Three Perfect Days

  • Jan 2009

    Three Perfect Days, Dubai United Arab Emirates

    Don your darkest shades and prepare to be dazzled by Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates. And it’s not just the glaring desert light or gleaming skyscrapers. Sure, you’ve seen the glossy images in the media: swish shopping malls, towering construction, and manmade palm-shaped islands (visible from outer space). But this Arabian Gulf metropolis is much more than a string of superlatives. Literally and metaphorically at the crossroads between East and West, the fastest-growing city on earth has skyrocketed from somnolent fishing village to a hot spot of global trade, transport, and finance.


  • Dec 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Denver Colorado

    Set in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains and long overshadowed by the high-profile ski towns located within “them thar hills,” the Mile High City of Denver is a formidable—and contemporary— destination in its own right. Denver’s savvy restaurants, state-of-the-art sporting venues, and booming art and cultural scene are making regular appearances on national best-of lists. In addition to having a thriving downtown and hip historic districts like LoDo, Denver is showing its diversity in up-and-coming neighborhoods like Highlands and the ArtDistrict on Santa Fe. A strong focus on sustainability means the city is green even in winter. And you’ll enjoy plenty of the white stuff during your three days, with one fast-track train trip up to city-owned Winter Park Resort, a fun destination for skiers and nonskiers alike.


  • Nov 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Melbourne, Australia

    MELBOURNE HAS A REPUTATION as a buttoned-down town, but arrive on the first Tuesday in November and you might think you’ve stumbled into the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Businesses brandish “closed” signs; blokes don suits and colourful ties; women parade a rainbow whirl of hats, fascinators, and other head-gear; and a general mood of silliness prevails. This is Melbourne Cup Day, the culmination of an annual horseracing carnival, when even those who can’t tell blinkers from bookmakers feel compelled to have “a flutter,” or a bet.


  • Oct 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Oahu, Hawaii

    ISLANDS ARE LIKE FRIENDS. They come into your life just when you need them. Each is different, offering different gifts. Meet O‘ahu, the friend that goes dancing, is sophisticated and urbane, yet dresses up in gaudy tangerine sunsets accessorized with coconut palms and rainbows. O‘ahu is paradise on speed dial, with a hundred white-sand beaches, including the world’s dream machine: magical, manic Waikiki. The island claims two mountain ranges, the Ko‘olau and Waianae, as well as national, state, and county parks crammed with legend, waterfalls, history, and hiking trails.


  • Sep 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Glacier National Park

    FOR EONS, ICE BLANKETED ALL but the highest summits of what is now Glacier National Park in Montana. Under writhing ice floes, mountains took shape. Glaciers gnawed gaping valleys, etched rocks, piled up long ridges of rubble, and left large turquoise-blue lakes on the landscape. Since the time that ancient ice birthed the park’s landforms, several miniature ice ages have come and gone. They scooped out the nooks with cirques and hanging valleys. More recently, Glacier Park has sung a different tune. In the late 1800s, when explorer George Bird Grinnell first laid eyes on the Continental Divide, a ridge that the Blackfeet called the Backbone of the World, he lobbied for its preservation. By the time Congress designated Glacier as the nation’s 10th national park in 1910, the 150 pockets of ice from Grinnell’s day had begun to thaw into ponds.


  • Aug 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Beijing

    THE SEAT OF EMPERORS, the showpiece of a revolution, and now—reinvented once again—Beijing is the happening 21st-century capital of the fastest-changing country on earth. What’s new: Snazzy cars have replaced bicycles; suits are designer, not Mao; restaurants are luxe; and the architecture? Mind-blowingly innovative. But some things haven’t changed. The city still has the stately, larger-than-life demeanor that comes from centuries of presiding over the Middle Kingdom, and, along with it, a palpable sense of history.


  • Jul 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Seattle

    SEATTLE SUMMERS ARE AS NEAR perfection as you can get this side of Paradise. Yes, fall, winter, and spring can be gray and rainy; that’s why Seattle is the caffeine capital of the universe. But July is sublime. Who needs coffee with temperatures in the 70s and 80s and a golden sun shining 16 hours a day? To the east and the west, the city is bound by water—Lake Washington and the Puget Sound, respectively—and mountains—the Cascades and the Olympics— that constantly woo you outdoors. In the middle is a city with a quirky sense of humor (exhibit A: the Space Needle), a vibrant downtown, and a serious focus on art of all kinds: performing, visual, culinary, public, and that provided by nature. With a robin’s egg–blue sky and the white triangles of sailboats skimming across the glittering water, Seattle pulls out all the stops to show you a good time and a world-renowned sense of place.


