Outdoor Art Adventures

Published in the April 2010 issue of Boston Parents Paper

Not all art lives inside museums and galleries. Wonderful, whimsical pieces – perfect for exploring with children – pepper parks, playgrounds and public places throughout Greater Boston. Now that spring is here, consider exploring these destinations that have creations to delight all ages.

Art-Filled Acres
DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln features contemporary art indoors and out. Says DeCordova's Victoria Glazomitsky, “Kids and families love the park. It gives little ones 35 acres to run around on while providing a creative backdrop that lends itself to family discussions.” The changing exhibition of about 75 works includes many for kids to enjoy – such as Doug Kornfeld’s outsized Ozymandias figure and Paul Matisse’s xylophone-like Musical Fence. The museum offers many family programs including a kid-friendly Sculpture Park audio tour.
DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln; 781-259-8355; http://www.decordova.org/. Park open daily dawn to dusk, admission charged during museum hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 10am – 5pm. Adults, $12; kids ages 6-12, $8; kids ages 5 and under, free.

Water Works
Enjoy sea and city views as you discover art along Boston’s Harborwalk, a public path that runs along or near the water’s edge from East Boston to Dorchester. About 38 of the Harborwalk’s planned 47 miles are completed, with plenty of long stretches perfect for family outings. Pick a route from the Harborwalk Web site, pack a picnic, and set off to find delightful works, including marine animal sculptures, fish-shaped benches and fanciful aluminum panels in South Boston’s Eastport Park. There are also mosaic walls and a spiral tower in Charlestown’s Paul Revere Park and eye-catching, large-scale sculpture at Arts on the Point on the UMASS Boston campus.
Boston Harborwalk, www.bostonharborwalk.com/art.

Outdoor Gallery in Cambridge
The Cambridge Arts Council (CAC) has helped turn Cambridge into a giant gallery of accessible art, much of it outdoors. “Because we serve the public, all of our projects are for a multigenerational audience,” says the CAC’s Lillian Hsu. There are interesting works in a variety of media all over the city, with lots of engaging installations to make kids smile. Check out Danehy Park’s half-mile-long “glassphalt” path by artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Nancy Selvage’s Waterwall in Trolley Square. The exteriors of public buildings, restaurants and stores host vibrant murals like Crossroads, Crosswinds and Potluck that celebrate the city’s diversity.
Cambridge Arts Council, 344 Broadway, Cambridge; 617-349-4389; http://www.cambridgema.gov/~cac/ .

Cemetery Sculpture
Don’t get spooked. Founded in 1848 as a park and arboretum as well as a burial ground, Jamaica Plain’s Forest Hills Cemetery offers a 250-acre oasis of paths, trees, and a lake alive with frogs and turtles. It’s also home to an extraordinary sculpture collection. In addition to elaborate Victorian grave art, there’s a Sculpture Path of contemporary pieces that “children and families enjoy exploring,” says Forest Hills Trust’s Cecily Miller. Favorite pieces include interactive works like Mitch Ryerson’s Poetry Chairs, inscribed with poetry written by teens, and Andrea Thompson’s Knock on Wood, with knockers that make different sounds. Forest Hills’s summer camps host more than 800 children, and July’s Lantern Festival draws people of all ages for Japanese drumming, dancing and the sunset launching of lanterns across the lake.
Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Ave., Boston; 617-524-0128; www.foresthillstrust.org.

The Universal Language of Pigeon

Published in HCI Books' The Ultimate Bird Lover. Book publication date February 2010

Arming your kids with corn and sending them into a flock of pigeons is a surefire way to connect with locals when you travel. Pigeons swoop, crowds gather, international relations ensue. You may not speak the locals’ language, but if they’ve got pigeons and you’ve got kids, you’ve got a lingua franca.

Some of my family’s favorite travel memories involve pigeons. In cities all over the world we’ve used the birds to make connections with people.

Like the bevy of Italian models who interrupted a photo shoot in Venice’s Piazza San Marco to marvel at my then nine-year-old son, Adam, who, by throwing the corn straight up but not out, made the top of his head the site of multiple pigeon landings. The models called him “PEE-jin boy” and took pictures before giving him corn-throwing advice. Italians speak with their hands, and it was interesting to watch a half-dozen drop-dead gorgeous women mime effective grain-tossing techniques to a little boy.

Nearby, our daughter, Dana, then six and already a skilled animal whisperer, had attracted her own fans. She laid a trail of corn and, by repeatedly cooing, “Yo, whitey, my man,” coaxed San Marco’s sole albino pigeon to walk a straight line, pecking each piece as he went, right into her hands.

The summer before he started school I took Adam to Bolivia. He liked the boat ride across Lake Titicaca and thought “Andy’s mountains” were cool. But what he most enjoyed was just hanging out in the capital, La Paz. He liked having his shoes shined by teenage boys who nodded earnestly while he explained the powers of the action figures he carried in his pockets, and he liked eating cotton candy in Plaza Murillo, a popular public space and heart of the city.

One sunny Sunday in the plaza, anchored by grand government buildings and a neo-classical cathedral, Adam spied a boy about his age sitting on a bench with his parents watching the pigeons gathered in the center of the square. We knew what to do.

I bought seven bags of corn from a vendor, gave Adam one, and sent him into the flock. He threw a handful into the air and the pigeons went loco, whirling to get the grain. As they swarmed around Adam’s feet, the little boy stood up and clapped.

I called Adam over and gave him two bags of corn. He went to the boy and offered him one. Then they ventured, the little American in a Pokemon windbreaker and the little Bolivian in a sweatsuit of red, yellow and green, the colors of the Bolivian flag, into the middle of the plaza, where they threw corn, dodged dive-bombing pigeons and laughed together from the bottom of their bellies.

After four more bags of corn had been happily tossed and consumed, the boy ran to his parents’ bench and returned to Adam with a soccer ball. The parents motioned to me to join them and asked if Adam could play for a while.

While the new friends kicked the ball for an hour, the parents and I, mixing simple Spanish and English, talked about life in our respective countries and about the joys and challenges of raising a family. There was little difference between their experiences and hopes and my own.

And, looking at our sons, running and grinning and enjoying the day and each other, we knew there wasn’t much difference between them, either.

Get Your Family Into the Cosmos: Great Places to Stargaze

Published in the October 2009 issue of Boston Parents Paper



We’re all shining stars. Really.

That bright star your family contemplated on your summer camping trip? You’re made from bits of one just like it says renowned astronomer Phil Plait. In a video for the British website www.whyscience.co.uk, a collection of thoughts on why science is so important, Plait uses astronomy to show that "science is everything, and it's everywhere, and it's you."

"The iron in your blood and calcium in your bones were created in a star that blew up five billion years ago, seeded a gas cloud with elements, and these elements formed – you," Plait says in the video. "That’s science.”

And that's bound to captivate the imaginations of your kids.

Children are tomorrow’s scientists and engineers. The more skilled they are in the process of wondering why -- the basic tenet of science exploration -- the brighter that future will be.

Astronomy is the perfect science for piquing curiosity and sparking critical thinking. It’s beautiful and mysterious. It’s one of the easiest sciences to investigate, requiring only eyes and, as interest grows, simple optical equipment. And it’s satisfying. Said Joe Doyle, curator of the Bridgewater State College Observatory, “Astronomy is a personal journey, since you’re alone at the eyepiece. You experience the universe through your own eyes and feel a sense of accomplishment when you find an object. The chance of discovery, which is very real, is thrilling.”

Exploring astronomy can make for some unique family outings. Massachusetts is home to many local public stargazing sites -- places where you can view our galaxy and beyond with precision equipment and expert guidance. Both Doyle and Tony Houser, director of the Wheaton College Observatory in Norton, said visitors are awed by magnified views of Saturn and its rings, Jupiter and its moons, and our Moon and its craters. Houser said the Andromeda Galaxy, Ring Nebula, Pleiades star cluster and naked eye objects like satellites, meteors and shooting stars also pack “a big wow factor.”

Check out one or more of the observatories described here and let skilled enthusiasts guide your kids through the universe -- perhaps unleashing their inner scientist. Just remember that stellar viewing requires clear weather, and viewing schedules change, so check an observatory’s website or information line before blasting off for your trip to the cosmos.

College Observatories
Wheaton, Bridgewater, Salem State, Merrimack and Boston University are among the area colleges that share their telescopes with the public on scheduled open viewing nights or by special arrangement. The observatories, some boasting platoons of equipment and others one or two powerful reflectors, are usually manned by physics instructors or passionate students.

Depending on the venue, you may be scanning the heavens from the roof of a science building or from inside a structure whose dome retracts to reveal the night sky. When groups of very young visitors are scheduled, Wheaton even sets up a portable, inflatable planetarium. “The kids – and their parents – enjoy crawling through the dark tunnel to get into the dome, and we have a star projector to tell stories and show star motion in the sky,” said director Houser. Find schedules and visitor information at the observatories’ websites: wheatoncollege.edu/Acad/Astronomy; bridgew.edu/Observatory; nsaac.org/collins.shtml; merrimack.edu/community/Observatory; bu.edu/astronomy/facilities/observatory.html.

