fried steak. Seeing commercials for unfamiliar stores on the hotel TV. Deciphering swing-y south/midwestern speech patterns while everyone we met tried to navigate all the missing consonants in our Boston accents. Calling in to a local radio show. Having dinner with other fans at a strip-mall Mexican restaurant that the Hanson boys had named as a favorite.

We went to Mayfest, a local street festival and concert, where Hanson had cut their musical teeth years before, when their ages were literally in the single digits. It was here that we tried a rare delicacy — Dip N Dots, a deconstructed ice cream in the form of rock-hard, dime-size pellets that made your teeth ache.

At one point, having run out of Hanson-related things to do, we told a local fan friend that we planned to checkout an all-ages goth club. I will never forget her shock and incredulity, her slow, drawling response. “Oooh kaaaaay, you do not wanna do that.”

This is how we ended up in her car on a weeknight, slow-driving past the split-level suburban house where the Hanson kids grew up. It seemed far too small for the raising of seven children, not much bigger than my own house. The windows were dark. A black SUV sat parked in the driveway, one that we speculated belonged to their personal assistant. The Hanson family, by then, had enough resources to move onward and upward, even though they were still based in Tulsa. (We knew details like this. Fans do.) You can predict how this ended for a carful of teenage girls and their muddled ideas of what it meant to be “inconspicuous” — the inevitable creak coming from somewhere near the house, us cutting the headlights. I somehow managed to pick up a stone from the driveway before we tore off, all of us shrieking to wake the dead. I still have it.

We were thrilled. We did not see much of anything. Hanson’s first album, after all, was called Middle of Nowhere. But we had come home with bragging rights – hard currency in fan circles. We had been. We had borne witness. To what? It wasn’t clear.

What I would give for a new Tulsa trip, one not quite so tied to my youthful obsession. The irony of this, of course, is that Hanson is more entrenched in Tulsa today than they were back then. They are local heroes now, baptized by nostalgia and a substantial discography that makes their early singles seem like exactly what they were – kid stuff. They are local music history, the inheritors of a legacy that goes back to the earliest days of country music, to Woody Guthrie, to Leon Bridges. When I first set foot in Tulsa, they were a mere trend.

In the ensuing years, Tulsa has become, and maybe always was, a city of Art Deco walking tours and acclaimed chefs, of the Bob Dylan Center Archive and a museum that commemorates the history of Black Wall Street. There is also the Philbrook Museum, with its gardens inspired by Villa Lante in Lazio, Italy. I’ve actually been to Italy and seen the original. I know it well enough to get the references. How things change.

Route 66, which bisects the city roughly east to west, is paid tribute in the form of neon signs, a visitor center, and small businesses that survive from that era. The city has even raised funds for a museum called OKPOP, which honors the rich musical and pop culture legacy of the city. I have heard that it will feature… guess who.

It is not all so uncomplicated, the trajectory not so straight. Hanson has never quite been able to live up to the hopeful ideal of our teenage imaginations – as if anything could. Taylor was married with a child by age 19. Between the three of them, they now have 15 children, which is lovely and utterly aligned with the traditions of their own family but is simply not a life I ever dreamed of for myself.

There is darker stuff, too. I unfollowed Isaac on Instagram years ago when he started reposting videos that I can only describe as “manosphere lite.” In 2020, fans found one of Zac’s social media accounts where he posted racist, sexist, and homophobic memes. That incident, rightfully, blew up to the degree that Zac offered an apology – an unprecedented mea culpa for a band with songs and albums that still cling, if somewhat more loosely, to a sense of nondenominational wholesomeness and righteousness.

Sitting in a place of not knowing, of unanswered curiosity, is uncomfortable, but sometimes the alternative is worse. Growing up will teach you that, too.

I know fans who quit the band for good after that. I have never quite been able to, mostly thanks to Taylor Hanson, who does not appear to share his brothers’ ideologies. He’s also spent the last decade founding and growing a charity organization that alleviates food insecurity, where else, in Tulsa. Even Taylor, though, has signaled that things are changing. In a recent post on Hanson’s web site, he alluded to tensions in the band, a move to Los Angeles. Suddenly the brothers are promoting solo projects — something that was never part of the Hanson equation.

A few days later, however, Taylor was on Instagram promoting a show at historic Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa — another place we neglected to visit on our trip. Another thing to add to a future itinerary, now that I know what I know.

The show is a tribute concert to Leon Bridges. Taylor is on the bill as a solo artist. I probably won’t be there this time, but you never know when you’ll have a good reason to go back to Tulsa.