  • Jun 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Berlin

    TO DESCRIBE THEIR city of 3.6 million people, Berliners love the quip “poor but sexy,” coined by Mayor Klaus Wowereit. The German capital may be financially poor, but almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is riding high on a wave of cultural prominence. The city has always been a place where locals get along, with their brisk sense of humor and energetic embrace of life. And thousands of students, artists, and free spirits have turned this bustling European metropolis into a unique, at times even wild, laboratory of 21st-century art, culture, and entertainment. June is the perfect time to dive into life here, as the streets in this surprisingly green city pulse with summertime activity.


  • May 2008

    Three Perfect Days, London

    LONDON IS A TRULY COSMOPOL-itan capital, arguably the world’s greatest. Art, literature, fashion, architecture, and business are booming in this city of some 8 million souls, and if you haven’t visited lately, relax: The days of bangers and beans are long dead. London is now an epicure’s paradise, though laced with a frisson of sticker shock as this is one of the world’s costliest cities. Diners aren’t the only ones agape at the bottom line. London watches in horror as the price tag soars for hosting the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. Despite the city’s relentless popularity, there persists a degree of good old English deference. Closed-circuit TV cameras are said to snap you an average of 300 times a day, but celebs relocate here to go about their business relatively unhindered. I once watched Madonna at Sunday lunch unable to attract the attention of anyone— including the waiter. She’s just one of two millennia worth of conquerors, exiles, and hippies who have made London their town. One in three Londoners was born abroad—making the city, to its detriment some believe, decidedly un-English. But as the good Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” London has its share of those, too. But you’ll likely encounter only the good sort during your three days.


  • Apr 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Tokyo

    FOR INVETERATE TRAVELERS, one place can sometimes blur into another. Was that village in Southeast Asia or the Amazon? That beach … was it the Caribbean or Australia? There’s no such memory mixing in Tokyo. The pleasures of the Japanese capital are unmistakably of this place: precision-presented sushi, white-gloved taxi drivers, outrageously dressed teens, exquisite crafts (even department store wares) wrapped just so, a kabuki actor’s trill. Tokyo is the world’s largest metropolis (nearly 34 million people within commuting distance), but courtesy is so ingrained that it’s hard to tell.


  • Mar 2008

    Three Perfect Days, San Antonio, Texas

    SAN ANTONIO’S FAMOUS River Walk offers travelers plenty of entertaining options: a romantic barge ride under a canopy of 200-year-old cypress trees, riverside tables perfect for sampling margaritas and local cuisine, and plenty of spas, restaurants, bars, and shops. Ever since the 1968 HemisFair put the spotlight on the ingenious development that turned the land along a former flood-prone river through the middle of town into one of the most alluring urban developments, the River Walk has drawn people from around the world to its banks for alfresco dining, shopping, and nightlife.


  • Feb 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

    THE MAGIC OF PUERTO Vallarta defies explanation. It’s hard to say whether that magic fueled the fiery attraction between Liz Taylor and Richard Burton when he was filming The Night of the Iguana here in 1963 or whether it prompted the movie’s director, John Huston, to claim Puerto Vallarta as home until his final years. Nevertheless, the torrid affair and onslaught of paparazzi put the place on the international map. Puerto Vallarta has been drawing Hollywood types and savvy Sybarites ever since. Vallarta, as this sultry area straddling the bay in the state of Jalisco is known to locals (PV to English speakers), has managed to retain the unmistakable flavor of colonial Mexico— the real Mexico.


  • Jan 2008

    Three Perfect Days, Bangkok, Thailand

    BEGUILING AND BEWILDERING, subtle and brash, spiritual and sensual—Bangkok is all these and more. Once known as the Venice of the East because of its dependence on canals for transport, Bangkok today is a bustling metropolis with some of Asia’s top hotels, restaurants, and shopping centers. Though the city’s main sights are temples and palaces, what stays in the minds of most visitors are encounters with ordinary people. This is when the famous Thai smile appears, cutting across cultural boundaries to forge a genuine bond.


  • Dec 2007

    Three Perfect Days, New York City

    NEW YORK IS A BEACON for the sophisticated traveler and a symbol of the U.S. “melting pot” heritage that has made the city such a cultural mélange. In fact, many New Yorkers think that term was invented just for them. Wasn’t it? For this reason, I haven’t always been excited about being identified as a native, and I’ve tried to keep it a secret most of the time— especially when I wasn’t ready to deal with “You don’t sound like a New Yorker!”