Clay Center for Science and Technology
A five-story, state-of-the-art learning center in Brookline operated by the Dexter and Southfield schools, the Clay Center (claycenter.org; 617-522-5544) includes an observatory housing seven professional-grade telescopes. During fall and spring Clay holds weekly public telescope nights for facilitated exploration of planets, stars, the Moon and other celestial surprises. Pre-registration is appreciated. When you’re not gazing upward, enjoy panoramic views of Boston from the observation decks, wander through fiber optic versions of the constellations in the Stars Courtyard and use the Planetary Scales to see what you’d weigh on Mars.

Gilliland Observatory
Most families are familiar with the spectacular Charles Hayden Planetarium at Boston’s Museum of Science. Less well known but just as exciting (on a clear night) is the Gilliland Observatory (mos.org; 617-589-0267), nestled on the roof of the museum’s parking garage. At 8:30 on Friday nights, museum staff invite the public to step up to Gilliland’s powerful Celestron telescope and observe the night sky’s current offerings. Before heading to the observatory, watch the 7 PM planetarium screening of The Sky Tonight, a film that helps you and your kids better appreciate what you’ll see up on the roof.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)
The CfA (cfa.harvard.edu; 617-495-7461) sponsors observatory nights the third Thursday of each month, except in summer. Starry-eyed future scientists can learn a lot from this Harvard University center. Observatory nights begin with a non-technical lecture (intended for high schoolers and older, but children are welcome) and end with telescopic viewing from the observatory roof. The CfA also runs special events like a Kids Academy and Sci-Fi movie nights. For details check the center’s website, which has a kid-friendly, content-rich “Fun Things To Do and See” section.

Astronomy Groups and Clubs
In addition to regular meetings, at which potential new members are welcome, groups like the South Shore Astronomical Society (SSASTROS.org), North Shore Amateur Astronomy Club (NSAAC.org) and Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston (ATMOB.org) share their astronomical knowledge in various ways.

If your child’s school or scout troop would like to hold a star party to investigate and celebrate the abundant wonder of deep space, both ATMOB and NSAAC can provide support and expertise. SSASTROS invites the public to join its frequent Saturday night observing sessions in Norwell’s Centennial Field. Bring the telescope that’s been sitting in your garage and they’ll teach you how to use it, or get equipment advice if you’re considering a purchase. NSAAC helps run the public viewing nights at Salem State and Merrimack College, and its just-launched Young Astronomers Program features an essay contest for 4th- through 8th-graders, with cool equipment as prizes. To view the heavens with NSAAC members, join their Friday and Saturday viewing nights at Veasey Memorial Park in Groveland.

Tips for Parents of Would-Be Stargazers

Local astronomy experts offer these suggestions for sparking a child's interest in the heavens:

Use a laser pointer to guide young eyes through the night sky

Start with a familiar object like the Moon, and look for things kids can relate to, like large craters or the Apollo landing site

Use binoculars, easy and inexpensive, to effectively view many objects

For a good first telescope, consider the $200 Orion Starblast

Experience the excitement and camaraderie of gatherings scheduled around major events like meteor showers

Let kids click their way through the cosmos on websites like NASA.gov, HubbleSite.org and KidsAstronomy.com

Use star charts, like the downloadable tools at Stellarium.org, to identify what’s in your sky tonight

Boston By Boat

Published in the July 2009 issue of Baystate Parent


Boston By Boat


From craft shaped like swans to machines tricked out like monster fish, Boston is home to a flotilla of vessels that ply the city’s waterways. With peaceful ponds, major river, scenic harbor and island-studded open ocean, Boston offers lots of ways to have family fun afloat:

Swan Boats: A 15-minute ride that’s a 130-year-old tradition. Drivers ease elegant paddleboats around the tree-lined lagoon in Boston Public Garden, America’s first botanical garden. http://www.swanboats.com/; 617-522-1966; $2.75 adults, $1.50 child.

Boston Harbor Cruises: From Long Wharf near the New England Aquarium, this company offers a cruise menu for all tastes, including whale watches, fast ferries to Cape Cod’s Provincetown and harbor cruises that take in lighthouses, the skyline and historical sights. Or ride Codzilla, a 2,800 horsepower beast with fish fangs painted on the hull that flies through the sea at 40 mph, music blaring. Screaming encouraged. http://www.bostonharborcruises.com/; 617-227-4321; prices vary.

Harbor Islands Ferries: From Long Wharf, Pier 10 in South Boston and from three suburban docks south of the city, ferries and water shuttles take you to some of the 34 islands that make up the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area. Georges Island, with its 19th-century Fort Warren, and Spectacle Island, which offers swimming, hiking trails and marvelous views of the Boston skyline, are among the most popular and accessible. http://www.bostonislands.org/; 617-223-8666; prices vary.

Duck Tours: Travel the streets of Boston in a restored World War II-era amphibious vehicle while a ConDucktor narrates, then “splashdown” into the Charles River. Boston sits on one riverbank and Cambridge on the other. 80-minute tour departs from both the Museum of Science and Prudential Center. http://www.bostonducktours.com/; 617-267-DUCK; $29.95 adults, $20 child.

Tall Ships Poincare and Formidable: The crew serves bottled water and ginger snaps, but you’re welcome to bring your own provisions and libations aboard these identical 50-foot square-rigged sailing vessels that accommodate 40 passengers on a two-hour tour of Boston harbor. Depart from Long Wharf’s Boston Waterfront Marina. http://www.tallshipformidable.com/; 617-262-1119; $25 adult, $10 child.

Entertainment Cruises: Cruise the inner harbor from Castle Island to Old Ironsides while enjoying food, drink and dancing. Spirit of Boston offers a variety of sailings at different times of day, departing from the World Trade Center in Boston’s Seaport District. http://www.spiritofboston.com/; 866-310-2469; prices vary.

Charles Riverboat Tours: Float down the Charles, Boston on one side and Cambridge on the other, taking in sights like the Longfellow Bridge, Beacon Hill and the golden-domed State House, the Esplanade, Back Bay, and the campuses and boathouses of MIT, Harvard and Boston University. Hour-long tour departs from the Cambridgeside Galleria. http://www.charlesriverboat.com/; 617-621-3001. $14 adult, $7 child. Also offers harbor cruises.

Charles River Canoe and Kayak: Paddle the Charles on your own steam. Pick up your hourly or daily canoe, kayak or rowboat rental at Artesani Park in Allston and explore a nine-mile stretch of the Charles River Basin. Guided tours available. Open Thurs.-Sun. in season. http://www.paddleboston.com/; 617-462-2513. Kayak/canoe rentals about $15/hour or $60/day.

Jamaica Pond: Rent a sailboat or rowboat from the boathouse at this 68-acre pond, a glacier-carved kettle depression and a jewel in the F.L. Olmsted-designed Emerald Necklace of Boston parkland. http://www.jamaicapond.com/; 617-522-5061. Rowboats $10/hour, sailboats $15/hour.

Affordable Europe: Travel Tips for the Budget Conscious

Published in the Spring 2009 issue of Tufts Magazine

Affordable Europe
Travel tips for the budget conscious

Skip summer. Everything costs less in the iffy weather of off-season. Yet a great place is a great place year-round. An October walk on Spain's Mediterranean beaches calls for a sweatshirt, but the sun's still warm enough to let you linger over wine and grilled fish at al fresco cafes. Germany in December is chilly, but it's alive with holiday lights and ornament shops. And a Scottish February's gray sky is the perfect backdrop for ancient castle ruins.

Fly frugal. If the major airlines' off-peak prices are too high, investigate economical carriers like Icelandair and Aer Lingus. Travel midweek. Check airlines and tour companies for air/hotel bundles, often cheaper than airfares alone. Browse discounted packages at sites like Affordabletours.com. Then be ready to combine air travel with other transportation options. Say you've found a cheap flight to London but are headed elsewhere. Grab the flight, then travel to your destination by train, bus, ferry or low-cost intra-Europe airlines like Ryanair or easyJet.

Hotel hunt. Sites like Expedia and Orbitz list some budget accommodations, but a little digging can uncover many more two- and three-star hotels. Start at your destination's official tourism site, which will likely have an expansive list of accommodations, often with links to their websites.

Make contact. Email each hotel you're interested in. Explain that you're looking for budget accommodation for specific dates, and ask for the best rate. If you can write a few words in your potential host's language, do. Bypassing a booking service gives the hotel an opportunity to actively compete for your business and fill a room that might otherwise go empty. And the personal contact can yield surprise perks like a welcome gift, view or upgrade.

Dine midday. Make luscious lunches your day's major culinary event; for dinner, grab something quick or buy groceries and eat in. Eating your main meal in the afternoon lets you indulge inexpensively in local cuisine -- and get enough sleep for sightseeing: European dinnertime is typically nine or ten.

