EXPLORING VENICE
Katharina Hahn, Senior Sub-Editor
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A post shared by Venice Official Tourist&Travel (@veneziaunica) on Mar 2, 2019 at 4:16am PST
When my dad suggested driving to Venice from Carinthia in Austria, where we were staying in a cute-but-modest pension by a lake, I barely waited for him to finish before I packed my things (including short denim dungarees – I was 15, and they were the best thing ever). Grazing cows, freezing morning swims and meadow walks, or seafood pasta in shady squares, glittering palazzi and gelato twice a day? I could not believe he was still hesitating. ‘But we would have to drive for hours,’ he countered, ‘the heat would be unbearable, the canals would stink at this time of year…’ I wasn’t listening. Years later, I would learn the language, and travel up and down the country from Bolzano to Bari, but as a teenager I was already in love with everything Italian – food, culture, shoes – and would have walked to get there. I also knew I was in for a serious, academic tour – as a historian, my father was on a mission to educate me about the Doges and the Byzantine and Austrian empires, while my mind was on where to find earrings with tiny carnival masks.
We compromised: I would hear all about the Greek-cross-shaped 11th-century church on the isle of Torcello, but then we’d go for pizza; I’d take an interest in the origins of the Giudecca, but afterwards we’d head to that shoe shop where the labels said Venezia in golden letters. Many things we agreed on effortlessly: we both wanted to see the city spread out in miniature from the top of the Campanile, photograph each other on the Contarini del Bovolo spiral snail staircase and hop from vaporetto to traghetto to ferry to cover as much of the lagoon as possible. I remember sun-filled days walking up and down endless bridges and alleys, following my dad’s expertly unfolded and refolded map; gesturing to waiters to communicate the idea of an Austrian Eiskaffee with milk and whipped cream, then staring at an espresso with two ice cubes in a glass; standing on the roof of St Mark’s Basilica and looking down at the competing orchestras of the two grand cafés… It was the first of many visits to Venice and the one that stays most in my memory.
NOSTALGIA IN KATHMANDU
Rick Jordan, Chief Sub-Editor
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A post shared by Nepal Tourism Board (@nepaltourism) on Jan 26, 2019 at 5:46pm PST
I grew up in the shadow of Nepal, without ever stepping foot in the Himalayas. My parents lived there from the mid-1960s; my father having been posted to Kathmandu for four years with the British Council. After a chance meeting with Ed Hillary at a cocktail party in 1968, he and my mother ended up trekking to the remote hillside schoolhouses that the mountaineer had founded as a thank you to the Sherpa people, and reporting back on them. It was a defining experience for my father and he returned several times over the years, catching up with old friends and running education courses, as well as amassing a teeteringly large collection of books on Nepal that gradually took over much of our Manchester home, joining prayer wheels, wooden drums and – to a child – deeply mystifying Buddhist thangkas, the demon-filled paintings of the wheel of life. Finally, in 2010, I was able to travel to Kathmandu with my father. He was unwell, and it would be his last journey to Nepal, but we were able to explore the city at a slow pace, staying amid the atmospheric cloisters of Dwarika’s hotel, where musicians play in the evening, and the manager twirled an impressive sergeant-major’s moustache. We tracked down the place where my parents had lived in the 1960s, and were invited in for tea by the family living there. There were forays out to the temples of Durbar Square and Bhaktapur; circling around the prayer wheels and flags of the Boudhanath Stupa, treading carefully in the burning ghats, and driving upwards to see the dark flanks of Everest through the clouds. Throughout the trip there was a peculiar feeling of familiarity with a place I was seeing for the first time, but also a sense of wonderment, and an understanding of why my father had first fallen for the country all those years ago.
A CLASSIC CALIFORNIA ROAD TRIP
Issy von Simson, Deputy Editor
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A post shared by visitcalifornia (@visitcalifornia) on Jan 25, 2019 at 5:34pm PST
My father took me, my brother and my sister on the classic California road trip when we were teenagers. We started in LA. Our eyes were out on stalks in Hollywood. We kicked off by staying at the palm-print confection that is the Beverly Hills Hotel, where every cabana by the pool was taken up by a businessman in his swimming trunks barking orders to the office into a phone the size of a suitcase. We then set off up the Pacific Coast Highway towards foggy San Francisco. As kids, we were allowed to choose where we stopped each night so I selected an entirely revolting, entirely pink motel with circular beds and satin sheets. My brother cleverly picked a much less seedy lodge in the Carmel Valley. We saw seals, hit Universal Studios and Six Flags, visited the Santa Barbara beach house my father lived in when he was at UCL, shopped ravenously in Gap and Virgin Records (this was the 1990s) and feasted on the American Dream.
DRIVING UP THE WEST COAST OF IRELAND
Gráinne McBride, Deputy Chief Sub-Editor
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A post shared by Old Ground Hotel (@oldgroundhotel) on Jan 15, 2019 at 12:11pm PST
Ireland might seem like a small country, but with four young children, a summer’s worth of suitcases and a slightly overweight golden Labrador in tow, it still takes two days to travel its length. At least that’s how long it took my parents in the 1980s when, after grumbling and whining about who was sitting next to who, my brothers and sister and I were squeezed into the estate wagon and driven from our home in the south-west corner of Kerry to my Dad’s native north-west Donegal.
