Tag: vacation

Travel for Christmas? You bet!

Big cities are exciting at Christmas! The Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto is always dressed for the season and when you can walk through after hours, the Swarovski tree gleams just for you.

It’s that time of year when everyone we know starts turning their attention to home & hearth.  Not these discerning travelers—our excitement is just starting to build as we anticipate the travel season ahead.  And that travel season begins with Christmas away.

This morning’s Globe and Mail greeted us with a travel section headlined “Six Destinations to Get Your Christmas On!” and they weren’t talking about department stores.  So, I guess we’re not alone, but people often ask us how we do it.  When everyone is running around from family obligation to grocery store to the kitchen and back, we might find ourselves in a hot tub at a hotel, basking on a pristine tropical beach or experiencing white-glove service at a wonderful restaurant with a view of the Mediterranean.  All of these are things we’ve done on Christmas Eve over the past years.

It’s been a long time since we spent Christmas at home, and we’re not going to start this year!  It all started back when our now 23-year-old son was eleven.  He was a student at the National Ballet School of Canada, a two-hour trip by plane from where we lived.  It had never occurred to us that when the students performed with the National Ballet of Canada in the annual Nutcracker that it would run over Christmas, and that the students could not go home.  So we adapted.

Ian and a Nutcracker aboard our Holland America Christmas cruise.

That first holiday season away, spending Christmas in a hotel with a child, taught us many things about ourselves and the season.  It taught us that breaking with tradition can be liberating (Christmas Eve celebrations with the family were fine, but year after year after year of the same thing can begin to wear on one).  It taught us that we could be more creative with the Christmas morning ritual under the Christmas tree opening presents (the hotel staff even helped us as we sent Ian on a scavenger hunt all over the hotel to find his Christmas present that first year).  It taught us that having Christmas dinner in a hotel is not without its upside (impeccable service, incredible food and no clean-up: what’s not to like?).  And over the years, it has taught us that experiences are far more important than presents.

After several Christmases in downtown Toronto at a hotel, Ian finally had a year when he didn’t have to perform.  Rather than spending it at home, we took a Christmas cruise (which we’ve talked about before).  The most important lesson from that trip (apart from how utterly amazing it is to spend Christmas eve on a private island in the Caribbean under a palm tree), that the presents are secondary and are only as important as the sentiment behind them.

That Christmas we had a family agreement: one present for each other person, bought after the ship sailed from Fort Lauderdale – and they had to be wrapped.   Streamlining those Christmas presents gave us time to really think about each present and each person.  It was wonderful.

Casino Square in Monte Carlo makes a magical scene dressed for Christmas.

Then there were three recent Christmases in Monte Carlo and the French Riviera.  There were so many wonderful memories that we made together as a little family.  Without the stress of the extended family activities, we have been able to focus on enjoying what the season has to offer – and on the Riviera, there was much to enjoy.  The Christmas market in Nice, the incredible decorations in Casino Square in Monte Carlo, the streets lined with trees highlighted with fake snow, the outdoor champagne bar at Christmas Land on the waterfront in Monaco, the chance to see Les Ballets de Monte Carlo performing on their home stage with Princess Caroline in the royal box, Revéillons (Christmas Eve dinner) at the Fairmont in Monte Carlo.

And now we will prepare for our upcoming Christmas in London.  We’ll take in the English National Ballet’s Nutcracker, several fabulous dinners; we’ll visit the Christmas windows on Oxford Street and visit the Christmas markets.  And the memories will be our presents.

Art takes in the Christmas ambience in Nice, France.

So, how do you get away from the expectations that your extended family has of you over the holidays (for those of you who have often thought about doing just that)?

  • Start getting them warmed up to the idea many months before.  By the time Christmas comes, they’ll think it’s always been that way.  Okay, there will be a few who will balk – but that’s only because they won’t have you to share their misery.
  • Get your little travel group to set some family ground rules. Activities? Budget?
  • Take our advice, agree to one present each.
  • Set up all the important parts in advance.  If Christmas dinner is important, get on it several months before.  You’d be amazed how many people eat out on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, not to mention how many restaurants are not open.  Hotels are your best bet.
  • Do something completely different from what you’ve done before on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.  One Christmas we went to a movie at a theater in a mall late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve.  There were exactly four other people in the theater and when the movie was over, we emerged into a completely quiet mall that had only hours before been pandemonium.  It was like taking a deep cleansing breath.
  • Don’t think that you have to go far away.  Get in the car, drive for a couple of hours, and you’re away for Christmas.
  • Remember to Skype your family at home – and don’t gloat!
Nice dressed for Christmas.

One perfect day…in London

The Renaissance St. Pancras Hotel in London used to be both an old hotel and the train station. It has been fabulously restored.