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This week on The Escapologist…

• Right Now in Travel, As Briefly as Possible

• Scratchpad: London Spring

Right Now in Travel, as Briefly as Possible

• LA28, the marketing moniker of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, released its official color palettes, fonts, and design elements this week and… well, I love them. Inspired by California superblooms and the bird of paradise flower – the official flower of Los Angeles – they also conjure the neons of the 80s. Malibu Barbie. LA Gear sneakers. The eye-crossing patterns of Jams shorts. The boldness and the brightness feel right on time. (la28.org)

• You know that feeling when you realize that the small problems and the huge problems are actually all the same problem? To wit, eight major culture and heritage organizations are jointly suing to halt any further changes to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts without Congressional approval. This follows recent comments from the President that he may take the building “down to the steel”. (National Trust for Historic Preservation)

• The New Museum in NYC reopened this week following the addition of a Koolhaas-designed new wing that, from a distance, looks like the main building has spawned a cute, space age li’l friend – its very own R2-D2. This New York Times piece (gift link) sums it up nicely and, as a bonus, contains a dirty word that I had to look up.

• A guy walked into Chihuly Garden and Glass, an outdoor exhibit at the foot of the Space Needle in Seattle, and just broke a bunch of stuff. I could say something here about a certain kind of art aficionado and how they probably think the art deserved it, but… (NBC News)

More on The Escapologist:

Scratchpad: London Spring

Status: I’ve been 10+ times, including several spring trips.

Why now? Bridgerton is fake but spring in London is real and it can fix everything that hurts. Why? The shimmery sunny days. The Gothic rainy ones. And never forget, the English are deadly serious about their gardens. If I was going, here’s what I’d do.

Sleep:

• This new hotel wasn’t actually philosopher Bertrand Russel’s townhouse, but wow am I ever willing to indulge the fantasy. If all you’ve ever wanted from London was a Bloomsbury address and tea and conversation in the Bohemian garden, start here.

• Sometimes, florals for spring are necessary. The Firmdale Hotels, experts in flower prints (and checks, and paisley) never seem to miss. Number Sixteen is situated in a Kensington townhouse that has a hidden garden and orangerie.

• Dishoom’s spinoff brand, The Permit Room, operates a single hotel – with a single, two-bedroom suite – on Portobello Road upstairs from the restaurant and the famous flower market. The space, done in buttery yellow, has high ceilings, top-floor light, and South Asian contemporary art.

• If you’re ready to ditch the city for the freedom and beauty of the countryside – and indeed, a cottage that is absolutely not a cottage – The Pig in the South Downs has fanciful “wagon” rooms that sit in its dreamy walled garden. Wake up early and all you’ll hear are the chirping birds and the bees buzzing in the century-old fruit trees.

Eat and Drink: Keep it simple. The Tamil Prince for modern Indian, martinis at American Bar at The Savoy, brunch at The Grazing Goat, and lattes – as many as you want – at Monmouth.

See and Do:

• Two fashion exhibits to book ahead of arrival – Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the V&A and Queen Elizabeth II: A Life in Style at King’s Gallery.

• Wes Anderson: The Archives at Design Museum. Yes, it seems that the Fabulous Mr. Fox characters are on view.

• Magnolias, cherry blossoms, and tulips will be blooming at The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew through mid-April, but there’s never a bad time to visit this sprawling, historic garden. While you’re there, make time to visit Kew Palace, the smallest of the royal palaces, where King George III lived and battled mental and physical illness.

• If you’re getting lunch at Tamil Prince, walk it off along the houseboat-lined Regent’s Canal walking path, with a stop at Word on the Water, a book shop on a boat with an impeccable selection. End your jaunt at slightly spooky St. Pancras Old Church, which is thought to be one of the oldest Christian sites in Europe. With big literary history that connects to Thomas Hardy, Mary Shelly, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Charles Dickens, it’s a good place to sit with whatever you bought at Word on the Water.

• If you’re staying at Bertrand’s Townhouse in Bloomsbury, you cannot miss Present & Correct, one of my favorite stationery stores on earth for its utterly original selection of design items, paper, ephemera, and more. Catch your breath in London Review Bookshop next door.

• Millennial musical theater kids rejoice (maybe): A John Doyle-directed (hence “maybe”) revival of Lucy Simon and Marsha Norman’s musical The Secret Garden is currently playing in actual Yorkshire at York Theatre Royal. “They play their own instruments!” aside, we don’t turn down a Secret Garden revival in this house.

Follow: fox.in.london never fails to indulge my vision of London as the perfect setting for a romance novel.

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This week in The Escapologist…

• Right Now in Travel, As Briefly as Possible

• 5 Days Left to Sign Up for My Travel Journaling Workshop

• Here’s What I Learned About This Stupid White House Ballroom

Right Now in Travel, as Briefly as Possible

• War across the Middle East is massively impacting travel. The gist:

  • Much of the airspace across the Middle East is closed.

  • There are direct threats to airports, hotels, and other ground infrastructure.

  • Airlines based in the region are operational but at reduced capacity.

  • American/Israeli bombs have damaged major Iranian cultural sites.

