A Life in Cinema, Split Between New York and Nantucket

In anticipation of this year’s Nantucket Film Festival, accessible by Tradewind with daily scheduled flights and private charters to the island, we sat down with Executive Director Mystelle Brabbée to talk past, present, and future of the acclaimed film showcase.

In the Oscar-nominated 2015 film Brooklyn, a young Irishwoman walks New York streets longing for the salt air and village life of her childhood in County Wexford. In the spirit of movies, storytelling, drama, and character, it’s easy to ascribe similar romantic yearnings to Mystelle Brabbée – needing only to substitute windswept Nantucket for Enniscorthy, Ireland.

A Brooklyn resident herself, Brabbée has been executive director of the Nantucket Film Festival since 2012, and she’s curated the festival program for a total for 16 years. Blond and athletic-looking, with a style both humble and intense, Brabbée annually spends the last week of June like the main character in the final reel of a blockbuster action flick, striving for all manner of happy endings as a year’s preparation unspools over six exciting days.

Plenty of New Yorkers split time between the city and Nantucket, but do any of them bring their work out to the island in such a climactic – not to mention high-pressure – fashion? It seems not, and as the late spring days keep NFF staffers working late, Brabbée falls into a mood akin to what Emerson must have felt when he wrote that “the air of Nantucket comes into your face and eyes as though it were glad to see you.”

In the run-up weeks before this year’s 23rd edition of the event, she indeed confessed to a bout of Nantucket fever. “It’s the same every year at this time,” she says. “I can’t wait to walk away from this desk, leave the city behind, and get out to the island.”

Its physical beauty and sensory effects were a revelation when Brabbée first visited Nantucket, during college. “I grew up in Colorado, and at the time I was studying at NYU, so I had never seen anything like it,” she says. “There was a sweetness and softness to the air that was all new to me.” As others have reported, she experienced the odd sensation of standing on solid ground yet feeling she was far out at sea.

If you’re an enthusiastic moviegoer and have not yet attended this festival, make a note to do so. The brother-sister duo of Jon and Jill Burkhart founded it and have guided the operation through nearly two dozen seasons, with Brabbée’s competence giving them an opening to step back. “For a festival of this prominence to be family-operated is unique,” Brabbée notes. “Over the years I guess I became part of that family, which extends to all our patrons and our filmmakers, too.” And indeed she did become an honorary Burkhart, according to Jill, who first hired Brabbée as a volunteer and soon offered her a staff role in programming.

“Mystelle said yes to my offer and we just went from there,” Burkhart says. “She is the longest-tenured staff member of NFF, and that’s owing to her combination of talent and knowledge – and especially to her passion. I sleep easy at night knowing she’s there running the show.”

Many of the moviemakers premiering their work on the island have returned again and again, including writer-director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone and the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone). “Debra’s entire career has been connected to and supported by our festival,” says Brabbée. “That’s one of the great things about being around so long.”

Few, if any, film fests are as inviting and walkable as Nantucket. And while it’s not the only such event with a heavy schedule of forums and presentations, it can claim a particularly inclusive mood to its programs. “This year we’re taping live with National Public Radio – their “Ask Me Another” Saturday show,” says Brabbée. “We’ll also have a Q&A session with Noah Baumbach, Adam Driver, and Ben Stiller.” If you’re attending for the first time, you will surely relish the anybody-can-talk-to-anybody atmosphere this gathering fosters.

The Burkharts, who as kids moved to Nantucket from (where else?) Brooklyn when their parents made a somewhat impulsive lifestyle reboot, envisioned a festival atmosphere in keeping with the island’s high-season escapism. “From the beginning, we likened it to summer camp,” recalls Jill Burkhart. “All it needed to succeed was people who love film, love this place, and want to share the intimacy and the storytelling.”

She recalls a night during year three when a young filmmaker screened his movie, spoke with audience afterward, and noticed one couple particularly taken by the film and its auteur both. “It so happened he’d never had a lobster dinner, and these folks said they had to fix that, so they took him out for lobster,” she says. “That wouldn’t happen at Sundance or Toronto or any big-city festival.”

