Ronald Reagan travel tips

“This is a love letter to our father.”

It is said that when Norse explorer Ingólfur Arnarson and his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir threw some wooden posts from their ship in AD878 they floated to a bay covered with steaming springs, hence the name Reykjavík, or “stormy bay”, and that’s where Arnarson decided to settle. I am here researching women in Icelandic sagas for my next book, and our two small children have accompanied me, with their father sharing childcare.

THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE FEBRUARY 17, 2024, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURA’S FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. YOU CAN SIGN UP HERE .

About 10 years ago, when I was living in Mexico, I went to a party at a beach house that belonged to a friend. It was an overcast afternoon on the Pacific Coast, but there’s a certain moment at the end of the day when the sun dips under the clouds and floods everything in light. It was then that we all saw what wasn’t visible before: a mansion, in the distance across the bay, sitting alone on its own beach, with a blue dome and fiery orange walls suddenly glowing in the dark forest that surrounded it. Someone said it had been built by the billionaire corporate raider Sir James Goldsmith in 1989. There were zebras and African antelope on the grounds; Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger had both been guests.

A recent report ten years in the making recently boldly selected The World’s 50 Best Hotels. So what makes a great hotel?

Ghost stories are fun. Though folk tales and flatout fabrications abound, the best of them prompt us to ponder the lives of those who inhabited the world before us.