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Square Tower House at Mesa Verde National Park. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user BenFrantzDale.

Everyone knows what to see at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado: the cliff dwellings of the Pueblo people who occupied the Four Corners region from A.D. 600 to 1300. Soon, though, there will be good reason to stop at the entrance because the park is building a new Visitor and Research Center, scheduled to open late this year, that will give a state-of-the-art museum to its remarkable collection of archaeological artifacts, ethnographic material on the Native Americans of the Southwest and Santa Fe Indian School painting. Considered as a whole, it’s one of the oldest and biggest museums in the national park system.

Another one of its treasures is a collection of jewelry and ceramics given to Mesa Verde in the 1940s by architect Mary Jane Colter. Born in Pittsburgh in 1869, she attended the California School of Design in San Francisco, then went to create and decorate buildings for the Fred Harvey Company which ran shops, restaurants and hotels along the Sante Fe Railway. Among her masterworks are Hopi House, Lookout Studio, Hermit’s Rest and the Watchtower on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, all stunning examples of the American Arts and Crafts movement that take their inspiration from Hopi, Zuni and Navajo design, as well as Spanish-Mexican hacienda architecture. Between 1900 and 1940 Colter also worked on landmark train stations in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and Los Angeles.

At a time when women spent their time in the kitchen and parlor, Colter made her way in a man’s world, striding over construction sites and seeking artifacts all over the old Southwest, her hair in an untidy French roll, her radio tuned to a Mexican music station. On forays around the Four Corners region she collected baskets, jewelry and pots, while getting to know the Native American craftspeople who made them. She used most of the treasures she found to decorate Harvey Company buildings, but kept some for herself, eventually retiring to Santa Fe where she died in 1958.

Colter was a close friend of the archaeologist Jesse L. Nusbaum, who excavated Mesa Verde’s Balcony House and served as the park’s superintendent from 1921 to 1946. So the museum there seemed to Colter a suitable home for her art.

But she never wanted the 530 pieces of jewelry she bequeathed to Mesa Verde to be known as the Mary Colter Collection. “I think she didn’t want it to be about her. She wanted it to be about the artists,” said curator Tara Travis. Later some of Colter’s ceramics were added from the old Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.

When the new Visitor and Research Center opens at Mesa Verde, 30 Colter pieces will be on display, including a silver Navajo pin shaped like a biplane, heishi necklaces made of delicately strung shells, and tie slides carved from the vertebrae of cows and goats—all showing, as Travis explained, that “Colter had an interest in how artists used materials—shells, stones, turquoise and silver—and everyday objects to create works of art.”

The mastery of the Native Americans who made them should be overwhelmingly apparent. But I can’t think of it as anything other than the Mary Jane Colter Collection.

The prized Fliers' and Explorers' Globe at the American Geographical Society. Image courtesy of Susan Spano.

It isn’t the biggest, shiniest, most up-to-date and detailed globe in the world. But the American Geographical Society’s 18-inch Rand McNally Terrestrial Globe is doubtless the most precious because it was signed by 85 of the greatest explorers in modern times: from Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart to Neil Armstrong and John Glenn. Not only did they sign it when they got back from netherlands (and netherworlds), they charted their courses on it in wavering ink lines across oceans and continents.

The Fliers’ and Explorers’ Globe, as it’s called, sits beneath a dark cloth, like a covered bird cage, in the Brooklyn home of the AGS, the oldest national geographical organization in the U.S. Founded in 1851, the AGS devotes itself to geographical research and education, sponsoring expeditions, supporting studies and disseminating information to laypeople with a strong interest in geography. As such, it takes a somewhat more scholarly approach than the Washington, D.C.-based National Geographic Society, which tends to focus more on photography and popular geography.

The AGS may not publish glossy magazines and make television specials, but it has the prized globe, given to the society by John H. Finley, a former society president and editor in chief of the New York Times. Finley kept the globe in his office at the paper, inviting newsmakers back from the jungles and poles to sign it. In 1929 he gave the globe to the society, which continued the tradition up to the present day.