Historic preservation is tantamount to a religion on Nantucket, dating back to the 1950s and Walter Beinecke Jr., who was heir to the S&H Green Stamps fortune and a devotee of classic island architecture and anti-commercialism. When the festival celebrated its 20th anniversary, Brabbée and her team sketched a design for classy-looking canvas signs that would hang from street lamps throughout the town’s cobblestone-paved center. They were informed that their signs were, ahem, against ordinances.

“The NFF is a commercial enterprise, so we’ll come up with plans and ideas that any business would,” says Brabbée. “Now and gain we run into prohibitions. The same preservation ethic that keeps the island so pristine can derail some of our plans. You learn to adjust.”

Asked to search through her long tenure and find a few festival moments that stand out, she at first stumbles, as too many memories flood in. Then she recounts the screening of Life, Animated, an award-laden documentary based on a father’s account of his autistic son’s obsession with Disney animated films – and how that fixation became a doorway for the boy’s dramatic progress in regaining speech and other capacities.

The filmmaker, Roger Ross Williams, provided background on the story and its central figure, Owen Suskind. Also in attendance was renowned composer Stephen Schwartz, author of so many familiar tunes in the Disney animation songbook. “Stephen played, and as he did the boy got up on stage and sang,” recalls Brabbée. “We plan and prepare all year, then something amazing will happen on its own.”

When the last ferry sails and the last flight out departs, ideas for the next year’s festival can begin to percolate. “Our fundamental value, the thing that guides us,” Brabbée says, “is the importance and the craft of storytelling – and in fact the joy of it.”

That idea resonates from Brooklyn to Nantucket and surely around the world. On occasion, like the evening a profoundly autistic boy stepped onstage to sing, the story will unfold right in front of you.

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The 23rd Annual Nantucket Film Festival will be held June 20 – 25.

All photos courtesy of the Nantucket Film Festival.

The Highest Standards in the Sky

The pilot of a plane nearing O’Hare Airport announces its “final descent into the greater Chicago area,” and the grammar mavens on board all wince. The error there is redundancy—either “greater Chicago” or “the Chicago area” would suffice.

Adam Schaefer speaks in very literate English, but the Director of Operations for Tradewind Aviation might just shrug that one off. Not simply because Schaefer is a pilot, himself, but out of his deep bias toward what redundancy means for aviation safety.

“Redundancy in our business is everywhere you look,” he says. “We don’t even perceive it the way people outside the industry might, as something excessive or burdensome. To us it’s fundamental.”

In aircraft design the mechanical functions all have backup systems. In pre-flight protocols like the one Tradewind follows, a plane is inspected by mechanics, then by the pilots. “Our scheduling software has 100 validation checks,” says Schaefer, who is both a pilot and a licensed mechanic, “and those checks have double-checks.” Certain safety factors are the responsibility of a dispatcher, then a software programmer, then the chief pilot. “You see things caught at the third level,” Schaefer says. “It’s rare but it happens.”

The Federal Aviation Administration has two sets of regulations covering private aviation. Companies that fly scheduled routes as well as charters are held to higher standards than their charter-only counterparts. This two-tier arrangement plays out in everything from financial fitness to the seniority and experience level of inspectors, according to Schaefer. Nor does he question the premise.

“The idea, as I understand it, is that someone buying a single seat on a scheduled flight will feel less need for diligence and scrutiny than someone booking a charter,” Schaefer says. “Chartering planes is so relatively uncommon that people who do it will take steps to check things out on their own. Therefore, if your company offers scheduled flights the safety responsibility is more on you.”

Tradewind provides both scheduled and charter service because it’s a more efficient use of company assets and resources—a better business model, for the markets being served. That causes a higher set of safety standards to kick in, and the company would hardly seem to mind, because it actually goes one step further and subjects itself to monitoring by a third-party inspection service. And pays for the privilege.