Natchez: A Fish Tale

Published in Country Roads Magazine, April 2009



Natchez: A Fish Tale
A magical Mississippi moment on a cross-country trek

by Lori Hein

When we rolled into Mississippi a few years back, my kids and I were a thousand miles into a summer-long journey across America. Since leaving our Boston home, we’d taken small routes instead of interstates and spent our time in places where people lived and worked, played and worshiped. Our trip thus far had been a connect-the-dots of a hundred proud downtowns.

When we got to Natchez, we sized it up as a good place to fish, and we drove to Bailey Park early one morning so Adam could spend some quality river time before the day’s high heat and humidity set in. He looked under the seat for his rod and tackle box. “Where are they, mom? I gave them to you to hold.”

So he did, back in Vicksburg, where I’d laid them down to take a picture. I felt worse than bad. Adam had been looking forward to this. Up in town, there was a K-Mart next to the Natchez Market, where the day before we’d spent a few fun minutes watching red plastic shopping carts roll through the downhill-sloping parking lot and bump into shoppers’ cars. I told Adam I’d replace his equipment as soon as K-Mart opened. But that was over an hour away, and I had ruined this perfect fishing morning. Adam was decent about not rubbing it in but did utilize his keen eye for opportunity: “Since I’m so devastated, can I have a root beer for breakfast?”

Two men in a pickup backed down the cement boat ramp pushing a Bass Tracker. “How you doin’ today?” asked the driver.

I pointed at Adam, sucking down his 7 am root beer. “Well, right now we’re trying to get over the fact that mom left his fishing rod in a park back in Vicksburg.”

John and Mac immediately became everything good about Mississippi that we needed to know. Our chance meeting meant they couldn’t solve the rod problem (“If I’d a known these kids was gonna be here, we’d a brought some rods – Mac’s got about ten,” sighed John), but they found other ways to show the kids a fine Mississippi River time.

They hoisted Adam, then 13, and his sister Dana, 10, into the bass boat and opened coolers holding yesterday’s catch. Three catfish, a whiskered one and two flatheads, each about six pounds, sat on ice. They looked huge to me, but Mac dismissed them as small, unprofitable fry he hoped he’d be able to sell. “The best eatin’ catfish are about eight to nine pounds. Size matters. Caught a seventy-six-pounder once. Nobody’d buy it. Bad eatin’. Too much fat.”

Then Mac pointed to a spot in the Mississippi and shared “evidence” of an alleged 110-pound flathead on the loose, a monster capable of turning the who-eats-whom tables. “Right out there. Eat a man whole.” As Adam listened to the fish tales, I imagined him wanting to get to K-Mart as soon as possible to retool so he could reel in one of these leviathans. And he probably envisioned me emptying the cartop carrier and filling it with ice so we could haul the thing around for a while.

Mac did most of the talking while John got ready to launch. He was crossing to Vidalia on the Louisiana side to check some catfish lines he’d sunk near a spot where a new hotel was going up, and he offered to take us along for the ride. It was tempting to go out on the Father of Waters and watch a Natchez fisherman at work.

But I couldn’t. While intuition sounded the all clear, on this trip I needed to err on the side of too much caution when it came to safety. Traveling alone with the kids required keeping my guard up, even if it meant missing some experiences. I had a fitting but truthful excuse.

“Thank you, but I’m afraid of the water.” Mac, either sharp, sympathetic or both, said he understood my fear. “So’s John’s girlfriend. She won’t get in the boat.” He paused, lowered his head, then added, “This river’s taken a lot of my friends.”

But he loved it. “I been on every inch of her. I’ve camped on all these sandbars, me and my wife. We got a generator and TV.”

The signature steel bridge that connects Natchez with Vidalia began to shimmer with heat as the sun assumed its position over the Mississippi. Mac and John told us that about four years back the water level was so low you could stand on the bridge and look down on a pile of cars and trucks, dumped into the river when a barge hit the bridge in 1945. “River’s got stories,” said Mac.

By now, John had an overdue date with some catfish lines, and K-Mart was open and ready to sell us new fishing gear. We shook hands. John looked at Adam. “Take care of your mama.”

We felt happy as we drove away. The whole day and the whole country were ahead, and everything we’d left behind was good. “Just think, Adam. Some kid in Vicksburg is catching catfish right now.” Adam smiled. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”



Lori Hein is the author of Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America (from which this story is adapted). Her freelance work has appeared in such publications as the Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer. Visit her at LoriHein.com or her world travel blog, RibbonsofHighway.blogspot.com.

Travel/parenting: New York For Families: The Big Apple Shines at Holiday Time

This article was published in The Dabbling Mum ezine in December 2008


New York For Families: The Big Apple Shines at Holiday Time
by Lori Hein

A frosty afternoon at Central Park’s Wollman Rink; time for the annual showdown. My kids lace up their rental skates and take off around the icy oval, Adam in front and determined to beat his sister, Dana, who’s threatening mightily from behind. My husband and I sip hot chocolate and take in the contest―and the Manhattan skyline rising beyond the park’s edges―from spectator benches.

We go to New York often, and some of our best visits have been in that crisp period between Thanksgiving and New Year when the city sparkles with holiday spirit. It’s a wonderful time to be in New York, as many families have discovered. Said Leslie Sullivan, a mom from Hingham, Massachusetts, “Being in New York around the holidays really gets us into the Christmas spirit. There’s an energy as well as a serenity. There are crowds, but somehow the place feels friendly and peaceful. We loved our first family holiday trip so much that we’ve made it into a tradition.”

Whether tradition or one-time event, enjoy these holiday sights and activities:

Skating
There’s Wollman, and there’s Rockefeller. The rink at Rockefeller Center is small, but skating around it, under the 1934 gilded Prometheus sculpture and the eyes of a thousand spectators, is a cool experience. Lasker Rink, in Central Park's far north, offers public skating without the crowds. Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers, a sport and entertainment complex on the Hudson River, has afternoon public skating. Or skate at Riverbank State Park, a 28-acre, multi-sport recreational facility, also on the Hudson. For budget skating that packs a full dose of the Manhattan experience, head to Bryant Park, tucked behind the New York Public Library. Ice time is free, and skate rentals are available. The rink is small, but the cross-section of locals and visitors, vendors selling interesting things and the midtown Manhattan skyline above your head make it big fun. For an uncrowded rink in a beautiful setting, head to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Tree-spotting
Typically lit the week after Thanksgiving, Rockefeller Center’s holiday tree, a must-see, has some competition. Twinkling trees tower over Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and South Street Seaport (from where you get an amazing view of the Brooklyn Bridge). The American Museum of Natural History's Origami Tree is adorned with a thousand folded decorations, each representing an object in the museum’s collection, and paper cranes grace the Peace Tree at the soaring Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Window-hopping
You’ll find brilliant decorations and window displays all over the city, but some of the best are at a half-dozen midtown department stores: Barney’s and Bloomingdales; Fifth Avenue’s Saks, Bergdorf Goodman and Lord & Taylor (my favorite); Macy’s, on 34th Street. If you visit them all, and on foot, you’ll earn the added fitness bonus of a roughly two-mile walk.

Holiday Fairs And Shows
Catch the Rockettes and their famous high kick line in the annual Radio City Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, an art deco gem. Browse the vendor stalls at Grand Central Terminal's holiday fair, and take in the half-hourly laser light show projected onto the station’s magnificent, refurbished central ceiling. Head up to the Bronx, where you’ll find family activities at a light festival at the New York Botanical Gardens and a winter wonderland of lights, ice sculptures, music and reindeer at the Bronx Zoo.

Other Treats
For a special tour of Manhattan from the water, splurge on a lunch or dinner Spirit Cruise, departing from Chelsea Piers. Enjoy a kid’s-eye view of over-the-top Christmas gifts―think nearly life-sized stuffed horses and giraffes―at FAO Schwarz, the venerable Fifth Avenue toy store, or ride the Ferris wheel inside the Times Square Toys ‘R’ Us. Take the elevator to the Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center, and enjoy the mindblowing view including, if you go in the evening, the Empire State Building floodlit red and green for the holiday season.

One of the best ways to get around New York is by bus and subway, and a 1- or 7-day Metro Card, available at most subway stations, gives you unlimited rides on both. For New York hotel and visitor information, check out NYCVisit.com.

So who won the Wollman Rink showdown? We all did. As the kids cruised down the home stretch, Adam in the lead, he got a touch of holiday spirit and slowed to let Dana catch up. The race ended in a tie.