In April at the St. Petersburg home of the Russian Geographical Society, two more John Hancocks were added to the globe, those of Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman cosmonaut in 1963) and Alexei Leonov (a 1965 space walk pioneer). It was the first time the globe had been taken outside the U.S., making it far less well-traveled than its signers, for an occasion marking the 75th anniversary of Russian aviator Valery Chkalov’s pioneering transpolar flight from Moscow to Washington, D.C., in 1937. Chkalov died the following year, piloting a prototype fighter plane, but both his grandson and great-grandson were on hand for the ceremony.

The U.S. and Russia have a surprisingly long history of geographical cooperation. In 1912 Russian scholars joined the 13,000-mile AGS Transcontinental Excursion; others later took part in the society’s Latin America mapping effort; more recently Russian geographer and businessman Mikhail Slipenchuk offered to underwrite the creation of 12 replicas of the Fliers’ and Explorers’ Globe, one of which now stands next to the original at the AGS in Brooklyn.

The exterior of the Hotel Astoria in St. Petersburg. Courtesy of the hotel.

This year the Hotel Astoria celebrates its 100th anniversary in St. Petersburg, Russia. I’m celebrating, too, because I got to stay there one white winter shortly after it was purchased and refurbished by the British hotelier Sir Rocco Forte in 1997. Other grand hotels may be more famous, but the Astoria holds its own place of pride among them.

A Russian icon in the Art Nouveau style on St. Isaac’s Square near the Neva River, the Astoria evokes a Belle Epoque world of grand dukes, ballerinas and Fabergé eggs. Everyone from Rasputin to Isadora Duncan stayed there, drinking tea from gold-rimmed teacups made by the czar’s favorite Lomonosov porcelain factory or swilling Russian Standard vodka at its velvet and wood-lined Kandinsky Bar.

All that was swept away by the Bolshevik Revolution, but the hotel soldiered on. Lenin gave a speech from its balcony in 1919 and during World War II Hitler planned to mark the city’s surrender in the Astoria, though Leningrad endured the 900-day German siege, proving the Führer premature.

The Astoria is sumptuous in an Old World way, not over-the-top like other modernized grand hotels, with soaring, chandelier-bedizened ceilings, voluminous swagged drapes, vanilla ice cream-colored molding and red-carpeted staircases. My room had a foyer separated from the sleeping chamber by etched-glass doors and a hand-embroidered bedspread, blissfully quiet even though its window looked directly over busy St. Isaac’s Square. There I watched snow coat the gold dome of the cathedral, sat reading Robert K. Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra or dressed for the ballet at the nearby Mariinsky Theatre.

The library of the hotel.

As part of the centennial celebration, special boxes at the Mariinsky are available to hotel guests, and jazz evenings return to the Astoria, a tradition begun in the 1920s. If you go, please raise a Russian Standard on the rocks in at the Kandinsky Bar. I’ll be doing the same in spirit.

Palace of the Winds in Jaipur, India. Image courtesy of Flickr user lapidim.

Did anybody else see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel over the Memorial Day weekend? Somebody must have because the film, which opened on May 4, continues to do well at the box office, and that’s compared with a slew of big-budget blockbusters—Men in Black 3, Battleship, The Avengers—that have come along since then. Marigold’s popularity has been credited to John Madden, who also directed Shakespeare in Love, and to its 24-karat gold cast, including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson and Bill Nighy, all of them over 60. (The film is based on These Foolish Things, a novel by Deborah Moggach about a group of English oldsters who move to a retirement hotel in India.) But the movie’s reception is also seen as proof that there’s a market for movies about people who aren’t young and beautiful, just interesting—as are the characters in Marigold, coping with end-of-life transitions in a drastically foreign place.

And let’s not forget another major factor in Marigold’s success: India, specifically the western state of Rajasthan, long a favorite with travelers for its mighty hill forts, bedizened palaces, teeming markets and lost desert villages. The hotel in the book—Moggach called it the Dunroamin—is located in the dreamy lake city of Udaipur, though the movie was filmed in Jaipur to the north. I recognized the setting immediately because I began a tour of Rajasthan there ten years ago.

