FRANK ROSE

In the late '90s, I spent a couple of years as a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure, and I've written occasionally for the magazine since. Here are a few of my pieces from that period.

February 2008
Exploring the waterfalls, forests, parks, and many, many lakes of alpine Argentina.

Every country should have a mountain retreat. Argentina's is its Lake District, encompassing thousands of square miles of pine-covered northwestern Patagonia. There are more exotic destinations, like Tierra del Fuego or the glaciers of the country's extreme south, but none that are so easily accessible and so refreshing to behold.

August 2000

The Gulf Islands of British Columbia are not everyone's idea of paradise. There are hardly any beaches, and the water's too cold for swimming anyway. They're not even in a gulf: they were given their name because George Vancouver, who charted these waters in 1792, thought the strait that separates Vancouver Island from the mainland, was enclosed on three sides. It was decades before anyone realized it's not, but by then no one had any interest in changing the name. Even now, the islands have the air of a semi-forgotten place—which is more or less the point.

March 1999
Along the garden paths and through the forest to nights in the châteaux.

We were expecting fairy-tale châteaux, rambles through the countryside, maybe a bit of history: Joan of Arc, the Renaissance court of François I. But here we were in a dense forest, standing in a grassy circle from which radiated a half-dozen arrow-straight walkways. Perfect symmetry. Classicism amid the trees. What struck me was how magical it all was—the crazy sense of rationalism run amok. Only later did I realize that in this clearing I'd stumbled across the essence of France.

January 1998
Town meets country and ranch meets the sea.

Ever since the 1920's, when nostalgia for the days of dolce far niente took root in earnest, Santa Barbara has been the primary locus of the California myth, the vision of California as a golden land, bountiful and enchanted. The Chumash, the Native American people who settled in this area before the Spanish, had their own word for such a myth: anacapa, mirage. To succumb to Santa Barbara is to recall an idyll that never was—but not to succumb is unthinkable.

April 1997
A century ago, the American seaside resort was practically invented at Newport. Today, Rhode Island's coastal towns are still defining themselves against its strange and alluring myth.

Newport is a city of charity balls and midnight carousing, of the quietly rich and the noisily young. The Old Money feels embattled, as Old Money generally does. Things haven't been the same since the Depression, or since the Newport Bridge made the town accessible to day-trippers in 1969, or since the America's Cup was lost to the Aussies in 1983. Henry James saw the Newport of his youth as a delicate thing, "like a little bare, white open hand, with slightly parted fingers." On his return four decades later he was horrified to find it, as Louis Auchincloss wrote, "crudely crammed with gold." Were the master to hit upper Thames Street on a summer weekend today, I'm afraid he'd find it smeared with fudge.

February 1997
The cradle of America is more seductive than ever.

If you want tour buses and T-shirted tourists snapping photos in Historyland, you won't be hard put to find them. But that is not Virginia. Virginia is an ancient place where nothing is far from the soil. It is the impossibly broad rivers of the Tidewater, rising and falling with the moon. It is the red clay of the Piedmont, where Jefferson trod the Newtonian frontier. It is a formal garden at twilight, boxwood perfuming the air with the sweet scent of decay. Breathe deep, and you too can taste the faded glories of cavalierdom.