Sure there were theme hotels before Hard Rock Hotels came on the scene, but they were built for eight year olds. Remember back in the 1980s when Letterman was hip, MTV was about music, and everyone was wearing Hard Rock Bangkok and London t-shirts? A brand was born and it just keeps getting Harder.
Steps from London’s Paddington Station on a discreet side street with a nondescript white door, metrogolf feels almost like a private members club. Actually, it’s an funky venue for special events mixing business and golf, even on rainy days. If you’ve never hit a golf ball before, this is the place to start.
When the126-room Mansion on Forsyth Park opened in Savannah in 2005 at the historic city’s best address, it turned a few heads. Where were the antiques? What about the period art and linens? This doesn’t look old, people gasped, in a city where historic preservation is religion.
Out with the old and in with the new. That’s the mindset of Fort Lauderdale, with sparkling new high-rise hotels lining up cozily along the beach, including the four-diamond Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort. The all-suite property opened in 2007, filling the need for mid-size meetings in a new, upscale resort hotel by the sea.
Together, Puerto Vallarta and neighboring Riviera Nayarit combine for the most active and adventurous meetings/incentive destination in Mexico. Planners have access to the highest mountains along the Pacific coast and the deepest waters in Banderas Bay, superb for fishing and diving. The best part is the region has strived to protect local culture, where visiting groups can avoid the honky tonk hubris if they want to.
If Mismaloya Bay looks familiar to people of a certain age, it’s because Richard Burton and Ava Gardner filmed John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana here, just south of Puerto Vallarta, while Burton’s paramour Elizabeth Taylor waited in the wings. If you squint really hard or have a few too many fruity drinks while watching this flic, you’ll swear you see Gardner shaking her maracas at a couple of brown-bodied cabana boys.
Western Colorado’s mighty mountain landscapes and rocky ravines are an outdoorsy playground for groups to kick out the jams and raise a sweat. Or sip some local Malbec around an old miner’s cabin overlooking a flowery meadow. There’s something to be said about the locals too. In Telluride and Grand Junction, people tend to be grounded, capable, down-to-earth sorts. They know how to enjoy life’s finer pleasures and they’re comfortable in a saddle. So come on in and sit a spell. The mid-rare Colorado lamb is warm and the smiles are warmer.
Certain activities stir the loins of men and women differently.
Some ladies for example get giddy shopping for Louboutins or La Perla. But get a guy behind the steering wheel of a high-powered exoticar and we as grown men, um, devolve. We’re five years old again. We make “wroom” sounds and we feel complete mastery over our inner speed demons.
Almost everyone is familiar with the image of the Texas badlands, that place out west of the Pecos where the flat, arid landscape shimmers in heatwaves emanating off the hot earth. Not so around Austin. This is Texas Hill Country—a decidedly more green and varied topography awash in rolling hills, warm water lakes and cypress forests.
When you imagine what life’s like in a Manhattan penthouse, you envision movie moguls and captains of industry staring at their recent Klimt purchase over a glass of ‘01 Petrus. Say hi to The Empire Hotel…