That independent party is ARGUS International, recognized for its authoritative rating system for aircraft operators and their safety history. Tradewind participates in ARGUS CHEQ (which stands for Charter Evaluation and Qualification) and has attained the status of ARGUS Gold, indicating a safety history in the upper tier of the industry. “You provide them with a very extensive body of data when you register,” explains Schaefer. “ARGUS knows our pilots, our aircraft, the whole company, really. They produce an overall safety score for us based on a wide range of factors.”

Part of the double-check and triple-check culture at Tradewind involves monitoring the monitor, so to speak. Recently there was a tarmac accident that reportedly caused damage to a Tradewind aircraft. “That turned out to be incorrect, and a staff member at our operations center flagged it,” recalls Schaefer. “The plane involved had a similar tail number to one of our planes, and it was misidentified by a couple of digits. Within an hour the correction was made.”

The safety history compiled by Tradewind since it began operations is truly remarkable. The company has such a clean record that some combination of modesty and superstition might induce Schaefer not to talk about it. But either sentiment would cloud or obscure the patterns, standards, and procedures that a culture of safety is built upon.

“What we’ve done most recently to institutionalize our practices is develop and release our own, proprietary SMS, or Safety Management System,” says Schaefer. “Major carriers are required to do this, but we’ve chosen to do it on our own. It’s a way of moving farther up the timeline from what is considered an event and getting to the precursors—the circumstances that could lead to a problem down the line.”

Safety in the air is the product of endless small details. For every little fastener holding the plane together, there is a specification for its size, for the material it’s plated with, for the lubricant applied to its threads before torquing, for the torque (tightness) value, and a spec for where, in sequence, that particular fastener gets tightened.

But along with being exact and unyielding, safety aloft is also fuzzy, according to Schaefer. How is that?

“Safety is a feeling, it’s a general perception,” he says. “We find that the more people fly with us, the less they even think about safety.” Interestingly, safety practices at Tradewind extend to the purely cosmetic, such as cabin cleanliness and sharp-looking uniforms worn by the crew. “At some level of consciousness, people associate soiled carpeting and worn upholstery with low standards overall,” Schaefer says, “including a lax approach to safety. So, if we take great cosmetic care of the plane, it stands to reason we also take great mechanical care.”

He can say that again.

Boston Searches for a Seaport Neighborhood

The architect of New York’s sublime Whitney Museum and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Renzo Piano, once said of his major design projects that, “Each time, it is like life starting all over again.”

An inspiring notion, and yet cities with limited space for large-scale development don’t often get that fresh start. In Boston—the daily destination of Tradewind’s NY-BOS shuttle—urban planners and elected officials are studying their nearly completed Seaport mega-project and asking what contribution it will make to the city’s identity.

In particular is the question of whether this 1,000-acre micro-metropolis within the South Boston Waterfront fulfills the mandate expressed by another celebrated architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who once said: “All fine architectural values are human values—otherwise not valuable.”

Not long ago the company that owns one of the project’s final puzzle pieces, a 23-acre parcel called Seaport Square, began publicly discussing design and development plans. An industry journal made note that the company, WS Development, was best known for building successful outdoor malls in the Boston suburbs—perhaps a dubious qualification in this instance. Seaport Square, the publication wrote with a note of urgency, “represents the last chance for the district to save itself from becoming a sea of generic office and condo buildings, and a playground only for those who can afford it.”

It inspires compassion—and perhaps mirth—when a major city undergoes its most traumatic growing pains 400 or so years after its founding. But Boston always resisted the notion of growth based on packing the skyline with steel-and-glass towers. For the old town to tear itself apart and basically grind to a halt during the 20-year ordeal of the Big Dig took fortitude and even fearlessness, but that project was all about roads, tunnels, and bridges. The infamous Dig was really a grid rebuild, centered on removal of a brutal, dysfunctional elevated highway inflicted upon us during the Eisenhower Interstate era—and blessedly gone from the streetscape as of 2004.

Courtesy of the Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism

Once that urban engineering miracle was pulled off, America’s most venerable city started to feel its oats and get more global in its ambitions—eyeing Southie’s vast parking lots and crumbling railroad piers and sketching out a vision of tech-meets-commerce at what would become the Seaport—along the way even luring General Electric to become a prime tenant.

