Travel

Once a year, Nick, a surgeon who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, visits Staten Island. Almost as soon as he arrives, he literally runs back to where he just came from. Nick is a marathon runner — he’s done New York seven times — and like millions of similarly masochistic athletes and wannabes, he’s lined up at the mouth of the Verrazzano Bridge, the eastern edge of New York City’s least exalted borough, with the sole aim of getting back to more familiar territory as briskly as his legs can carry him. “Of course I don’t have anything against Staten Island,” he explains. “There’s just not that much of a reason to go there.” Many others, it turns out, feel the same. I moved to Manhattan just over four years ago.

“Welcome to your thirties,” my friend Rich roared, throwing open the balcony door leading onto our hotel room’s private loggia. The sound of gushing water filled the room as I flopped, exhausted, onto the bed. The Ziller River rushed through the valley below, fast. Verdant hills stretched upwards to create a preposterously bucolic scene, practically begging for your best Julie Andrews impression, arms outstretched. I laid there, and took it in through the window. I pretended I didn’t mind that I was missing the party, Snowbombing Festival raging on in Mayrhofen town. The “Snolympics?” Didn’t sound like much fun. Pond skimming on skis, surely soggy and impractical.

Kitted out in black Givenchy, huge sunglasses blocking out the snow glare, Audrey Hepburn is lunching al fresco in the French Alps when a meet-cute with Cary Grant ensues. It’s the opening scene of Charade, filmed just over sixty years ago in Megève — the chichi winter resort for both Hollywood royalty and true bluebloods during the 1960s. Back then, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand and Jean Cocteau were often seen swooping down its pistes. Imagine a snow-dusted Saint-Tropez and you’re on the right track. This medieval market town was hardly destined to become a darling of the beau monde. Megève was something of a backwater (the name even translates to “village in the middle of the waters”) until 1920, when Baroness Noémie de Rothschild spotted its potential.

Quizzed on how to assimilate to new cultures, travel writer and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once said: “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.” The “Opening a bottle with…” series is about getting pickled with people far cooler than I am, in new places. To me, booking a ski trip at the start of the year is the ultimate luxury. With my birthday falling on the first of January, when the ball drops, I feel a sense of melancholy. As hangovers descend and diets begin, I want to carry on celebrating.  In European ski resorts, they keep the festivities going well into March. Christmas lights and religious displays stay twinkling. Fresh snow combats the winter blues. Everyone’s happy to share a bottle of good wine.

At first, the sleepy little town of Mirleft looks like all the others on the 600-mile trek through the sands of the Sahara: half-gravel, half-concrete sidewalks, faded paint, brightly painted schools and the minaret of a new mosque jutting up toward the sky. But a mile past Mirleft’s dusty high street lie cliffs of California proportions — with swells to match. The cliffs arch down at a near forty-five-degree angle and into meaty waves rolling toward a point break. It’s here that a group of ten French and German surfers have joined up with Issam Surf School, heading down to Plage Sauvage, the beach below, in a 4x4.

The city of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, really comes into its own twice a year. Firstly is August, when its streets are thronged with revelers and amateur PR types (“four stars in the Scotsman!”) promoting their wares at the world-famous performing arts festival. And then the second comes at the end of the year, during the New Year’s Eve period of Hogmanay, which sees anyone claiming long-distant Scots ancestry taking part in the revels for a day or two, just as it seems anyone in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day suddenly remembers their long-lost Uncle Padraig or Great-Aunt Shelagh. In any case, Hogmanay in Edinburgh is a marvelous experience, freezing cold aside, and best experienced from the surroundings of somewhere comfortable.