Art & Culture Hotels & Lodging Restaurants Shopping Spas Travel: Art & Culture Hotels & Lodging Restaurants Shopping Spas Travel
by maribeth
Comments Off on Mid-Atlantic Discoveries: Baltimore
Mid-Atlantic Discoveries: Baltimore
Historic Fell’s Point
When my boyfriend, Steve, asked me to accompany him to his brother’s wedding on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I didn’t expect that the trip would grow into such a big travel week (actually more like ten days). But I should have known that that would be the case since the travel writer in me itched for new experiences and, of course, it takes more doing than one flight to reach the Outer Banks from Telluride. It’s rare that I can go to a place and just BE; instead I seek to live it fully, gathering all kinds of information along the way, jotting down notes, doing what I can to find the story.
We flew from Denver to Baltimore and since I had never visited this major hub, I decided it was a must-see. It did not disappoint me in the slightest. We stayed our first night together on the east coast at The Admiral Fell Inn, a historic property on Fell’s Point, Baltimore’s original port and Maryland’s first National Historic District. (The area was spared destruction in the late sixties after a grassroots effort prevented construction of a highway plumb through this now happening neighborhood. Can you imagine?)
Once dominated by ship building and commerce, today Fell’s Point is a charming harbor side district characterized by centuries-old buildings, eclectic shops, lively taverns and cobbled streets made from bricks of granite used for ship ballast. Goods once flowed through the wharves and warehouses of Fell’s Point with as many as eighteen shipyards operating in the area, building hundreds of vessels. Many of these structures have recently been converted into fun spaces for people to live and play; others, such as the taverns, have existed for ages.
Beauty Colorado Mountain Living Spas Telluride: Beauty Colorado Mountain Living Spas Telluride
by maribeth
Comments Off on Telluride’s Beauty Boutiques
Telluride’s Beauty Boutiques
Mountain Therapy at Mountain Lodge Telluride
I love the notion of a beauty boutique. I frequented Beauté Boutique in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris for many years. It consisted of a sectioned off little space where (mostly) women had a variety of body parts attended to with the efficacy and regularity of a man’s visit to the barber shop. It was a totally no frills operation but women maintained their monthly appointments for a short menu of treatments that included waxings, pedicures and facials. “In France, all this is part of la hygiene personnelle,” la directrice once explained to me.
The approach in Telluride is not too unlike what I encountered in Paris. Here the salons and spas are considerably more inviting than my neighborhood beauty boutique in Paris but these purveyors of poufing and pampering are indeed accustomed to meeting the needs of an equally demanding clientele. In Telluride, many women remain just as committed to maintaining their beauté as the French. This sort of fervent dedication to spas and salons is somewhat unusual in America but in my Rocky Mountain town where the air is often single-digit-humidity dry and the sun beams hard and bright most days of the year, personal upkeep is more of a necessity than a luxury.