In point of fact, the Seaport has been a global proposition in more than ways than one. Russell Preston, a Boston-based architect and urban-planning specialist, says the $12 billion in Big Dig investment that miraculously connected South Boston to Logan Airport via underwater tunnel, plus several billion more in public infrastructure, attracted the attention of investor groups worldwide. These institutions and syndicates, seeing opportunity on the horizon, brought necessary private capital. However, their geographic dispersion and fixation on financial return would unintentionally subvert neighborhood-building as an element of the project.

“From the beginning there has been intense focus on turning those old South Boston parking lots and abandoned wharfs into buildings, such that people failed to recognize the potential of the spaces in between,” says Preston. “There’s a shift now, late in the game, toward finding design elements that might be able to tie the various parts together, in hopes of creating a place people will come to love—a neighborhood with a true soul.”

During the world’s long, slow economic recovery post-2008, vast pools of financial capital gradually formed, and they’ve been competing for a limited array of high-return super-projects to fund, especially in the U.S. and Europe. As Preston explains, this has caused large-scale commercial real estate “to become commoditized and reduced to numbers on spreadsheets for pensions funds and other global capital sources to review, as investment instruments.”

In the locality where a mega-project’s towers will eventually rise, planners and officials can of course task themselves with injecting a sense of community and human connection into the finished product, he hastens to add. But that’s often easier said than done.

Preston helped establish the New England chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an architectural discipline committed to forging a beautiful balance between the built environment and human sensibilities. The woman credited with co-founding New Urbanism in the 1970s, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg, was one of Preston’s grad school professors at the University of Miami. The concept’s core tenets included reversing the sprawl-producing, automobile-centric approach that had overtaken planning, zoning, and construction in the U.S. The idea was to pivot toward walkable, human-scale, mixed-use projects and thereby create neighborhood-style patterns of life featuring chance encounters between people as they go about everyday life. The list of New Urbanist projects and districts is long and impressive, but as the years went by it hardly came to represent a revolution.

Courtesy of the Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism

“Why the New Urbanist view did not become the normal course of business for how we build our country is something that a lot of us would ask ourselves, on almost a weekly basis,” recalls Preston. But the CNU folks now pick their spots. Lately a sub-category called Tactical Urbanism has gained prominence, valued for how straightforward its executions can be.

“The term Tactical Urbanism refers to short, very quick interventions,” says Preston, “and it’s happening everywhere.”

An example can be found across the Charles River in Cambridge, where historic Brattle Street outside Harvard Square has a new bike lane created by moving curbside parking spaces several paces into the roadway and letting bikes have the newly created inner lane—when you park, you walk a few yards across it to put quarters in your meter.

Interestingly, while New Urbanism hasn’t become the rallying cry for municipalities and developers nationwide in the generation that it’s been around, enthusiasm for urban living has nonetheless mushroomed.

“Someone with my background and point of view is always going to want any new built environment like the Seaport to be the most vibrant neighborhood possible, and the place Bostonians most love to spend time,” says Preston. “But even if that doesn’t happen, the Seaport will still be a testament to the value of building new urban districts, even new cities altogether.” 

Spoken like someone who sees the next big urban development project as a thrilling example of life starting all over again.

*Featured image: John Hoey

Jim Remy’s Autumn Golf Tour through Vermont

Written by David Gould, a former Executive Editor of Travel + Leisure Golf who has authored several books on golf history and course architecture.

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On a map of New England you notice Vermont’s silhouette—narrow at the bottom and widening toward the top. That’s how it feels to any fall-foliage seeker motoring north, as the road opens up and the scale of the topography increases. If rather than drive you’ve booked a Tradewind flight—a private charter to the classic Vermont town of Stowe—the sense of anticipation will be similar and your views (from above) naturally grander.

Come autumn, trees and bushes here controvert the Green Mountain State nickname, flaring into yellow, orange, and red. Arriving to view the fiery results are vacationers of every sort, and yet it’s golfers who get the best of it. “Where you want to be is on an elevated tee somewhere along Route 100 in the first week of October,” says Vermont golf expert Jim Remy, “with the maples coming to peak and sunlight flooding the fairways.”