Travel/family/parenting: Intergenerational Travel: Finding Family Harmony

This article appeared in the online magazine The Dabbling Mum in February 2008:

Intergenerational Travel: Finding Family Harmony
Lori Hein
All materials copyrighted

It’s a sweet, indelible image: My dad, six-foot-two and lean as a green bean holding hands with my then two-year-old daughter, clad in a puffy turquoise sunsuit. My dad’s long arm reaches down, my daughter’s tiny one reaches up, and they look into each other’s eyes as they make their way, laughing, down the hill from our rented beach house to the ice cream store in town. That simple, joy-filled walk that Dana took with her Pop-Pop was one of many special moments shared by three generations of our family during a week-long vacation together.

Traveling with multiple generations of family can be rich and rewarding. It’s an opportunity to reunite, reminisce, discover, celebrate.

But friction can develop, too, as family members who don’t live together in the real world try to live together in the vacation world. Whether you rent a ski chalet, cabin in the woods or motel rooms near Disney World, some honest pre-trip discussion and planning can help ensure that everyone enjoys your multi-generational journey.

Before leaving home, discuss:

How close the quarters? Chris and Dave Blelloch, a Boston-area couple with three grade-schoolers, have taken several vacations with extended family. Some have been less than perfect, others a joy. The difference? Space. For a reunion trip to North Carolina, the clan, which included aunts, uncles, grandparents and a gaggle of cousins, rented one large house. “It didn’t work,” said Chris. “Too close.”

For a more recent trip to Cape Cod, the group booked separate, side-by-side condos. Each family had its own living space, and the resort’s beach and play area with barbecue pit served as common gathering ground. Harmony reigned.

What are the ground rules – and floor plan? It’s easier to set behavior and etiquette guidelines before a trip than to fret and feud while on vacation because, for example, teenagers come in late, make noise in the kitchen and wake the family. Mom and dad may be used to this at home, but grandma and grandpa aren’t. And mom and dad may need a break from it. It’s their vacation, too.

Set ground rules and devise plans that address issues like curfews; accommodation of early risers and night owls; babies’ naptimes; uses of common space; control of amenities like TVs, computers, sound systems, sports equipment and rental cars. The payoff for your negotiations will be a vacation haven that’s truly a peaceable kingdom.

If you’ll be staying in a vacation rental, knowing the property’s floor plan and layout can help you make advance decisions on potentially thorny issues like bedroom assignments. Who gets the biggest or quietest room, the room nearest the bathroom, the ground floor room, the room in the attic two flights up, the room that faces a busy street? Vacation rental sites like Interhome.com, CyberRentals.com and vrbo.com (Vacation Rentals by Owner) have photos and property descriptions and, with the latter two, you deal directly with the owners and can email them with questions.

Whose turn to dry? You may not want to think about work while on vacation, but jobs will need doing, especially if you’re vacationing in a rental property without restaurants or maid service. Who will shop, cook, clean, watch the kids? If the men golf in the morning, should the women get a few kid-free hours at the pool or gym in the afternoon? Grandma may love hosting family holiday feasts, but she may not want to spend her vacation cooking. Talking in advance about the division of leisure and labor will lighten everyone’s load.

How much togetherness? You’re traveling together, but you’re individuals and separate families, and it’s likely you’ll want and need time apart. Interests, habits, age, finances and health will steer each person and family toward different pursuits. Will you eat in or out? If out, how often? Or will each family do its own thing at mealtime? Should you have several vehicles available so people can go different places? Some of you may want to take daily road trips or climb mountains while others want only to sit and read. Establishing a different strokes for different folks policy gives everyone guilt-free freedom to partake in or pass on outings or activities.

On an intergenerational vacation, planning and communication help smooth the way for wonderful shared experiences.

Like holding hands and laughing all the way to the ice cream store.

Travel: Apricots and Vermentino

This story was published in Chicken Soup for the Wine Lover's Soul. The title is one of four volumes in Chicken Soup's "Flavorful" series, released in November 2007.

Apricots and Vermentino
Lori Hein


Signorina Marina checked us into our rental apartment in the clifftop complex she owned with her brother, and, as she completed the paperwork, waved toward the window and her brilliant stretch of the Italian Riviera. She gave us our key. And two bottles of wine.

One red, one white, in unlabeled plastic carafes with tiddlywinkish stoppers. Language is no barrier against communicating the truly essential, which anything involving wine is, and our Englitalian exchange established that this was literal house wine, made on the premises from grapes on the premises – we’d seen the vines climbing the slope next to the driveway and crawling the arbors erected as sun screens over the parking lot and adjacent ping pong table and bocce court. Our check-in bottles were complimentary. When we emptied them, we were to bring them to reception, where they’d be refilled for about three dollars. Welcome to paradise.

We turned the key in the door of our unit, and paradise got better. We found ourselves in a sun-filled aerie with a tiled terrace that hung over the Mediterranean. Below us, mahogany boats skipped over silver waves, thin people browned themselves atop rocks that poked from the sea, vineyards, orchards and olive groves marched up every mountainside, and Moneglia, a medieval hamlet turned tourist town, buzzed with beachgoers, shoppers and cafe-lingerers. There was no reason to move. We could take in this whole sun-drenched swath of the world from our hilltop perch.

My husband Mike and I quickly fell into a routine of sitting, sipping, staring, and little else, while our kids, Adam and Dana, explored the complex and its grounds and polished their ping pong skills, often playing with a German girl on holiday with her parents. Their unit sat behind ours and looked onto the parking lot and ping pong table. In Moneglia on a month-long stay, they’d chosen to economize and forego the sea view.

We made short work of Signorina Marina’s free check-in bottles and, while we enjoyed the red, it was the white we presented most to reception for refills. Pressed from Vermentino grapes that grow in the steep, sea-kissed vineyards that arc from Genoa southeast to Santa Margherita Ligure – an arc that includes Moneglia and Signorina Marina’s family vineyards – the wine’s crisp kick partnered perfectly with the slice of sultry dolce vita we feasted on from our terrace.

I went off-campus once a day, to buy a chicken. A store in Moneglia sold whole roasted birds, and I’d head down into town about four to get today’s and reserve tomorrow’s. I’d supplement the chicken, which we’d pick on for a full day, with bread and olives from narrow, ochre-colored shops that lined Moneglia’s pedestrian zone.

"Mom, there’s a bag of stuff hanging on the door," said Adam one day as he left to play ping pong. I investigated and retrieved a plastic sack filled nearly to bursting with fresh apricots.

Nearly every afternoon for the rest of our stay we’d find a bag of apricots dangling from the doorknob. "More apricots!" Adam would shriek as he laid the newest delivery on the kitchen table. The kids loved them straight up and on the run. Mike and I assimilated them into our languorous sea-viewing sessions, pairing them with our landlady’s young, label-less Vermentino. Ahhh, Moneglia. Glorious view; happy children; open spigot of almost-free wine; tasty chickens cooked by somebody else; juicy fruit delivered by anonymous produce fairies.

I decided the Germans were the apricot-gifters. They had no terrace and no view, so no reason to hang around their apartment. Each morning about ten, they’d set off to hike, sporting backpacks, boots and serious socks. We, in bathing suits, would look up from our terrace onto the mountainside planted with orchards and vines and see the family ambling amidst the agriculture. I figured they’d befriended a landowner who let them pluck his apricots and they were using the fruit to pay Adam and Dana back for playing so much ping pong with their daughter.

Near the end of our stay I saw the German father in the parking lot, and I thanked him for the fruit: "Danke sehr fur die Aprikosen." He shook his head: "Nein, nein! Nicht von uns. Von der Schwester!"

Signorina Marina, the "sister," had delivered the apricots. We learned she owned not only the vineyards that produced our free-flowing Vermentino, but all the groves and orchards we’d been looking on. She owned the mountainside.

And she enjoyed sharing sips and pieces of it with her guests.

Travel/History: Worms: A Storied Past

Published in the October/November 2007 issue of German Life magazine

Worms: A Storied Past
Lori Hein

I looked out across Heiliger Sand (Holy Sands), a field of headstones engraved in Hebrew, some a thousand years old and listing backward or to one side, and settled my gaze on the towers of Dom St. Peter, the cathedral of Worms. The ancient Jewish cemetery and the mighty Romanesque church, both witnesses to the city’s rich history, were draped – graves of Talmudic scholars and statues of saints equally – in the thin, white cloak of a late autumn snowfall.

The dusting lent an air of calm to this old German city whose history has at times been turbulent, and I went looking for pieces of its past. As I explored, Worms, which sits on the Rhein 28 miles south of Mainz in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, offered glimpses of Celts and Romans; a once thriving Jewish community; Holy Roman Emperors; the seed-sowers of the Reformation; a wine-growing culture with 2,000-year-old roots.

Four-towered Dom St. Peter has been the signature landmark of Worms for over a thousand years. The amber-red sandstone colossus sits atop the old city’s highest hill and dominates the skyline, dwarfing buildings old and new that have been built around it. Though early Christians of the late Roman era built a church on the site in the 7th century, it was in the 11th century under Bishop Burchard that the foundations of a Romanesque cathedral with today’s grand dimensions were laid.