  • Nov 2007

    Three Perfect Days, Sun Valley, Idaho

    THE FIRST MODERN SKIER TO SPEND three perfect days in Sun Valley, Idaho, was Austrian Count Felix Schaffgotsch. In 1936, diplomatically destined Averell Harriman, the president of Union Pacific Railroad, commissioned Schaffgotsch to search for what could become the American West’s version of the popular Swiss winter sports center St. Moritz. Schaffgotsch hoped to discover a meteorological Rubik’s Cube: a perfect mix of freezing but not frigid temperatures and deep but not impassable or unskiable snow. He was looking for a place where indigo skies framed each day and powerful storms ruled the night. And he wanted it all surrounded by towering mountains. Last, this perfectly powdery place should have an authentic Western town.


  • Oct 2007

    Three Perfect Days, Phoenix, Arizona

    YOU’D HAVE THOUGHT Phoenix might have grown up by now. It is, after all, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., a sprawling economic powerhouse. The population stands now at about 1.5 million, up from 100,000 in 1950. Yet this exuberant expanse of a suburb has at least three distinct “downtowns” and loses three residents for every five people who move in. Although a gawky adolescent in many ways, there’s still something liberating about the place. You can be anyone in Phoenix—or no one at all. Perhaps that’s why it keeps drawing immigrants and real-estate agents and people with dreams—anyone with a need to reinvent himself.


  • Sep 2007

    Three Perfect Days, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    This laidback city is easygoing as ever. The art, music, beer, football and coffee shops are among the best the planet has to offer. Wander past dainty brick buildings along the cobweb of canals as the morning mists rise off the water and you’re back in the age of Rembrandt. Ferry to the Oostelijke Eilanden (Eastern Islands), where Amsterdam’s former dockland is being transformed into one of the coolest quarters of town and you’ll see why contemporary Dutch architects and designers are ranked world-class.


  • Aug 2007

    Three Perfect Days, Taipei, Taiwan

    TAIPEI MAY BE THE best-kept secret in Asia. The capital city of Taiwan, Taipei is nestled among mountains at the northern tip of an island replete with dramatic landscapes. The Portuguese called it Ilha Formosa —Beautiful Island. Visitors will find here a taste of the rich traditions of ancient China, uninterrupted by cultural revolutions or Western colonialism. The city is a fast-paced blend of contemporary upscale life, with colorful ancient temples and monuments, dramatic scenery, and romantic teahouses perched on the sides of mountains. It is one of the few cities in the world where you can go from a modern metropolis of millions of people to lush green mountains in just minutes. In Taipei, you can find not only the best of the regional cuisines of China, but also first-class food from every part of the world.


  • Jul 2007

    Three Perfect Days, Zürich, Switzerland

    SUMMER IS THE PERFECT TIME to visit Zürich. Plants have burst into profuse bloom, showering the city with color. Restaurants and cafés set up tables on outdoor terraces and wide sidewalks. For more than three weeks, Zürich’s Tonhalle concert hall hosts the Zürich Festival with top opera, dance, and theatrical events. July is the month for the Züri Fäscht, a long weekend of outdoor concerts, dances, family attractions, and fireworks displays. History is all around you in Zürich. Streets abound in medieval architecture—residential, municipal, and commercial. One of the world’s major financial capitals, Zürich is home to elegant shops, perfectly dressed citizens, and excellent services for locals and tourists alike. But Zürich exudes more than wealth: It’s a hip, art-oriented city that’s emerging as one of Europe’s hot spots. With more than 40 museums, an on-time public transportation system, and a stunning location at the head of Lake Zürich on the Limmat River, Zürich earns repeated recognition as the world’s most livable city.


  • Jun 2007

    Three Perfect Days, Hong Kong, China

    ON JUNE 30, IT WILL BE 10 YEARS to the day since China resumed control over the former British colony of Hong Kong. The town will be in a mood to celebrate, and you couldn’t have picked a better time to visit. Confounding fears to the contrary, Hong Kong’s unique way of life has remained much as it was before the handover—please don’t say “takeover”; it’s a sensitive distinction—and the city has benefited enormously from China’s emergence as the world’s fastest-growing economy. Famous for its pace and energy, Hong Kong is rich in culture as well as commerce. The food is magnificent, the scenery stunning, the people friendly and helpful, and the shopping, if no longer cheap, is unsurpassed in Asia for quality and choice. Exotic but efficient, exciting but safe, there probably isn’t a city in the world where you can have a better time with less hassle.


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