Jim Remy with Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush. Courtesy of The PGA of America.

Remy was a hotshot ski-racer kid who left his hometown in central Massachusetts after graduation and settled in the Vermont town of Ludlow, working at golf courses in the summer while waiting for the double-diamond trails to turn white again.

Despite not treating golf as his number one sport, Remy honed his game, turned professional, mastered the nuances of the golf business, rose ever higher in his peers’ estimation, and wound up as president of the PGA of America, a massive organization with 27,000 member pros and hundreds of millions in sponsorship contracts to manage. When his years of constant events and travel as a PGA officer ended, Jim was even more of a Vermonter than when he started.

“This is a part of the world where people tend not to overdo things,” Remy explains. “While golf was growing at an unhealthy rate elsewhere, Vermont was adding just the right type of courses and resorts, in just the right locations—mostly up and down Route 100, the old ‘Skier’s Highway.’ ”

Whatever Vermont highway you travel, you may see ‘Moose Crossing’ signs, but you don’t ever see billboards. Likewise, you see very few big-box stores. All part of not overdoing things—commercialism particularly. But the quaint towns come along reliably every 20 minutes or so, with their general stores, craft barns, antique shops, glassblowing studios, wood stove suppliers, and other “country things,” as Robert Frost referred to them.

Okemo Valley Golf Club. Courtesy of Okemo Mountain Resort. 

Remy’s base of operations, going back 20 years, is Okemo Mountain Resort and the Okemo Valley Golf Club. In 1997, the couple that owned the resort (the Mullers, who own it still), hired Remy to assemble a team that would build and manage a first-class golf amenity, making Okemo a four-season force to be reckoned with. Twice this decade, Okemo Valley has been anointed by Golf Digest as the Best Public Course in the state, and it has hosted major regional tournaments like the Vermont PGA and the New England PGA Senior Championship.

“It’s got a beautiful collection of par-3 holes,” says Remy, “and par-5s with a lot risk-versus-reward choices for the golfer to make.” At plenty of spots the errant shot bounces back into play, preserving the enjoyment factor—this on a course built at a time when brutal difficulty was in fashion across the golf landscape.

Okemo is nearly on the opposite, or southern, end of Route 100 from your Tradewind-served town of Stowe, where you find the fairways of The Golf Course at Stowe Mountain Club, a high-country layout designed by golf polymath Bob Cupp and built a dozen years ago. Vermont’s highest peaks, Mt. Mansfield and a neighboring bump called The Chin, are in full view for golfers nearly throughout the round. The course is a wonder of engineering, the way its fairways have been ramped onto hillsides and its greens perched on precipices. Pick the right afternoon and this place offers as much visual beauty as one can take and still swing a club.

Courtesy of Stowe Mountain Resort. 

To play Vermont National Country Club, located west of Stowe in South Burlington, you have to be a private-club member elsewhere. Have your own club’s professional call ahead and set things up so pay a Reciprocal Guest fee, then take your shots at this Jack Nicklaus-designed course that seems eminently playable but can very easily wind up playing you. The layout was carefully routed in respect of prevailing winds, which in the meadow-like confines of the Champlain Valley are dependable. Vermont National has 17 holes that run north-south and just one, the 10th, oriented east-west.

There is enough variety and novelty—a split fairway on No. 3, a shared green for holes 10 and 15—to make the course seem like a charmer rather than the taskmaster it really is. Between fairways of the early holes are lively swaths of bottlebrush, goldenrod, and even thick stands of cattail. 

Rutland Country Club, a citadel of Vermont golf history, looks and feels like a private enclave but opens its first tee to anyone who calls in advance and covers its $80 green fees. The ancient layout has good bones and fine character throughout. It opened in 1896 as a nine-holer and was expanded to 18 in 1928 by the under-appreciated course architect Wayne Stiles. With greens that are smooth and gospel-true—but only lightly contoured—it’s a course where you could show up with a hitchy putting stroke and perhaps make it well again.