As the centuries marched on, masons and laborers of the medieval cathedral guild rebuilt and restored, eventually adding gothic flourishes to the church’s Romanesque core. The result is a soaring space with strong Romanesque bones and lighter gothic limbs – carved portals, stained glass, airy chapels. Added to the mix are baroque and rococo elements installed after the cathedral’s interior – along with most of the city of Worms – was torched in 1689 by Louis XIV’s army during the War of the Palatinate Succession, a sweeping expansionist bid by the French king. The most striking of these later cathedral constructions is the opulent gilt altar designed by 18th century architectural wunderkind Balthasar Neumann.

Worms was a key administrative and ecclesiastical center during the Holy Roman Empire, and St. Peter’s Nicholas Chapel was the setting for sessions of the Imperial Diet, a Catholic court and legislative body. Of the many Diets convened at Worms, that of 1521 stands apart in the history of the city and the Christian world. Called before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and top figures in the Catholic hierarchy, Martin Luther stuck to the words and spirit of the 95 Theses he’d nailed four years earlier to a church door in Wittenberg. He refused to recant his protest that biblical scripture, not papal power or decree, holds the key to salvation. The Diet labeled Luther an outlaw, and the Reformation got into gear.

A huge monument to Luther and other protestant reformers sits near Dom St. Peter in a park where the city’s moat once flowed. While the cathedral remains Catholic, most Worms residents are Protestant, and some half dozen architecturally and historically significant evangelical and Lutheran churches, notably the baroque Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Trinity Church) welcome visitors.

While Worms is a key stop along the "Luther Trail," the string of German cities with connections to Martin Luther, Worms also holds some of Germany’s most important ancient Jewish sites, and historian Dr. Gerold Boennen, director of the city archives since 1996, confirms that many people come to Worms expressly for these: "Visitors to the city are searching for authentic places with a long history, especially concerning the very important Jewish part."

Contemporaneous with budding post-Roman Christianity, Judaism existed in Worms as early as the 10th century, and from the Middle Ages until it was extinguished under the Third Reich, Worms’s Jewish community was one of Germany’s largest and most active. Striking pieces of this community – the old Jewish quarter, the ancient synagogue, the haunting cemetery where I’d watched snow settle on scholars’ stones – are places that invite, indeed cause, reflection.

The Jewish quarter is tucked in the curved embrace of medieval city wall remnants north of the cathedral. Restored multi-story houses line narrow streets, and in the center of the quarter sits what was the community’s focal point: the synagogue and attached yeshiva, or religious study hall, called Rashi Chapel after eminent Jewish scholar Rabbi Salomon ben Isaak, known as Rashi, who studied in Worms around 1060.

The entire quarter is a restoration atop previous restorations, as varying degrees of destruction visited the Jewish community and its buildings during the Crusades, 14th and 17th century pogroms, and the period from 1938 to 1942. Major restoration, using original stone and brickwork where possible, was done in the 1970s and ‘80s, and the city funds ongoing preservation. While the city maintains the synagogue, its legal owner is the Jewish community of Mainz, which absorbed Worms’s tiny remaining Jewish population into its congregation after World War II. The combined community holds services once a month in Worms’s historic synagogue.

While the temple complex has been rebuilt and altered since the original stones were laid in 1034, the buildings visitors see today together comprise, as did earlier iterations, the community infrastructure prescribed by orthodox Judaism: a place to worship; a mikva, or immersion pool for purification baths; a study house for religious instruction. The fourth component, a cemetery separate from the synagogue, is filled by Heiliger Sand, Europe’s oldest Jewish cemetery, which sits outside the city walls south of Dom St. Peter.

Heiliger Sand was never destroyed, and its 3,000 gravestones, the earliest dated 1076 and the most recent, according to Dr. Boennen, dated 1937, survived even Nazi destruction. Some guidebooks and Internet articles cite then city archivist F.M. Illert with having saved the cemetery during that period, but Boennen knows of no documents or evidence to support this and feels the story may be "really a legend and cannot be proved." But he acknowledges that visitors "are interested every time in how was it possible that the cemetery was not destroyed." A divine hand, perhaps?

Both the archives office and a Jewish Museum managed by the archives are located in Rashi-Haus, built in 1982 adjacent to the synagogue. Boennen described the richness of the treasures his department tends: "We are responsible for a great and increasing collection of documents, beginning with a charter by King Henry IV for the city of Worms from 1074, the oldest document of a German king given to the people of a city. Despite all the wars and ups and downs of Worms, we preserve a collection which can normally not be expected by a relatively small city like ours." The archives also hold a collection of 300,000 historic photographs.

Having learned a little about some of the players in the eventful, millennia-long pageant that is Worms’s history, I left the city and headed north toward Mainz on the B9, a small road that runs aside the Rhein. As it did in the city, light snow dotted the scene, a tableau of rolling hills planted with recently harvested Riesling vineyards. This is Rheinhessen, Germany’s largest wine-growing area, and viniculture here dates to Roman times.

Just outside Worms the gothic Liebfrauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) sat on its hill surrounded by a vineyard from which monks once made sweet wine for thirsty medieval pilgrims. This "Liebfraumilch" gained fame over time, and wine merchants not tied to the church’s vineyard began selling wines with that name, as they do today. Two wine exporters, Langenbach and Valckenberg, own the original Liebfrauenkirche vineyard, and their wines are labeled "Liebfrauenstift Kirchestueck" to denote that specific provenance.

Flat, black barges plied the Rhein as I passed through ancient towns, many with centuries-old grape-growing traditions. Two neighboring villages, Oppenheim and Nierstein, stood out as particularly pleasing for modern pilgrims in search of scenery, history and good wine. Each offers hillside hikes, stunning medieval architecture and wine estates that have been in the same families for as long as 11 generations.

Practice makes perfect, and these vintners turn out world-class Rieslings. With my head full of history, I thought this a fine place to stop and toast the past.


More information:
Worms Tourist Office: Neumarkt 4; www.worms.de; touristinfo@worms.de
Dom St. Peter: http://www.wormser-dom.de; http://dombauverein-worms.de; www.wormser-dom.de (German only)
Nierstein and Rheinhessen regions: www.nierstein.de/start.htm; www.rheinhessen-info.de (both German only)

Travel: Apple Tea and Crazy Eights

This story was published in Chicken Soup for the Tea Lover's Soul. The title is one of the four volumes in Chicken Soup's "Flavorful" series, released in November 2007.

Apple Tea and Crazy Eights

Lori Hein

We’d spent the morning driving through the rocky, hardscrabble beauty of the Bey, a range of Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. Erhan, our driver, maneuvered our microbus up and down the February snow-spattered mountain swells and through the streets of terra cotta-roofed towns like Derekoy and Karamanli. Cows grazed in yards, men in plastic chairs lined sidewalks, smoking and rubbing prayer beads, women in billowy pantaloons called salvar stooped to sweep porches with handleless brooms, and boys walked fields of just-turned black soil, casting seed from flax bags slung across their shoulders.

Our group was small. Besides Erhan there was Yesim, our guide, who’d been married a year but had been on the road leading so many tours that she’d spent only 60 days total at home with her husband. Her charges this trips were me, my son, Adam, then seven and proudly sporting a Tintin in Istanbul sweatshirt, Bob and Estheta, a retired couple from Long Island, and Jan and Rose, puckish seventysomething friends from Pennsylvania who’d been globetrotting together for 30 years. They delighted in just about everything and enjoyed pinching Adam’s cheeks. We were a well-traveled, glass-half-full lot, and we bonded quickly.

Up in the mountains, the bus door had jammed open, its hydraulic workings kaput, and Erhan had roped it shut against the February chill. This worked for us but violated the tour company’s safety code, and it fell to Yesim to get the door fixed.

"Toilet stop," she said, as Erhan eased the bus into a tiny paved lot in front of the Kulcuoglu Restaurant. "We’ll be here for fifteen minutes." We weren’t fooled. Yesim told Erhan to take the bus to a repair shop in Denizli, the nearest city. It was 11:30. At three that afternoon, Erhan would reappear, door still kaput – he couldn’t find an open garage – to collect us.

The restaurant was technically closed. Tourist season began in March, and we were a month early. The owners, an extended family of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and teenagers, were busy readying the place, washing floors and windows, scrubbing toilets, mopping halls and stairs. They weren’t prepared for guests, but, consistent with the hospitality we’d been shown since landing in Turkey, welcomed us as if we’d been eagerly awaited.

We weren’t five minutes inside their door when the first tray of hot apple tea appeared. One of the owners’ black-haired daughters came from the kitchen bearing a metal tray of small, clear glasses filled with the steaming, honey-colored beverage. We stood in the hallway sipping the sugared drink, toasting serendipity.

