Category Archives: New York Times

February 3, 2008

MARIN COUNTY, just north of San Francisco, cradles wealthy bedroom communities in picturesque bays. But nearly half of the county’s 520 square miles is protected open space — bucolic and wild, its tiny towns separated by forested mountains.

It is the kind of landscape, with miles of well-maintained trails, that people travel across the globe to traverse — to Wales, say, or the Cinque Terre. But Marin, particularly its western reaches, offers something for anyone spry enough to walk a mile or two, on any budget. (more…)

January 20, 2008

Until recently, San Francisco’s Japantown had been suffering from a lingering neglect. Even anchors, like the 1960s-era Miyako Hotel, were rundown. So the conversion of the Miyako into the Hotel Kabuki by the boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre — an overhaul finished in November — is a milestone for the neighborhood.

Read it on the NYT site…

Dec 28, 2007

“HEY there’s no schwag!” my wife, Nina, exclaimed from the bathroom of our room at the Gaia Napa Valley Hotel.

The Gaia, which advertises itself as “Napa Valley’s first fully environmentally sustainable hotel,” has eschewed the tiny plastic bottles of lotion, shampoo and conditioner, instead using wall-mounted dispensers. I breathed a sigh of relief that neither the collection in our bathroom at home nor the infamous raft of plastic garbage in the middle of the Pacific, which I imagine to consist largely of hotel amenities, would grow larger from this stay. (more…)