Traditional English country-house hotels are trading their stiffness for an increasingly informal vibe.
With its thatched roof and a portico with wooden columns made from actual knobbly tree trunks, the charmingly humble Hex Cottage, on the edge of a forest in Suffolk, would have appealed to Hansel and Gretel. Inside, the décor is appropriately rustic, with rough-hewn tables and chairs, unpainted plaster walls, brick floors, and a wood-fired range that you have to keep lit if you want to have hot water. When I arrived, I felt beside the door for a light switch, only to realize that there wasn’t one. I fought a moment of panic when I realized there would also be no power supply for my laptop or cell phone.
This story is from the March 2017 edition of Travel+Leisure.
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This story is from the March 2017 edition of Travel+Leisure.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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The Luxury of Silence - Grieving a dissolved marriage, Nora Walsh seeks peace and compassion at a meditation retreat in California.
My decade-long marriage to a man I deeply love had dissolved, and I had come to the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, in the secluded hills of Marin County, north of San Francisco, to steady myself. Led by the author and meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer, the seven-day silent retreat focused on the four brahmavihāra, or Buddhist virtues: loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
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My partner and I grew up in families that didn't travel a lot, so we've always had a sense of wanderlust. Before we had kids, we traveled together, and it was life-changing-travel opened our minds to different ways of life.In 2000, Triton and I decided to have kids. At the time, my mom had terminal cancer, and we were all about connecting with family. We wanted to adopt, because we felt like there were so many children in the world who needed love and a good home. In 2002, my mom passed away, and Sophia was born two weeks later. We welcomed our second daughter, Ava, in 2004.
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I was at the end of a five-day journey that had begun in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Galle Fort, in southwestern Sri Lanka, and taken me across the southern tip of the island to the leopard reserve of Yala National Park. In between I had taken in the dramatic coastline of Weligama and had stopped for some beach time in Hiriketiya. Sri Lanka is a country I'm particularly fond of, so when I was asked to revisit to report this story, I seized the opportunity. Yes, I was dying to go back, but I'd had another motive for coming: I wanted to see if the island nation was ready to welcome international visitors again.
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