While Yesim stayed downstairs and worked her cell phone, rearranging our itinerary to accommodate what she (and we) knew would be a sizable delay, we followed the father up a worn wooden staircase to a cavernous dining hall, empty except for stacked tables and chairs and a squat iron stove, quiet and unlit, that sat in the middle of the room. The father pushed a table and six chairs next to the stove, then fed it from a woodpile by the stairwell. We knew wood was scarce here, and his kindness warmed us before he struck the first match. As the blaze began to hum and crackle, the black-haired daughter mounted the stairs with the second of what would, before the afternoon was out, be a half-dozen trays of apple tea.

The family got on with its cleaning, and we sat, in coats and hats, wondering how to entertain ourselves. Adam, veteran of several global circumnavigations and no stranger to having time to fill in strange places that move at slow paces, rummaged through his Lion King backpack and produced the tiny deck of playing cards he’d been given on the British Airways flight we’d taken from Boston to Europe.

Jan and Rose beamed with simultaneous delight when they saw the cards. They clapped and rubbed their palms together. "Gin rummy!" said one or the other or both. They reacted to the lilliputian cards printed with winking, bulb-nosed cartoon airplanes fished from a vinyl Disney bag by a seven-year-old as if a vision of Our Lady of Atlantic City had just descended into the dining hall of the Kulcuoglu Restaurant. "Gin. We’ll teach you," they said, reaching for the deck.

The gin rummy experiment was short-lived, as Adam had the attention span of, well, a seven-year-old, plus an already-established favorite card game: "Let’s play Crazy Eights!" I gave Adam a big thumbs-up, Bob and Estheta laughed and told him they loved Crazy Eights, and Jan and Rose pinched his cheeks and told him to deal them in.

For three hours, we huddled at a table by a snapping stove fed with precious wood by a gracious host, playing Crazy Eights with teeny weeny cards and enjoying sweet swallows of hot apple tea, raising a glass now and then to bus doors going kaput in unexpected places.

Essay/Travel: The last paddle

Published in WaveLength Magazine, fall 2006



The Last Paddle
Lori Hein



Foliage is long past peak and many trees are already barren. The graying leaves that still hang on quake with age and inevitability. I push my kayak into the water and paddle over and around the stumps revealed each fall, when my lake is peeled back to show things unseen in summer.

Fishermen and weekenders have gone. Time to pull the stopper, inspect the dam and make needed repairs. By late autumn, the lake in its shallowest parts will be a ripe mud pool. In its deepest, a meandering, watery ribbon.

It’s the season’s last paddle. The low water can no longer host powerboats, and even the most committed bass men in their silvery, shallow-hulled craft have quit the lake until spring. When the lake is down, my kayak shows me things no one else is looking for in places no one else can reach.

I wear sunglasses. Burnished light glints off the ripples through which I ride. I tilt my face toward the sun, remembering how it felt in summer, and I try to soak it up and store it.

As I glide through this spare autumn waterworld, I discover a rock jetty, hand-placed a century ago, running long and low off an island’s tip. The line along the shore where earth’s fecund layer of forest soil ends and its granite underpinnings begin. Decaying logs and slender water grasses that house creatures, some who show themselves and some who scuttle away. I peer into their murky homes and breathe the deep, cloying smell of exposed algae. Hello, turtle. Let me sit and examine the pattern on your shell.

Like spotlights, the stillness and bare branches let me see or sense any moving thing. A few year-rounders putter about their cottages, canoes on shore, lawn furniture still arranged. Two fishermen are closing their place, pulling up docks and securing windows. Their dog explodes from the woods when he sees my blue boat, a burst of movement and color in this muted, going-to-sleep world, and he bounds along the shore next to me until dense trees stop him.

I eavesdrop on a couple in a birch bark canoe. They’re a quarter-mile away, but I hear their conversation—speculation about which yard a moose had called home for a while—as clearly as if I were sitting between them. Were I to confirm, in my normal voice, that they’d indeed found Lily Moose’s bed of now shrivelled flowers, they would hear me, crystal clear.

Dennis the dentist has been spending less time on teeth and more on the lake of late, and he poles around on a homemade raft, collecting slimy, untethered logs that poke from the mud near his dock. He’s a fit man with Ralph Lauren hair sharing raft space with dripping, brown butt ends of rotted trees.

When the water is down, the docks left standing in the muck become long-limbed flamingos, skinny legs and knees exposed. Can-can girls. Frisky ladies pulling up their skirts. The docks that have been hauled out and tied upright to trees show their shiny plastic barrel bellies.

Anything that can blow away has been stored away. Gone are wind chimes and floats, umbrellas and beach chairs. Lonely picnic tables, too heavy to move, dot beaches and yards. They’ve begun their slow, cold wait for weather that will again pull people back outside to sit.

At the marina, docks and boat berths are pulled out. The gas pump is gone. White shrink-wrapped motorboats sit on land like so many Sydney Opera Houses. In the extreme silence, my ears track the progress of a car as it travels from the lakeshore up to the top of a wooded mountain.

On this last paddle, I do things I don’t do when the water is high and others are about. I cross the lake at its widest point, slowly. Today, no need to rush. No worry about powerboats overtaking me before I reach the other shore. I cross and recross. I stop paddling and float with head back and eyes closed, stamping this serene time into my memory.

The loon that lives with his mate in a reedy shallow wants to play. He dives under my kayak and emerges, finally, twenty yards off its other side. The waterfall whose hums and trills are muted in season by the competing sounds of summer activity now has top billing. From my gently rocking seat, I take in its performance.

As I head home, the day’s last rays kissing the earth, I look down the lake and think of what’s ahead. Winter will soon bring its wonders. Like the long skate. If you catch it just right, after the lake freezes but before snow has buried it, you can skate on glass for seven miles.



© Lori Hein, who splits her time between Boston and the New Hampshire woods and is the author of Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America (www.LoriHein.com). Her freelance work has appeared in publications across North America and online. She publishes a world travel blog at http://RibbonsofHighway.blogspot.com.

Travel: A salute to the skyscraper

Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, January 28, 2007



A salute to the skyscraper
By Lori Hein
For The Inquirer


NEW YORK - "Skyscraper Museum? Sorry, no. Ask that guy over there. He might know where it is."

After hearing four variations on that theme, I approached a female construction worker in a neon-pink hard hat. "Sure," she said, "right there," and pointed around the corner, past a line of people waiting to board the Circle Line boat to the Statue of Liberty, to a building at Lower Manhattan's 39 Battery Place.

It seemed fitting that a person who builds for a living knew where to find this celebration of the city's architectural heritage and ever-evolving skyline.

The first new museum to open in Lower Manhattan since Sept. 11, its simple exhibits weave powerful stories of man's ability to create - and to rebuild. As one of the 15 members of the Museums of Lower Manhattan, the Skyscraper Museum "is involved in the efforts to reinvigorate downtown," founder and director Carol Willis said.

The museum was founded in 1996 and relocated several times before it opened six blocks south of ground zero in spring 2004 in the building designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It glistens with stainless steel floors, walls and ceilings; glass showcases rise like towers, and the space itself seems to soar. For the visitor, the mirrorlike environment intensifies the exhibits and reflects the dreams, risks, brawn and bravado that are as much a part of a great building as the bricks and beams holding it together.

At the top of a shiny entry ramp, visitors find a photographic timeline of towers that runs the length of a wall and chronicles the evolution of high-rises, from 284-foot Trinity Church, built in 1846, through 500-foot beauties of the early 1900s and monumental glass towers of the World Trade Center era, to recent colossi such as Taiwan's 1,671-foot Taipei 101.

The museum has two main parts, one showcasing mostly items from its growing permanent collection and one that hosts a large, themed exhibition, which changes every few months. "GIANTS: The Twin Towers and the Twentieth Century," runs through April 15.

While text describing the exhibit acknowledges that "September 11 defines our memory of the Twin Towers, and the profound proportions of that tragedy continue to reverberate in New York and beyond," the exhibit is about the towers' creation, not their destruction. It seeks to explain "the significance of this project in the evolution of skyscraper history," Willis said.

Before entering the "GIANTS" gallery, visitors are treated to a rich collection of material on early-20th-century towers that established New York as the world's preeminent skyscraper city and continue to define its unique spirit and culture. A montage of vintage postcards trumpets skyline stars such as the Woolworth and Flatiron Buildings and the Brooklyn Bridge.

A film shot during construction of the Empire State Building puts visitors high above Manhattan, face to face with workmen as they create the 112-story stone and steel symbol of New York. A typewritten daily log lists tasks that each group of tradesmen - "Stone Cutters; Derrickman; Excavators-Rockmen" - were to complete. "Stenciling E.S. on windows" was a job for the "Carpenter Helpers."

Structure and size differentiated the Twin Towers from earlier skyscrapers. Improvements in materials and mechanical systems allowed construction of buildings that were not just tall, but big, with interior volume measured in millions of square feet.

The "GIANTS" exhibit is a trove of photographs, aerial views, architectural models, interactive displays, and video and audio clips that bring the design, construction, operation and enjoyment of the megastructures to life.