A quarter of a century seems like a long time in a life – but for these discerning travelers it seems to have flown by.  So, last week on the occasion of our 25th wedding anniversary, we spent another perfect day.  Unlike other perfect days we’ve spent, this one was not on the water.  It was determinedly on land – in London.

We awoke to a wonderfully sunny and crisp autumn day – just the way a perfect fall day ought to be – with only a vague notion of how the day would progress. We only knew how we would cap it off in the end – we’ll get to that.  So, we did what we usually do when we visit a city: we walked.

Staying at the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, we had little choice: as our son who now lives in London remarked, it’s not really close to anything.  But for us that is not a shortcoming.  The hotel is a remarkable architectural treat in itself, with a rich history, and when you walk through the Booking Room Restaurant & Bar and exit through the back door, you find yourself on the platform where the Eurostar trains leave for Paris & Brussels.

That morning we headed out toward Regent’s Park (which is but a five minute walk away – who says the hotel isn’t close to anything?).  What a beautiful oasis in the city – one of many.  London is dotted with these green spaces, a fact that often surprises people whose only view of London has been of traffic jams and hordes of ogling tourists as shown on the nightly news.  We enjoyed our walk and just kept going into the heart of down town, browsing the many wonderful shops along the way.

Art strolling in Regent’s Park, London.

Eventually it was time for a late lunch.  It’s often best in our view to wait until the weekday office crowd has returned to their desks to take fuller advantage of restaurants.  In the past when we have visited London we have concluded that we don’t go there for the food – but this trip seemed different somehow.  Every restaurant we had chosen in the days leading up to our anniversary had proved our previous experience to be so wrong.  And this time was no different.

In Swallow Street just off Regent Street, we discovered Bentley’s Oyster Bar.  With options that included the oyster bar itself, an outside dining space and an upstairs dining room (a bit more formal, said the hostess), the restaurant had a wonderful British ambience, replete with attentive, professional wait staff and fabulously prepared and presented food.  We opted for the ‘more formal’ dining experience upstairs and found ourselves surrounded not by tourists, but by well-dressed business types.  It was wonderful.  It also reinforced for us one of our rules of traveling: always dress comfortably but well: you never know where you might end up.  We may not have been dressed as we would for a formal presentation at work, but we comported ourselves quite well, thank-you very much.  Let that be a lesson to any travelers who favor those god-awful, hulking white sneakers and (we can hardly bring ourselves to say it) the fanny pack!

Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill in London

We treated ourselves to their wonderful seafood, a bottle of reasonably-priced Sancerre from France and even their trifle with mascarpone, and then returned to the street to continue our wander to soak in the London ambience.

Returning to the Renaissance, we made our way into the Chambers Club which has to be the most impressive concierge lounge among the Marriott properties.  It is massive, well-staffed, well-victualed and does not charge for wine.  We were in the mood for a few hot appetizers and a glass (or two) of their cold sauvignon blanc on offer.  We were not planning to eat until after the evening’s entertainment.

We changed and made our way to the west end in time for the 7:30 curtain of the new production of Cabaret which had officially opened with press night just the evening before.  We were eight rows back, dead center when Britain’s first Pop Idol, and platinum British recording artist Will Young emerged from the “O” in “Wilkommen” as the emcee in this astounding production.  Of course, our interest was a bit more personal.

The marquee at the Savoy Theatre.

Several minutes later, we spotted him – Hans was the character’s name – and he was very familiar to us since we’ve been watching him perform since he was three years old.  It was our 23-year-old son Ian making his west end debut, and it was the most unique and wonderful way to celebrate 25 years of marriage.  We congratulated ourselves on having “done good” as they say.

The cast poster outside the Savoy Theatre.

We capped off the day with a late dinner at Café des Amis just off Covent Garden with Ian & Jeremy – another west end musical theater veteran, and returned to our hotel via the tube. We are now the proud owners of London Underground ‘Oyster Cards’ which we intend to use often and soon!

All the world’s a stage: Travel and theater do mix

The Discerning Travelers off to the ballet in Monte Carlo.

We’re counting down now – to London, that is.  In about 10 days we’re off to celebrate two very important milestones in the lives of the Discerning Travelers.

On October 10 we’ll spend our 25th wedding anniversary (OK, we weren’t exactly ingénues when we married!) at a very special theatrical performance.  When you have offspring who are performers (and we have two), there are many memorable performances through the years, but this one is especially poignant.  Our now 23-year-old ballet dancer son has moved on – from Monte Carlo to London – to revisit the reason he started dancing in the first place.  He’s a triple-threat musical theater performer.  No longer even a wannabe performer, he is currently touring the UK in the newest remount of Cabaret starring pop idol Will Young, a production that opens in London’s West End at the Savoy Theatre on October 3.  And on October 10 we’ll celebrate our son’s debut and 25 years of wonderful marriage.  We’ll be having a glass or two of champagne late that evening for sure!