It was in Jaipur—known as the Pink City for the color it was painted when England’s Prince Albert came to visit in 1876—that I learned how to take wild rides in auto-rickshaws without fear, tasted my spinach paneer at a vegetarian restaurant downtown, climbed to Amber Palace built by Raja Man Singh in 1592, and had a fine gin and tonic in the style of Prince Albert at the Polo Bar in the Rambagh Palace Hotel, where the Maharani of Jaipur lived until 1957. And I only have to look as far as my bedroom to remember a daylong shopping expedition aimed at finding the perfect quilted cotton spread, decorated in woodblock prints, a specialty in Jaipur. Mine is in shades of blue—soft and beautiful, albeit somewhat threadbare now.

I went on from there to Udaipur, the Jain temple complex at Ranakpur, Kumbhalgarh Fort and Jaisalmer, the last Thar Desert outpost before the Pakistani border. But Jaipur remains most deeply etched in my memory, which is why I took so much pleasure in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The $13 ticket price is a small amount to pay for a trip to Rajasthan.

A few old honeymoon hotels linger on in the Pennsylvania Poconos. Image courtesy of Susan Spano.

No place tells the whole quirky story of American vacationing better than the Poconos, a region of hills and vales on the west bank of the Delaware River about 100 miles from both Philadelphia and New York City. The history is well covered in Better in the Poconos, by Lawrence Squeri, describing the area’s birth as a rustic family resort in the 19th century and later catering to specific clienteles with hotels for Jews, Italians, Catholics, Quakers, African-Americans, singles, even trade unions. The advent of highways and the family car made the area all the more accessible to urbanites in search of modestly priced country pleasures, and then came World War II, which changed the game in the Poconos. In its aftermath, just-married veterans arrived with their brides, bringing new celebrity to the Poconos as “the honeymoon capital of the world.”

Rudolf Von Hoevenberg’s The Farm on the Hill was the first resort for honeymoon couples; opened in 1945, it offered constant group activities—get-acquainted parties, hayrides, volleyball—for newlyweds still unused to each other. By 1960 the Poconos rivaled Niagara Falls as a honeymoon destination, attracting over 100,000 couples a year who arrived with freshly minted marriage licenses and slightly wilted bouquets.

But times change, as do social norms. Before long people without licenses started knocking at the door and the rules were relaxed to accommodate them, gradually turning wholesome old mom-and-pop-style honeymoon resorts into hot spots for couples, with lots of libidinous trimmings.

Enter the heart-shaped bathtub, invented by one Morris Wilkins who’d served as an electrician on a submarine during World War II. He partnered up with a friend in 1958 to buy an 18-room hotel on Lake Wallenpaupack and proceeded to convert it into Cove Haven, a couples resort with new bells and whistles. According to Morris’ nephew, Doug Wilkins, who still works as a manager at the resort, the renovators focused immediately on the bathrooms, feeling that they could use some “livening-up.” Morris drew the plan for the first heart-shaped tub in his basement, then found a local company to make a mold and install them.

“He was a great entrepreneur,” Doug told me, “and all the stars were aligned. It was on the cusp of the sexual revolution; the whole thing was very avant-garde.”

Some bridal magazines rejected Cove Haven advertising because they thought it too racy. When Life magazine arrived in 1969 to shoot a two-page spread of a couple spooning in a heart-shaped tub surrounded by mirrors, the photographer could only keep himself out of the picture by using the camera’s timer function. The image testified to what Life called an era of “affluent vulgarity” in America, which of course only made heart-shaped bathtubs more popular.

Too bad Morris didn’t get a patent. Pretty soon all the couples resorts in the Poconos had to have them. Undaunted, Morris went on to create seven-foot champagne glass whirlpools, still a top-of-the-line amenity at Cove Haven and its sister resorts Paradise Stream and Pocono Palace, among the last remaining couples resorts in the Poconos, now owned by Starwood.

Yes, even love pales as a vacation theme in America. Outmaneuvered by more exotic honeymoon places, the Poconos has mostly moved on, though weddings and anniversaries are still big business. The regional visitors bureau has lately focused on marketing the area as a natural destination for skiers, hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts, and after much local resistance, gambling arrived there a few years ago, transforming the site of the old Mount Airy Lodge, opened in 1898, into the Mount Airy Casino Resort.

But as I discovered on a trip through the Poconos a few weeks ago, there’s still a sign that says “You Are Entering the Land of Love” on the driveway leading to Pocono Palace and room for two in a heart-shaped tub.