In a mirrored room anchored by light columns that reflect endlessly in the silvery walls and ceiling, evoking the dramatic power of the Twin Towers' distinctive exterior box columns and window bays, a mother said to her young son, "Honey, I want you to hear this." She put headphones on the boy's head, then looked at the parade of light pillars while he listened to a 1982 South Tower public-address recording that prepared visitors for their elevator ride to the 107th-floor Observation Deck: "It takes approximately 58 seconds at a speed of 20 miles per hour to reach the deck," says the voice from 25 years ago.

There are also displays of the new towers that will rise above ground zero. Models and drawings show the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, now under construction, and three companion towers planned for the WTC site.

The Skyscraper Museum is a small place that celebrates big things and honors man's capacity to keep reaching for the sky. As you leave the museum and step onto the sidewalk, you can't help but look up.




Skyscraper Museum

The Skyscraper Museum's home at 39 Battery Place, Lower Manhattan, was designed pro bono by the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in space donated by real-estate developer Millennium Partners. It is on the ground floor of the building that houses the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, across the street from the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City.
Phone: 212-968-1961
Web site:http://www.skyscraper.org/
Hours: Noon-6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
Admission: $5, adults; $2.50, students, seniors.
Group tours and family-friendly Saturday events available.
By subway: Line 1, R or W to Rector, Whitehall or South Ferry or Line 4 or 5 to Bowling Green.
Subway and bus maps at www.mta.info.


On the Web
http://www.lowermanhattan.info/
www.museumsoflowermanhattan.org
www.nycvisit.com

Travel: More to Milan than Da Vinci

Published in International Living and sister publication, The European, December 2006



More to Milan than Da Vinci
by Lori Hein



Call it the Da Vinci Code effect. Viewing Leonardo’s Last Supper at Milan’s Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie can require a minor miracle. Reservations are mandatory, and tour companies buy blocks of tickets, reducing the number available to solo travelers. And, even if you score reservations, expect big lines and long waits. If you can’t see the famed fresco, head instead for Milan’s historic core for the best of the rest of Lombardy’s lively capital.

Milan’s most glorious sight is the duomo (cathedral). Rising like a great Gothic wedding cake from its namesake piazza, the colossus, which Mark Twain called “a poem in marble,” brims with belfries, buttresses and towers. A slow walk around the exterior puts you in the middle of a riot of arches, vaults, statues and tracery. Inside, magnificent floor-to-ceiling stained glass will dazzle you, and you can ride an elevator to the roof to a forest of intricately sculpted stone spires. Although the cathedral’s brilliant facade is half-hidden behind scaffolding as major restoration work continues, you can still spend hours here.

Renovation’s always going on somewhere in Milan, so don’t let it keep you from visiting. Roberto Peretta, who runs the website www.ciaomilano.it, says of the restoration, “In Milan, the saying ‘lungo come la fabbrica del Duomo’ or ‘as long as the building of the duomo,’ means that something never ends.”

Nearby, the soaring Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, a glass, stone and wrought iron confection begun in 1877 and arguably the world’s most elegant mall, attracts Milanese and visitors. Look for the floor mosaic depicting a bull under the galleria’s central dome: Tradition says that a twirl on the bull’s nether parts brings good luck.

The galleria’s side portal opens to the venerable La Scala Theater. A facelift has the 250-year-old grande dame looking good, and her acoustics are perfect. The adjacent museum’s collection of costumes, sets and instruments is a journey into La Scala’s rich past. Backstage tours can also be had.

A few blocks west is the red-orange Castello Sforzesco, the Renaissance fortress that served as seat of the Sforzas, Dukes of Milan and now houses an impressive art collection that includes a Michelangelo Pieta. In good weather people relax in the green Parco Sempione outside the castle walls.

Some of Milan’s best sights move. About 20 tram lines serve Milan and environs, but several historic liveries with some 150 vintage trolleys run through the old city on iron rails laid into the pavement. Buy a hop on/hop off tram pass, settle into the shiny, varnished wooden seats, and enjoy a rolling tour of Milan’s historic heart.



What to see:

For Last Supper reservations, visit www.cenacolovinciano.org or call +39 (0)28942-1146. Closed Mondays, entry: 14 euros.

The Duomo is open daily 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. No shorts, short skirts, or sleeveless shirts.

La Scala performances can be booked via www.teatroallascala.org. La Scala Museum hours: 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.-5 p.m. Closed Mondays, backstage tours Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Castello Sforzesco (www.milanocastello.it) is free and open daily. Entrance to the museum, open 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. except Mondays, is 3 euros.

Touristic Tram Tour tickets are sold at the tourist office on Via Marconi, Piazza del Duomo. 20 euros for an all-day pass.

www.ciaomilano.it and www.hellomilano.it have information on hotels, restaurants and sights.

Travel: Nairobi by degrees

Published in Perceptive Travel Magazine, May/June 2006:

Nairobi by Degrees

by Lori Hein

From the top of a high building in the city center, Lori Hein surveys Kenya's capitol through the eyes of the janitor.

The security guard and the building information officer both quizzed and vetted me before handing me to Daniel, a janitor at one of Nairobi’s tallest skyscrapers. I’d asked permission to ride the elevator to the roof for a panoramic view of the city. We agreed on a price, “to be paid later,” and Daniel was tapped to be my guide.

Daniel stashed his broom in a corner under a stairwell and smoothed his bright red cleaner’s smock, torn under both armpits. He led me to the elevator, packed with workers making their way to the offices and cubicles nested inside the tower. Daniel pushed them gently aside to make room for me, then stood in the middle of the elevator, arms crossed over his chest and small, content smile on his lips.

As the elevator rose and stopped, the other passengers left to go about their business, leaving me and Daniel to ride to the top floor. There, the elevator door opened to reveal a crude ticket booth. I handed the pre-negotiated 200 shilling fee to two giggling Muslim girls in gray headscarves who sat half-hidden behind the opaque Plexiglas of the makeshift kiosk. In unison, they nodded an okay to Daniel, who grinned big and broke into a sprint. “This way, please,” he yelled back to me as he bolted up a concrete staircase to the rooftop helipad, round and high and open to the blue African sky.

On the roof, Daniel became a bird, his cotton smock feathers and his arms wings as he moved around and across the circular helipad, mouth laughing, eyes dancing, soul savoring this release from pushing his broom. He jumped from one thick neon-yellow landing sight line to the next, arms outstretched, whirling like a top, canvassing the 360 degrees of Nairobi splendor and squalor laid out below and beyond.

He came to rest, like the arrow on a board game’s spinner, arm pointing toward Mount Kenya in the northeast. Serendipity or stagecraft? We began our 360-degree tour with this jagged exclamation mark – wild, raw, powerful, like Africa itself. “On a clear day, one can see both Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro from this point,” said Daniel as he tilted his head to the right to find snow-capped Kili, just visible under the heavy spindrift haze that hugged its summit.

Over the next hour, one of wonder for me and freedom for him, Daniel moved me counterclockwise around the roof, degree by degree. Each new eyeful triggered talk and tales. The more he could say about the beauty and baseness, majesty and mud, coffee and corruption that ran through Kenya’s veins, the longer he could leave his broom under the stairwell.

Daniel, once a teacher, reveled in the immense embrace of his land. Sharing it gave him great pleasure. He spoke of its problems and possibilities with equal passion.

From the terra cotta roofs of City Hall and the precise, gray walls of the Anglican cathedral, we looked northwest toward the rich purple Ngong Hills. Daniel talked of the vast tea and coffee plantations there, flanked by wealthy white suburbs. We took in the expanse of Nairobi National Park, whose location hard by the sprawling airport and industrial sector belies its role as a key migratory corridor for big game.

In a street directly below us, a mass of people made its way from Uhuru Park to the office of Kenya’s president and, with a booming collective voice and hand-painted banners, boldly demanded an end to the corruption that creeps into so many corners of Kenyan life. Tourists in bathing suits stood at the railing of a luxury hotel’s rooftop pool and watched the scene.

Daniel and I looked down at the place where the American embassy once stood. A park now marks the site of al Qaeda’s depraved handiwork. Daniel remembered the day of the terrorist bombing. He sighed deeply, closed his eyes, and recalled the horror and “the hundreds of Kenyans who will not be there again.” He told me of the “thousands injured and many left deaf or blind,” and of a passing bus lifted ten feet in the air, killing all onboard. “A noise I never want to hear again,” whispered Daniel, as echoes of the blast rolled through his bones.

Before we came full circle and again faced Mount Kenya, Daniel’s arm swept over the teeming slums of east Nairobi. Land dominion in the north, west and south is held by wealth, wildlife or commerce, so Nairobi’s poor spread eastward. Daniel guided my eyes to the city’s cruelest slum.

“That is where I live,” he said. “With my two young daughters.” He talked about the realities of his life. His neighborhood has no running water. His daughters are in school, but Daniel struggles to keep them there. Some of his 200 shilling per month salary goes to corrupt teachers and school officials for fake fees and books that never appear. If Daniel doesn’t pay this “money for nothing,” his daughters pay consequences meted out by people a link above him in the food chain. People with just enough power to make a poor family’s difficult life harder.