This planning has made us consider the joys of taking the time to see theatre productions when traveling.  We can’t now remember the first time we attended a theatrical performance when away, but it was probably Cats in New York on Broadway (the US equivalent to London’s famed West End).

We’ve had a number of very memorable experiences.  The first was on a trip in 2006 to London.  It was spring break and we had son Ian with us.  Seventeen-years old at the time, he was at the National Ballet School (Canada) and of course we had to plan on taking in a number of performances.  Usually when we travel we don’t ever book theater tickets of any kind for the first day or night of arrival – you can never tell when you’ll be delayed and these tickets can be astronomically expensive.  This time we took a chance, though.  After applying some adolescent persuasion to his parents, Ian convinced us that we had to see famed French ballerina Sylvie Guillem in the Royal Ballet’s production of Romeo & Juliet at Covent Garden.  The only hitch was that her very last performance was the evening that we arrived on an overnight flight very early that morning.

Ian takes in the beautiful interior of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in London.

Our usual approach to dealing with potential jet lag is to immediately get ourselves on the new time zone and carry on through the day as normally as possible, going to bed fairly early so that we can make up for lost sleep (no matter how much we spend on airline tickets to have space and flat-out beds, sleeping is usually a fleeting dream).  If we were going to experience this R & J, however, we’d have to prop our eyes open for some hours that night – which we did.

What a terrific experience – but it will go down in our family history as the time we coined the phrase “DTP” – in other words, “drink the poison.”  This particular production of R & J is excruciating for one particular scene at the very end of the ballet.  Romeo takes so long to decide to “drink the poison” as he writhes in the pain of seeing his Juliet dead (at least he believes she’s dead – we all know the sordid story).  All we could think of as we watched him on stage was, “For the love of God, Romeo, just drink the poison and put us out of our misery.  We all know how this ends!”   Well, of course he did drink it, he died, Juliet woke up, writhed in anguish and stabbed herself to death.  Then we could sleep!

Ian at 17 in front of the Victoria Palace Theatre in London where we saw Billy Elliott. In just over a week he’ll make his own West End debut just down the road at the Savoy Theatre.

Over the years we’ve seen musicals like Thoroughly Modern Millie and Wicked in New York; Billy Elliott and Phantom of the Opera in London (actually we’ve seen Phantom several different places), and its sequel Love Never Dies.  We’ve seen The Thirty Nine Steps in London (highly recommend that one), and ballets galore.  One of the most memorable for us was the Matthew Bourne rendition of Swan Lake that we happened upon when we arrived in New York last year.  As we sat in the bar at the Renaissance Times Square where we were staying, we noticed a very large billboard outside the window advertising this production, and it was in town for only a few days while were  were there.  This production is the one that Billy Elliott is in during the final frames of the movie and casts men as the swans.  We had to see it.

We approached the concierge and asked him if it might be possible to procure tickets.  With a twinkle in his eye, he told us that “anything is possible.”  And so he did.  But at the same time, we also learned that the concierges in New York hotels have access to online coupons that you can use for same-day tickets at the theaters thus avoiding that horrible, long line at the TKTS both in Times Square.  It was worth every cent we paid.

Of course, we can’t forget all of the ballets we have seen in Monte Carlo when Ian danced there for three years.  That included world premieres of Scheherazade on New Year’s Eve 2010, and last year’s new Swan Lake.   And then we followed the company to Los Angeles last year and saw them on tour.

Theater experiences when traveling are entertaining and illuminating for more than just experiencing the production itself.  The theater buildings themselves are so very interesting.  The old (Covent Garden in London,  The Garnier in the Casino building in Monte Carlo, most Broadway and West End theaters), the new (The Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo, the Marquis on Broadway, the Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts in Orange County California – so impressive).

Then of course there is the audience.  Audiences around the world are also interestingly different.  Ask anyone who has performed in live theater of dance in different countries and they’ll tell you that the response of the audience is very cultural.  In some countries, at a ballet, there is no applause whatsoever between scenes or at the end of specific performances – the applause comes at the end of the act.  This can be unnerving for audience members who are used to applauding whenever impressed by a performance, and you can just imagine what the performers must be thinking.  In some places, a standing ovation is extremely uncommon, saved for only the most astonishing performances; in other places, it seems any performance short of god-awful inspires the audience members to jump to their feet.  You just have to go along with the prevailing cultural response.

Les Ballets de Monte Carlo takes a bow at the end of the world premiere of Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Swan Lake at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo in late 2011.

We usually buy our most important theater tickets online before we leave to avoid disappointment.  Often these days you can simply print off the ticket and the bar code is right there, like an online boarding pass.  If you have time, you can have the tickets mailed, but that can be dicey if you don’t leave enough time.  You can also pick them up at the theater when you get there – but remember to take with you some identification and the credit card you used to purchase online.  And remember to book it into your day’s plans unless you want to wait in that line at the theater before the performance.