No. 6 is where RCC begins doling out the distant views of Killington Peak, Ram’s Head, and all the various high points to the east. Putting out on the sixth you are soothed by the sound of a nearby falls. Other than a short, deep plunge to the green of the par-3 15th, the inward nine climbs steadily up the ridge until you hole out on lofty No. 16. From there it is down toward the creek again before a testy par-4 finishing hole with a curling fairway and a tucked green. 

Courtesy of Green Mountain National. 

With not too much travel time in between, you can play your next day’s round at Green Mountain National, which cuts merrily through noble woodland and packs a great variety of shotmaking challenges into its 6,500 yards. Course architect Gene Bates laid out his No. 8 hole at Green Mountain National as a bite-it-off dogleg to the left that punishes the greedy. On No. 16, you blast down a hill then have to thread your approach into a well-guarded green; it’s like a ski run you’ll want to turn around and scoot down again.

These courses all come with a nod of approval from our guide, Jim Remy, as do many smaller, lesser-known layouts—many of them family-owned. “You can take your autumn vacation here and divide it between the courses that are elite and the ones that are more humble,” he advises. “Whichever you choose on a given day, it’s still Vermont.”

6 East Coast Golf Getaways That Prove Rankings Don't Mean Everything

Written by David Gould, a former Executive Editor of Travel + Leisure Golf who has authored several books on golf history and course architecture.

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One evening I stood in a tavern among a group of well-traveled golf writers, talking shop. An avid golfer who had joined the conversation floated a query: After all the years and all the trips, which course is your favorite? He seemed puzzled by the answers, likely because “favorite” wasn’t taken to be synonymous with “famous” or “award-winning.” Instead we each named a very fine course we had developed a fondness for, where we’d met great people and enjoyed experiences we wouldn’t ever forget.

Golfers who aren’t fixated on rankings and ratings can develop an instinct for golf destinations that will suit their fancy. There’s nothing wrong with prestige and awards—you just don’t want to be a slave to them. What works best is when you have a hunch you’re going to love a certain golf experience, then you set off and discover your intuition was spot-on.

This collection of a half-dozen courses along the Eastern Seaboard—each worthy of a chartered golf getaway with Tradewind Aviation—does contain greatness. Yet it’s mainly a sixth-sense kind of list, blending elements of architecture, setting, scenery, and some kind of spirit that holds it all together.

Photo: Courtesy of Cabot Links / Evan Schiller

Cabot Cliffs, Inverness, Nova Scotia, Canada: We’re not breaking the intuition rule by including Cabot Cliffs, despite all the acclaim it’s received since coming online two years ago. That’s because the Canadian Maritimes are physically remote and their character is unassuming—you have to feel drawn there. Of course, having a chartered private jet fixes the remote part, delivering you to a jaw-dropping golf landscape overlaid with the strategic subtleties its designers, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, specialize in. They built one hole—the cliff-to-cliff par-3 No. 16—that no golfer has ever played without first photographing it. If you take this trip there is one place to stay, the Cabot Links Lodge—well-designed, comfortable, and just right for its time and place. Time your Nova Scotia getaway for midsummer and you can see classic MGs, Austin Healys, and Triumph TR6s, plus vintage motorcycles, at the Eighth Annual British Motoring Festival, July 14-16.

Photo: Nemacolin Woodlands Resort

Shepherd’s Rock, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, Farmington, PA:  You can be sure your sixth sense for sublime golf travel is working when you lock on to a course that isn’t even open yet. Beginning July 12, golf pilgrims can immerse themselves in the pure Pete Dye-ness of Shepherd’s Rock, the newest addition to this luxurious resort on 2,000 acres southeast of Pittsburgh. Modern earth-moving equipment can create landscape perfection; Dye understood this wasn’t desirable and spent a career making sure to exploit the quirks and peculiarities of natural terrain. There’s beauty throughout his courses, but never an overt glamour. Dye has a second course at Nemacolin, and the outdoor activities here are endless. For indoor enthusiasts, there’s a casino and multiple spas, plus a fine array of dining options.

