Travel Report

In the last couple of weeks I've been to Florida with my lady friends (our 25th year of fall travel), to the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and the the Algonquin in New York City. Fun, but I'm glad to be back home!

Our ladies group consists of eight lawyers wives. It all started when our husbands, law partners, took clients on a weekend fishing trip to Biloxi, Mississippi and we wives, in retaliation, decided to take a trip of our own. We've visited Charleston, Savannah, Deleware (Winterthur and Longwood Gardens), Sturbridge, the Hudson Valley (Kikut), Lake Placid, South Texas, among others. This year we rented a house in Watercolor in the panhandle of Florida - near Destin. Beautiful beaches and good food. Our husbands have all either moved to other firms or retired and don't do their fishing trip anymore, but we are still taking advantage of the time to catch up, see some beautiful scenery, shop and eat.

The Broadmoor is beautiful and the Colorado Springs area has a lot to offer. The Colorado Springs Art Museum has an unmatched collection of Dale Chihuly glass art - spectacular! And Manitou Springs has cave dwellings and a delightful and different kind of hippie culture mixed with tourist trappings. The chapel at the Air Force Academy is a cultural experience not to be missed.

New York is always exciting and it was fun to imagine Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley et al in the Algonquin, even though the hotel has been renovated. The rooms are still about as big as a good-sized closet, but the hall wallpaper is made up of New Yorker cartoons and a quote from one of the Roundtable regulars appears daily on each hotel room door. Have a drink in the lounge (I recommend the "Parker", but more than one might kill you). Give the dining room a miss.

We tried for tickets to "The Jersey Boys" which I saw in San Francisco and loved, but they were sold out except for premium seats at $320 each. We settled for "The Fantasticks", written by two home-grown Texans (and University of Texas ex-students) that we saw maybe 40 years ago. Tom Jones (one of the play's authors - not the British singer) appeared in the part of the old actor. The production was in the Snapple Theater a small and pretty grubby venue and was about half full. But the fantasy and the music still charms. I'm still singing "Try to Remember" and "Plant a Radish" in my head a week later.