However you buy your tickets, just do it.  It will be one of the most memorable parts of your travel experiences.

Cruise ships and their photographers: It can be fun to use them!

The “boarding portrait”: More than a bit on the tacky side, but as you can see, on that occasion we did buy it!

If you have ever been on a cruise then you know what we’re talking about: cruise lines hire photographers to take photos of practically everything and everybody.  Opinions on these photographers seem to fall into one of two camps:

  • Those who love them and step into camera range at every opportunity;
  • Those who loathe them and wish they would just go away.

But even within these two groups, the extent to which cruisers buy the photos varies considerably.  Some of those who love to have their picture taken never actually buy them; at the same time there are those who complain but who do buy the pictures.

We can still remember our very first encounter with a cruise-line photographer.  We had just checked into our cruise aboard the Carnival Triumph with our then ten-year-old son.  We had our key cards in hand and were about to walk across the gangway to board, but before we were ‘permitted’ to do so, we (and everyone else in the line) had to stop  behind a life preserver emblazoned with the ship’s name and the Carnival logos to have our picture taken.  We had just flown from Toronto and looked a bit dazed – as did everyone else getting their boarding photo taken.  At that point we had no idea where, or if, we would ever see that photo.  It wasn’t long, however, before we learned about the photo gallery on board cruise ships.  No, these are not galleries of professional, artistic photographs for our viewing pleasure.  These galleries have portable, foldable walls that come out every evening to display all of the photos that the onboard photographers have taken that day – and some of them are a sight to see!

Oh so tacky: the roving dining room photographer provides us with a reminder of our Christmas dinner on Holland America’s Zuiderdam. But we bought again!

As that first cruise progressed we found ourselves accosted by photographers in all manner of locations.  Over the years we’ve learned that cruise ship photographers will inevitably take your picture in the following places and at the following times:

  • When you are boarding on the first day.
  • At the end of the gangway every single solitary time you disembark at a port (this happens much less in Europe we might add, all the time in the Caribbean).
  • Sometimes at the end of the pier with the ship in the background when you arrive in a port (this is a newer incarnation).
  • On your way to and/or from dinner on formal nights.  They will offer atrium and/or grand staircase backgrounds or those weird phony ones like in front of the Titanic staircase. On these nights the photographers will inevitably tell you how to stand, where to put your arms etc. and some of this looks very odd.  We often argue with them;  we usually win, but it isn’t easy and they have told us that they are instructed to do this.
  • During dinner with or without your dining companions in the shot.
A prime example of a fake background on semi-formal night aboard the Celebrity Century where we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary a few years ago.

Some time the next day, these will all appear on the walls of the ship’s photo gallery.  You can buy them or ditch them – it’s up to you.  Ten cruises later, and we’re here to tell you that you need to take control of your photo experience on board – and we’re delighted to be able to tell you that as you become more discerning in your travel choices and graduate to the high-end cruise lines, there will no longer be any photographers.  That being said, it can be a lot of fun if you take control of the experience.

Based on our personal experiences on a variety of cruise lines (Carnival, thankfully only once, Holland American we believe three times, several times on Celebrity – all of that before Regent and Silversea who have wisely ditched their photographers), we have some advice for making the best use of the service.

  • Think of this as an opportunity for that really nice, formal family or individual portrait.  Put yourself in front of every photographer whose backdrop you like on formal nights.  You don’t have to pay a sitting fee as you would if you did this with a photographer at home.  Then when you see the ones you like the next day, you simply buy them.  We recommend waiting until the end of the cruise before making a final decision, unless you are convinced that you want the one from the first night.  These are usually 8 X 10’s and cost around $20.00 each.
  • Buy only the photos you really love or think are very fun!
  • Especially if you have children or it’s a special occasion, take advantage of the opportunity for a group photo somewhere fun – like at the end of the gangway in the Bahamas or Jamaica.  Work the cost into your on-board budget in advance if you need to.
  • Just say no – and be firm – if you do not want your photo taken, especially at the end of the gangway at every port.  This is the place where it becomes tired fastest in our view.  Do you really want your photo with a very large, stuffed lobster?  Last winter as we walked along the pier from the Silver Spirit (which wisely does not employ these photographers) in St. Martin we were accosted by a ship’s photographer – from an NCL ship that was on the other side of the pier.  We demurred, he insisted.  We said no, he cajoled.  We then pointed to the Silversea ship and he let us go.  Be very firm.
  • When you are really sick of the whole idea, switch to an ultra-luxury line.  No one will ever accost you again!
A family portrait aboard Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 last summer. It’s the only way for the three of us to get a professional portrait since we live on a different continent than our son. A great opportunity when we’re all dressed up.