Photo: Stowe Mountain Resort

Stowe Mountain Club, Stowe Resort, Stowe, VT: There’s nothing prettier than your own golf shot suspended in the air against a mountain vista on a long, downhill hole. This high-country course in the shadow of Mount Mansfield gives you several of those moments, most notably on the plunging par-3 16th. It took a design genius like Bob Cupp—he was a book illustrator and a master cabinet-maker, as well as a course architect—to wrangle this sloping, chasm-laced topography into 18 wonderfully playable holes. Lodge guests also have privileges at Stowe Country Club, built on more level ground but with wonderful views nonetheless. A summer highlight for locals and visitors is the Stoweflake Hot Air Balloon Festival, July 7-9; it’s a chance to see something almost as pretty as your golf shot, pinned against the ridgelines and peaks.

Note: Tradewind’s Ultimate Golf package can accommodate your entire trip to Stowe, thanks to a new partnership with Stowe Mountain Club. As part of a two-day getaway aboard an eight-person private charter, enjoy unlimited golf access to both Stowe Mountain Club and Stowe Country Club, luxury accommodations at Stowe Mountain Lodge with views of Mount Mansfield, group lunch at The Cottage at Stowe Mountain Club, curated gift bags, and four-packs of Lawson’s Sip of Sunshine local craft beer. For more information or to reserve, please contact kmohr@destinationhotels.com or 802-760-4703.

Photo: Courtesy of Keswick Hall & Golf Club / Ken May

Full Cry, Keswick Hall, Charlottesville, VA: The classic manor-style building on high ground with a green expanse of fairways spreading out below—there’s no combination of those two elements more pleasing than what you’ll find at this stylish resort in fox-and-hounds country outside the university town of Charlottesville. Full Cry (that’s hunt-club vernacular) is an original name for a golf course, and this layout is loaded with originality and character—again courtesy of Pete Dye. Inside the beautifully restored Italianate hostelry, Keswick Hall, are just 48 guest rooms, each individually decorated. The place was in shambles until Sir Bernard Ashley, widower of design queen Laura Ashley, arrived bearing capital and good taste in 1995. Present ownership has taken it far beyond what even his lordship had achieved.

Photo: Omni Grove Park Inn

The Omni Grove Park Inn, Asheville, NC: Artsy and outdoorsy, but still with traditional Southern graces, Asheville belongs on any summertime pleasure tour. Guests at the Grove Park Inn return each year for the golf, great dining, and country hospitality. Donald Ross, a Johnny Appleseed of superior course-building, laid out the beloved Omni Grove Park Inn links in 1926, when shovels and mules were all you had to sculpt with—natural, unforced contours are the result. And while the craft beer movement and its bespoke breweries have sprouted all across the country, few cities can compete with Asheville, a suds mecca with more breweries per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. There is no end of ways to explore its malty wonders, including a half-day bus tour with many a tasting stop. Cheers.

Photo: Courtesy of The Sea Pines Resort / Rob Tipton

Atlantic Dunes, The Sea Pines Resort, Hilton Head, SC: The concept of the resort golf community originated with Sea Pines, which retains a vague ‘60s-era imprint even as it continually updates and renovates itself. One of the courses was recently plowed under to make way for Atlantic Dunes, which opened last year and brought yet another round of acclaim to the course design group of Davis Love III (who as a player won the PGA Tour event at Sea Pines five times). Atlantic Dunes is visually sleek and stylish, with large greens, new and restored sand dunes, and little touches like crushed coquina shells and waving seaside grasses to frame the holes. For all the dozens of trips I’ve made to this resort, I’ve not yet had a chance to experience Atlantic Dunes. And yet I know instinctively that I would have a great time playing it.

*Featured Image: Nemacolin Woodlands Resort

Island Getaway Decision: Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard?

In meteorology, the term “heat island” describes the way cities get hotter—and stay hotter—than the suburbs or countryside surrounding them. In New York, during the steamy days of summer, this explains why you need to turn your sights to other islands—Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard being prime examples.

