In the natural wonderland of northern Vermont, a snowshoe novice finds a whole new reason to love winter in New England.
You have to strut!” my girlfriend, Michelle, hollered at me from the bottom of the hill, pointing at her hips and waving her ski poles around. How had she gotten down there so quickly? We were deep in Vermont’s snowbound woods, on a mountain at Mad River Glen. Everything was white and icy, all slumbering trees and prehistoric boulders. The only sound consisted of a rusty leaf rattling between two branches—and our voices echoing through the frosty air.
“Strut?” I yelled back, still trying to get the hang of going downhill on the tech-y, lightweight aluminum snowshoes we’d rented. “Like a model on a catwalk,” she said, shimmying encouragingly. Easy for her to say, radiating glamour in her Jackie O. sunglasses. The only way I could figure out how to descend the hillside was to let the tail end of the frame touch down first, then slide forward until the crampons—the fanged grip on the snowshoes’ bottom—kicked in and provided some traction. This lurching method meant I had to lean back while executing high, wide knee lifts, resulting in a form that wasn’t so much Gigi Hadid as Robert Crumb’s Keep on Truckin’ character—wearing snow pants.
Natural though I wasn’t, I still loved my first grown-up snowshoeing hike. As soon as we set off on the Mad River Glen trail, we were immediately ensconced in the Vermont wilderness. To snowshoe is to experience the landscape from within in a way you never can when you’re zooming down groomed slopes, or even bushwhacking off-trail. A snowshoer is simply one with the elements, tramping through the frozen countryside in a state of calm exhilaration.
Bu hikaye Travel+Leisure dergisinin December 2016 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Travel+Leisure dergisinin December 2016 sayısından alınmıştır.
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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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