The foodie treats along the way are what I remember most: chips for dinner at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis; 99s on the seafront in Salthill; pink-striped rock at the amusement park in Bundoran. After endless hours on the road, the final twisty-turny stretch from Donegal town to Gweedore always seemed to take the longest, and at least one of us children was inevitably crying or car sick (too much rock). But just when it felt like we were reaching critical family meltdown, Dad would point out his cousin’s bookshop, with its colourful sign in the lovely curling letters of Old Irish, and two minutes later we were pulling up at the big, beautiful house where he grew up. He’d turn to us all with his huge, ginger moustache of a smile and we knew that he didn’t mind those two days at the steering wheel one bit.
SKIING IN CHAMONIX
Tabitha Joyce, Online Content Editor
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A post shared by Chamonix-Mont-Blanc (@chamonixmontblanc) on Feb 21, 2019 at 5:15am PST
My mum has always hated skiing(I mean really hated skiing), while my dad loves nothing more. And so it’s a trip my brothers and I are lucky enough to have made year after year. Chamonix is probably our favourite spot because there are so many different ski areas to discover: Argentière, packed with serious skiiers, here to explore the glacier – this isn’t really a resort known for its après; Les Houches, the pretty tree-lined slopes that are more family-friendly on days when it’s hard to see the snow from the sky; and Mont Blanc where you’ll find climbers roped together and no pisted runs at all. The best bit is that Chamonix is the closest ski resort to Geneva (just over an hour’s drive) and so it makes for a great long weekend trip. You don’t need to be an expert to enjoy the adventurous side of Chamonix but it certainly helps. Meanwhile I’m still trying to keep up with my 60-something father…
EATING OUT IN FLORENCE
Katharine Sohn, PA to the Editor in Chief
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A post shared by Umberto (@udissenha) on Jul 23, 2018 at 4:15pm PDT
My father came to visit me while on a business trip, which happened to fall on his birthday, as I was studying in Florence for a year. It was an easy excuse for him to say he was ‘visiting me’ and make a weekend out of eating pasta and gelato for three days straight. It was also an excuse for me to show off the city I called home. The weather in Florence during the winter months isn’t quite as lovely as on a spring day with blossoming glicine (wisteria) and Florentine iris, but there are hardly any tourists. So my father came for a perfect rainy weekend to empty Florence: views of the Duomo were unobstructed, the Ponte Vecchio had only a few bobbing heads on it and we could feast at our favourite restaurant on Via Parioncino.
My parents actually visited this trattoria when they got married in the 1980s and it hadn’t changed a bit – they welcomed us with open arms. The space consists of a few long sharing tables covered in tissue-like tablecloth, ancient spinning ceiling fans and black-and-white photographs of the family owners, with aromas of the food cooking away in the kitchen.
Within minutes of sitting down, my father ordered his go-to: warm red house wine in a glass carafe, bland but purposeful Tuscan bread with a large plate of spicy olive oil as yellow as Van Gogh’s sunflowers, al dente rigatoni con ragù (when peas are in season, during a short month in spring, they also do farfalle con piselli) and thinly sliced veal as a main. I had pappa al pomodoro (a mush of stale bread and tomato sauce doused in that thick spicy olive oil), bites of my father’s pasta and an extra-large plate of fresh vegetables, again all drenched and dripping in glorious, shiny oil and squeezes of citrusy lemon. Dessert here is always the fluffiest tiramisu, fresh strawberries or cherries from the market and a couple of cantucci dipped in Vin Santo. Coco Lezzone, which means ‘dirty chef’, is a quiet gem in a city filled with excellent food. It still feels like a secret kept between me and my dad.
A TRAIN JOURNEY IN INDIA
Teddy Wolstenholme
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A post shared by TheImperial, New Delhi (@imperialdelhi) on Jul 13, 2018 at 8:44pm PDT
The best part of four decades ago, India stole my father’s heart. On his gap year, he’d backpacked his way around the country, the clothes on his back and the travel guide in his pocket virtually his only possessions. And he’d been pining to bring us back, to show us the places he’d been to. We spent one wonderful night at the Imperial in Delhi, with its comfortingly manicured lawns and smiley staff in starchy colonial uniforms. More than enough time, we were told, to acclimatise to the blistering heat, the smells, the blur of bright saris and crimson turbans.
And then we arrived, bleary-eyed and shell-shocked, on a train platform. We waited to board the sleeper train to Varanasi, cursing my father for dragging us there. We clambered over piles of comatose sleeping bodies, entire-families-thick, who seemed oblivious to the deafening bleating of tuk-tuks, the moos of a wayward cow ambling across the tracks, the heckling of vendors drifting up and down, up and down, flogging tiny trinkets and corn on the cob.
In our cramped, uncomfortable cabin, we didn’t sleep; men paced the aisle with tooth-rottingly sweet cups of chai, women rattled on the windows holding up their doe-eyed, begging children. Other passengers stared intently. And then, through the morning haze, we arrived in the sepia-coloured world of India’s holiest and most magical city, and suddenly our night on the train became just a rehearsal for all that was to come. It was unforgettable, incredibly humbling, and a trip I’ll always thank my father for.
Text by Condé Nast Traveller.