From either Westchester County Airport or Teterboro Airport, Tradewind flights can transport you to either of those alluring destinations off Cape Cod in just about an hour—wheels up to wheels down. You’ll have no TSA lines to slog through and all traffic jams are conveniently located 30,000 feet below.

So, okay, you’re sold on the idea—that was easy. But it leaves you with the choice of which island to book your flight to—and it’s a stimulating debate. Nantucket and the Vineyard (locals seldom include “Martha’s” in their toponym) actually have a yin-yang duality that seems to divide summer fun-seekers into two camps.

For cultural variety and more of a summer-revel vibe you would give the nod to MV. Visible on clear days from the Cape Cod town of Falmouth, Martha’s Vineyard makes sense, so to speak, to longtime Cape-goers.

For serenity, seclusion, and some one-percenter chic, punch your ticket to Nantucket. Even the shape of Nantucket Island—resembling the nose of an airplane pointed southwest and away from the mainland—befits what people say about its singular and separate feeling.

Although Nantucket is slightly larger in square miles, and has the ultimate cobblestone-paved port village, it doesn’t differ much from end to end. The Vineyard has many more villages and localities for you to see on a long bike ride, including Edgartown with its whaling-captain manses and just-so yacht club, Vineyard Haven with its boutique shopping and ferry-landing buzz, tucked-away Chilmark with its humble billionaires, and of course the historic town of Oak Bluffs, where gingerbread-style homes are passed down through the family trees of affluent, influential African-Americans. On the roadways connecting these hamlets you’ll pass farms and grazing pastures that may conjure thoughts of western Ireland.

Photo: Quinn Dombrowski

On a long bike ride down Nantucket roads, you’re more likely to experience a hypnotic descent into the simple beauty of pine trees, flower gardens, and narrow roads curving off into what must be idyllic properties. But keep riding out of town to the end of Polpis Road and prepare for panoramas of the bucolic Sankaty Head golf course and an inspiring lighthouse with a bold red stripe.

Year-round Vineyarders, like the online real estate entrepreneur David Lott, can sound dismissive when discussing Nantucket, due in good part to the “Beinecke factor.” That’s a reference to Walter Beinecke, a well-born New Yorker who almost single-handedly reinvented the island as an upscale haven for tourists and second-home owners in the mid-20th century. Beinecke spent childhood summers on Nantucket in the 1920s and ‘30s. It was then midway through a long, steady decline, never having replaced whaling as an economic base. The prim-and-pretty look that characterizes Nantucket today is based on building codes Beinecke pushed through, he being owner of most commercial properties and plenty of residences, too.

“There’s nothing wrong with weathered shingles, white trim, and picket fences covered in rambler roses,” comments Lott. “Martha’s Vineyard has those as well. But when it was done by fiat and it’s everywhere you look, well, it’s a little much.”

White Elephant

While the preservation process that unfolded on Nantucket may seem a bit firm-handed to a Vineyard devotee, to visitors it is delightfully welcome. Last summer was the first trip out there for Michael Corcoran, a New York publishing executive who reads a lot of history books and historical novels—including a recent run through whaling-industry chronicles.

“My wife and I thought about a trip to Martha’s Vineyard,” explains Corcoran, “but Nantucket always seemed that it was way out at sea, sort of unto itself.” The couple flew out to ACK—that’s not only the island airport’s abbreviation, but a code of sorts for Nantucket that shows up all over—and disappeared into luxury cottage accommodations at the famed White Elephant.

“It was 10 minutes by taxi from the airport to the start of our vacation, which turned out to be one of the most relaxing and fun trips I’ve ever been on,” he says. They rented a jeep, took boat trips, stared at seals basking en masse along the shore, and watched movies in the cottage at night. “You call the front desk and they deliver fresh popcorn while you’re watching your movie—that’s a nice touch,” recalls Corcoran.

The magic-carpet effect of a Tradewind flight from sultry New York to the fish shacks and fine restaurants of these two islands off Massachusetts is such that, once experienced, could well become a go-to for summer perfection.

Or, like many Tradewind flyers, at least take advantage of the offer twice—once for each island. That way you’ll never have to wonder if you made the right choice.