Vacation

“You just missed Chris Hoy. He was here leading cycle rides over the summer,” the Peligoni Club’s receptionist informed me breezily as he lugged my suitcase down the gravel path to my villa. Lively Greek music drifted on the (non-existent) breeze, thick air seeming to press down on us despite the late hour.  I’d come to Zakynthos seeking some solo restoration — and sure, even self-improvement. I hadn’t pictured puffing up a rock-strewn hill behind a six-time Olympic gold-medal-winning medalist, in 90-degree heat. But that’s how they roll, here; this family-run, members-only beach club regularly flies in experts to add star quality to the pared-back, luxurious spaces.

The Maldives is an unusual country. It’s Asia’s smallest country, but also the world’s most geographically dispersed. It has Asia’s second smallest population, but is one of the world’s most densely populated. It was Buddhist for a millennium and a half, which is conspicuous in most of the country’s ruling institutions, early scriptures and even language, but you wouldn’t know it from the people; it’s almost 100 percent Muslim now, demographically and culturally, and has been since the last Buddhist king of Maldives, Dhovemi, converted in 1153 (or maybe it was 1193 — depends on who you ask).

Strong, old pine tree branches cutting through a cloudless cerulean sky — a sight I find hard to beat. Throwing open the curtains at Pine Cliffs Resort in the Algarve, I wondered why I’d been away from Portugal so long.  Bleary-eyed, I reflexively photographed my first glimpse of the Atlantic from my Junior Ocean Suite’s balcony, seagulls cinematically swooping into the frame. Another vain attempt to capture the colors that always keep me coming back; the pictures somehow never as good as the real thing. I’d posted up from Tokyo gone dinnertime the previous night, just outfoxed by Japan’s famed pink sakura (2024’s late bloom meant I missed them by twenty-four hours). Waking up deathly early, I soaked away grizzly jet lag in my spacious room’s egg-shaped tub.

Setting an early alarm while on vacation never comes easily to me, but making time to wander Babylonstoren’s fruit and vegetable garden before the day’s searing heat took hold was no problem. One of the oldest Cape Dutch farms, set at the foot of Simonsberg in Cape Town’s Franschhoek wine valley, it’s a sprawling, fantastical, technicolor utopia — positively Eden-like, with a lot more than apples to tempt you. Scarecrows made from terracotta plant pots wave from fields teeming with 300 edible crops, fat pomegranates growing alongside tangy tamarillos, willow trees swaying in the breeze.

Signs announcing roadside picnic tables once peppered America’s secondary roads and highways. Or so we call those byways now. Before the limited-access interstate system arrived in the 1960s, these roads were primary. America then was laced with a tangle of serviceable two-lane, hard-surfaced highways. Look at an old oil-company roadmap, if you can find one, to get the idea. Some roads were federal, some state, but all were emphatically open-access: get on anywhere, pull over wherever you like. They led through cities and towns, not around them; they traversed the countryside more than they cut through it. They required two-hands-on-the-wheel alertness in drivers, who got to know and respect the lay of the landscape.

The price of gasoline in California is averaging at over $6 a gallon. Inflation is 8.6 percent. The nation is reeling after yet another mass shooting, and the Democratic base is furious at their party for being caught flat-footed by the Supreme Court on abortion. How are our nation’s leaders responding? Well, Nancy Pelosi and her ample bosom are taking a waterfront stroll at a private beach club in Italy. The Speaker of the House looked well below her eighty-two years as she showcased her tanned figure in a turquoise-patterned bathing suit. Pelosi and her beau Paul are taking a break from, respectively, suspect stock trading and drink driving at the highly exclusive Alpemare Beach Club near Florence, owned by Italian opera star Andrea Bocelli.