  • Rising jet fuel prices are expected to drive airfares higher this summer.

• It’s superbloom season in California, and higher than average rainfall across the West is predicted to create ideal conditions for flower-gazing. As always, remember to leave no trace.

• Thanks to those of you who reached out about the construction at Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. The chapel has been open throughout a major renovation project, some strategically placed mirrors (!) are cleverly disguising some restoration work. In the photo below, you can see the mirror in the bottom left corner

  

• San Antonio’s River Walk, a pioneering development that set the tone for so many urban waterfront renewal projects in the US, is getting a smartly refreshed hotel. The El Tropicano, which opened in 1962 and had its own flamingo garden, will be reborn as Sítio El Tropicano. The inspiration is midcentury Brazilian tropical – a winning combo if there ever was.

• The Whitney in NYC is hosting its Biennial and it’s weird (complementary) as ever. Two pieces to look out for that have travel-centric themes: Songbook, 2024 by documentary filmmaker Mariah Garnett, who traveled to Cairo to reinvent and stage her great-great aunt’s 700-page opera about the Egyptian pharaohs. Also, 20-minute workout, [WIP], 2023/2026 by Hawaiian collective kekahi wahi gives us a semi-creepy workout video on the spot where Captain James Cook tried – and failed – to kidnap high chief Kalani‘ōpu‘u in 1779. The incident eventually led to Cook’s death. (Note that the latter contains adult content.)

5 Days Left to Sign up for My Travel Journaling Workshop

Obsessed with travel journal inspo but really not sure where to start?

Want to take your travel journal to the next level?

Looking to go from pretty collages to meaningful memory keeping?

Join me, travel editor & journalist of 15+ years (and lifetime journal fanatic), for this informative, engaging online class. It’s 2 hours of tips, tricks, and tools to help take your travel journal from chaotic scrapbook to a gorgeous reflection of your personal travel story.

What to expect:

• Ideas about what to capture and how to capture it

• Tips for making time to journal while you’re traveling

• Layout inspiration and ideas

• A list of recommended journaling materials

• Advice for making a compact journaling kit you can use on the road

• Creative time to turn inspo into action while we make a journal page together

• A casual, safe, there-are-no-mistakes atmosphere

Because the workshop is online (We’ll be on Zoom) and on a Sunday, pajamas and a cup of tea are suggested but not required. Shoot me a note or a comment if you have questions! I hope you can join us!

Here’s What I Learned About This Stupid White House Ballroom

You may have heard.

The President of the United States, following the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, now wants to build a ballroom in its place. A really, really big ballroom. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., has led the opposition to this project and has sued the President, the National Parks Service, the Department of the Interior, and a number of other defendants in order to halt construction. The initial suit was dismissed on procedural grounds.

Here’s what we know, so far, from the NTHP:

• The current proposed plan is for a ballroom that can accommodate 1,000 people for a seated dinner. There has also been talk of increasing this capacity to 1,500.

• The plan is for a 22,000-square-foot ballroom, which is about 44% larger than the industry standard.

• The 90,000-square-foot, multistory building that will include the ballroom is three times the size of the White House.

• The proposed ballroom cannot be subdivided. If 200 people are gathered instead of 1,000, the space will feel awkward and outsized, and guests will not be able to move through it comfortably.

• Construction of the ballroom would create a massive visual asymmetry, which is antithetical to the original intentions of the White House’s architects.

• The ballroom will fully block views of the White House from the US Capitol, interrupting an intentional, symbolic sight line between two of the branches of government.

• Ballroom construction will necessitate the disruption of the White House’s driveway and garden, which were designed by Frederic Law Olmsted.

• The plan calls for Corinthian columns on the ballroom’s portico. The White House currently contains no Corinthian columns. They are all ionic or doric. In addition to the plans for the ballroom, the President has called for the replacement of the White House’s existing columns so they will all be Corinthian – and thus match the ballroom.

• The ballroom’s portico is nonfunctional. It cannot be accessed from the ballroom. Additionally, the plan calls for dozens of false windows and doors.

• It’s not clear what the massive spaces on the floors above and surrounding the ballroom are for.

• A public comment period on the construction of the ballroom closed on March 4. More than 30,000 comments were received, and an estimated 97% of them opposed the project.

The wildest part of all this? The NTHP is not even opposed to the construction of a ballroom. They are simply opposed to the construction of this ballroom.

The National Capitol Planning Commission, which oversees city planning in Washington, D.C., will vote on the project on April 2. It is expected to pass, as the President has stacked the commission with his supporters since he took office. This is not the final hurdle for the project, but it is a significant one. The NTHP is expected to take further legal action.

More from The Escapologist:

• Athens on the Upswing

• 6 Travel Trends That Should Go Away

• Elvis Is Buried by the Pool and Other Ghost Stories

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This week on The Escapologist…

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