| THE MID-ATLANTIC GETAWAY:
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 Travel can be tiring these days. Travelers sometimes come back from vacations wanting a vacation. And looking back wistfully to times when life and their needs were simpler. Yet there are backwaters in America where rivers still run slow, where people still smile to each other and to visitors, where tourists can pull out a map and have a local person offering help before they even have the map unfolded. |
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Such a place lingers in upper Virginia in the Northern
Neck, tucked in between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers on one
of those fingers of land that push out East into the Chesapeake Bay.
Relatively unknown, the Northern Neck's crammed with American history.
Our first president was born there so, for once, claims "George
Washington slept here" might be valid. Others who took their
first breath in this bucolic place include James Madison, James Munroe
and Robert E. Lee. One favored spot, historic Christ
Church completed in 1735 - privately, so it avoided retribution
after the Revolutionary War and recognized as the finest colonial
church in North America -- hides in the 1950's era village of Irvington. |
| Establishments catering to tourists in this
languid land have learned their guests are coming to escape today's
high tech, noisy world not to embrace it. The basics that have pleased
travelers for decades still hold true: comfortable luxurious surroundings,
fastidious willing service, Southern hospitality and great food. |
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The
Tides Inn, (800-843-3746), for example, first saw life in the
weary post war year of 1947. Family-run, it called its guests "Old
Friends." The friends kept returning, the inn prospered but finally
closed for a six-month $12 million renovation in late 2001. Now re-opened
as a Sedona Resorts flagship it has gained membership in Leading Small
Hotels of the World, been ranked by Zagat in the top 20 of the nation's
finest hotels and resorts, and had its refurbished Golden Eagle 18-hole
golf course famously described by Golf Digest as "the toughest
course no one has ever heard of." |
| One hundred and six guest rooms and suites
have been redecorated in a stylish "British Colonial motif"
with lots of open space, stuffed furnishings, mahogany plantation
shutters and marble baths truly reminding this ex-Brit of exotic ports of call and the one-time glory of Empire. |
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