Clouds began to hug Mount Kenya. Daniel made a last spin around the helipad, his red smock flapping. He tilted his beautiful face upward and smiled at whatever god had granted him this hour’s relief from mop and bucket. I handed him a tip, money likely to become money for nothing, and we rode the elevator down to the building lobby.

After a few minutes, I left the building and walked across the plaza, heavy with sober law courts and supersized statue of Jomo Kenyatta. I looked back toward the tower. There was Daniel, outside in the soft sun, smiling and sweeping the cobblestones.

Travel: Looking down on St. Moritz

Published in German Life magazine, Dec. 2003:

Looking Down on St. Moritz
by Lori Hein


"Look," I said to my husband and kids. "We have all of St. Moritz at our feet." We were standing atop Muottas Muragl in Switzerland’s beautiful Upper Engadine. The nail polish-red Muottas Muraglbahn had deposited us at the over 8,000-foot mountain station and had already begun its descent, leaving us to gaze over a spectacular alpine panorama that included the towns of Celerina and St. Moritz, a chain of bluish-green lakes, and the powerful peaks of the Bernina Massif.

The July day was cloudy and cool. To get to Muottas Muragl, we’d driven alongside the Sils and Silvaplana lakes, where the windsurfers all sported wetsuits. The day before, in medieval Bellinzona, we’d shared an outdoor lunch table with Horst, a German mathematician living in Zurich. When we mentioned our plan to overnight at the mountaintop Berghotel Muottas Muragl, he said, with certainty, "It will snow above 2,000 meters." We’d just smiled, shading our eyes from the blistering Bellinzona sun.

Now, we were on top of a crisp mountain world, and the possibility of snow in July didn’t seem so farfetched. Muottas Muragl’s treeless summit was green, with delicate lichen and pink and yellow wildflowers flourishing between the rocks. Tempting hiking paths unfolded in several directions. But ice-covered giants towered just beyond, encircling us like a crystal bracelet, and a light fog blanket had started to climb from the valley floor.

We checked into the sherbet-colored hotel, which sits at the mountain’s edge. From our room, we looked down at St. Moritz on its lake. We could also watch the shiny red Muraglbahn make its frequent trips between the summit terminus and the Punt Muragl station below.

There’s much to explore on the mountaintop. We hiked part of the Hochweg, a trail that leads down to the resort town of Pontresina, a three-hour walk away. The Muraglbahn delivered several groups of hikers. Many were seniors, fit and sturdy like noble trees. Off they went with their packs and walking sticks.

While Muottas Muragl offers splendid hiking in summer and uncrowded skiing and sledding in winter, many people come simply for the breathtaking, unparalleled view of the Alps. The Piz Rosatsch and Piz Julier ranges frame the Upper Engadine Gap, which holds St. Moritz and the string of lakes stretching to Maloja. From the hotel’s terrace, the massive, glacier-studded Bernina peaks look close enough to touch.

The hotel’s rustic Panoramic Restaurant offers local specialties until 11 p.m., and those not overnighting at the summit can ride the Muraglbahn up for lunch, sunset cocktails, or dinner and enjoy the spectacular vista as a side dish.

At night, while my family slept, I sat at our window, trying to etch the view in my mind so I could carry it home. The sky was cobalt blue, and lights twinkled everywhere. There were stars above and the glow of St. Moritz nightlife far below.

Then, a heavy cloud rolled past the window, swallowing the hotel, and flakes began to fall. Next morning, we woke to the Horst-foretold "snow above 2,000 meters." The kids ran across the frosted mountaintop, tossing snowballs, amazed by snow in July.

Before we left the Engadine, we explored the area around Muottas Muragl. We drove an eye-popping stretch of the Berninastrasse from Pontresina to the Bernina Pass and waved at tourists riding the famed Bernina Express, among the most scenic of Switzerland’s celebrated rail routes.

I noted four parallel lines: the majestic wall of the Bernina peaks, glaciers spilling down their faces like half-melted ice cream; the mint green Inn River, from which the Engadine takes its name; the tracks; the road.

Later, we walked the steep streets of nearby Guarda. From the town’s spectacular setting high above the valley, stunning Alps tower in every direction. It was market day, and vendors in Guarda’s square offered cakes, wurst, sauerkraut and handmade crafts. The town is filled with centuries-old gabled houses decorated with designs and family coats of arms. An afternoon in Guarda is the perfect finish to a visit to the Engadine.

Contact the Berghotel Muottas Muragl, in Samedan, by phone (41 81 842 82 32), fax (41 81 842 82 90) or e-mail (mmb.rest@skiengadin.ch).

Travel/Family: Into the fire zone

Book excerpt published in the Cortez Journal (CO), March 2004:

March 13, 2004
Tourists journey into fire zone
By Lori Hein
Special to the Journal

EDITOR'S NOTE: The summer after Sept. 11, a globetrotting writer from Massachusetts and her two children traveled 12,000 miles of American back roads and byways. "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America" (Booklocker.com, 2004) by Lori Hein (lorihein.com) is the story of the trio's road odyssey. In this excerpt, the travelers visit Cortez and Mesa Verde National Park at the height of wildfire season:


The parking lot of our Cortez motel gave onto a postcard Rocky Mountain view, so I parked New Paint so she could look, enjoy and be rejuvenated. When I went out the next morning to begin the tasks required before daily takeoff, New Paint sat in the early sun facing the Rockies, and a white truck marked OJIBWE Wildcat Firefighters sat next to her, its driver drinking coffee and working a cell phone.

As part of each morning's pre-departure ritual, I'd dump the melted ice from the coolers and send the kids to the motel ice machine for new stocks. There was no way I could throw water away in front of this man, so I hauled the coolers to the room and dumped the old ice in the bathtub, and still felt plenty guilty.

A wildcat firefighter in our motel parking lot meant fire was near. We'd come to Cortez, and Colorado, for Mesa Verde, and, when we got to the park, parts of it, including Cliff Palace and Balcony House, were closed due to fire threat. Wildfires had now affected us personally.

The only way to see anything was to go with a group on one of the tours they'd patched together and were still allowing to go out. The Park Service wanted everyone in one place, to count heads and ease evacuation should fire start. Both temperature and tempers were high as rangers dealt with frustrated tourists who'd traveled the country and world to get here. We were assigned to a 10:30 departure on a yellow Dolores School District bus to Spruce Tree House on Chapin Mesa. We killed time in the Visitor Center watching a film of Cliff Palace, the closest we'd get to it, and joked with a couple looking through postcards in the gift shop that it would be hard to find one of something we'd actually see.

But Spruce Tree House was magnificent, and the tour had an unusual edge to it because of the tense, frightening circumstances. The minute our school bus filled and the driver pulled away from the Visitor Center, all of us on the bus became a club and started talking. We sat next to a family from San Francisco whose two daughters, baby Hailey and 11-year-old Amanda, both fell in love with Adam. He gave them equal time, bouncing Hailey on his leg during the bus ride, and climbing into an underground Spruce Tree House kiva with Amanda.

All the tour kids went down into the cool, dark kiva. I sensed a silent contest taking shape down there after the smallest kids had come up. The older ones stayed in the hole, and I was tempted to ask the other parents if they wanted to wager on whose kid would win the test of wills and be last up the ladder. I'd have put my money on Adam to win and Dana to place.

Sure enough, after the other kids had caved and climbed out, a conversation like this was going on down in the pit:

"You go ahead, Dana."

"No, Adam. You go."

"No, you go up first. I'll follow you."

"Adam, you're just doing this because you want to be last."

"I do not."

"Yes, you do."

"Be quiet, Dana."

"Thanks, Adam."

Dana capitulated, and Adam was last man standing in the kiva.

Our tour group connected quickly because we had similar thoughts. We felt lucky to have nabbed a tour spot. (Becoming rarer by the hour, I imagined tickets being scalped in the parking lot in whispers to families in RVs.) We were optimistic that Spruce Tree House, not the first choice of anyone on our bus, would be "worth it." We were strangely titillated by our flirt with fire. We trusted the rangers, people we'd we never met, to protect us. And, we couldn't wait to see the cliff dwellings, then hightail it out of Mesa Verde.

None of us had missed the hellish landscape on the 15-mile mountain drive from the entrance up to the Visitor Center. Charred, eerie remains of a year 2000 fire covered the mountainsides. Black limbs and trunks. Gray, leafless trees reaching up like skeletal hands. Almost counterintuitive, this already-burned landscape was, in fact, a safe zone. It had no fodder or fuel left, so wouldn't ignite again. It allowed us safe passage into Mesa Verde, and it was safe passage out, should trouble flare.

Copyright © Lori Hein (lorihein.com) 2004. Excerpted from "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America" (Booklocker.com). Reprinted with permission.