Read The 100 Best Affordable Vacations Online
Authors: Jane Wooldridge
The 100 Best Affordable Vacations (48 page)
For more than 135 years, the tiny upstate town of Chautauqua, New York, has been a summer gathering place for enlightened and enlightening discussion. The eponymous institution—first created to teach Methodist Sunday school teachers—was founded on the principles of art, education, religion, and education. For a visitor, that means you might catch a presentation by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns in the morning, and golf on a championship course in the afternoon. Your day can include a nondenominational service led by best-selling author and former Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong or a class on Benjamin Franklin’s worldview or the intricacies of genealogy.
Chautauqua’s heyday was in the 1920s, when it traveled from city to city on a lecture circuit, reaching an estimated 40 million people. Now it’s happily settled in its home base. During summers, the town of 1,500 reaches the density of Manhattan—without the traffic jams. In Chautauqua’s 250-acre gated campus, you’ll find few cars but scores of pedestrians. A free shuttle service means you can park your vehicle and forget about it. Most visitors stay Saturday to Saturday. A weeklong $362 gate pass allows entrance to most events.
Although Chautauquans would hate the expression, the town is really a theme park for thinking adults. Put simply, your pass gives you access to some of the brightest minds of our era. Although many of the issues discussed may be contentious—from same-sex marriage to genetic engineering—the emphasis is on exploring issues, not making points. “We’re a kind of place that people can come and discuss a controversial topic in a very civil way,” says Mike Sullivan, Chautauqua’s director of institutional relations. “There’s no place exactly like this.”
Despite the heady atmosphere, Chautauqua is a family place, where doors are left unlocked and a bike is the preferred transportation. While parents are hearing the latest lecture on sustainable energy technologies, kids can have a ball at preschool classes ($175 a week) or day camp ($170 a week). But everyone will want to come out for evening performances by notables like comedian Bob Newhart and country star Gretchen Wilson.
OTHER CHAUTAUQUAS
At the height of the movement during the 1920s, towns across the nation hosted Chautauqua lectures. Although nowhere near the scale of the New York institution, a few locations keep the tradition alive with their own institutions, complete with lodgings.
Boulder, Colorado.
This Chautauqua campus dates from 1898 and is now a national historic landmark. With a wealth of educational resources at the nearby University of Colorado, the programming focuses on recreation and entertainment, including the six-week summer
Colorado Music Festival
(303-665-0599,
www.coloradomusicfest.org
), which offers four concerts a week. There’s usually a silent movie shown once a week, and often kids’ educational programs are scheduled. The bungalow-style cottages and lodges are situated below the distinctive Flatiron rock formations, providing easy access to thousands of acres of hiking. The Chautauqua is open year-round; although programming might be limited at certain times of year, the staff has listings of nearby lectures and activities. Cabins and rooms don’t have phones or televisions. Summer pricing begins at $70 a night for an efficiency apartment in the Columbine Lodge.
Colorado Chautauqua Association, 900 Baseline Rd., Boulder, CO 80302, 303-442-3282,
www.chautauqua.com
.
Lakeside, Ohio.
This Chautauqua opened in 1873 and every summer since has hosted leading scholars, authors, and chaplains at its idyllic campus on Lake Erie halfway between Cleveland and Toledo. About 5,000 guests attend during a typical week. Weekly topics might range from medical ethics to race in America to financial planning.
There are also concerts, fitness classes, swimming, and many other recreational activities. Nightly entertainment ranges from comedians to musicians or acrobats. Adult gate passes run $17.50 per day or $122.50 per week; the last week of summer, rates are reduced. You can camp or stay at the historic Hotel Lakeside from $69 a night. Many of Lakeside’s private cottages are available for weekly rental beginning at about $850 a week.
The Lakeside Association, 236 Walnut Ave., Lakeside, OH 43440, 866-952-5374,
http://lakesideohio.com
.
It’s literally impossible to do everything, and for a first-time Chautauquan, a weeklong visit can be overwhelming. Sullivan suggests that visitors take a $5 campus tour on Saturday to get the lay of the land, and make sure to catch the orientation lecture Sunday night.
You’ll definitely need a plan. Some guests sign up for Special Studies classes, an array of about 50 options from book discussions to sailing instruction. These carry an additional charge of about $50. But it’s quite easy to fill your week without them.
The summer program is built on nine theme weeks stretching from the last week of June to the week before Labor Day. One topic might be the Ethics of Leadership featuring
New York Times
columnist David Brooks. A popular repeat topic has been Roger Rosenblatt and Friends, featuring the prize-winning author and folks like PBS journalist Jim Lehrer and playwright Marsha Norman, author of
Night Mother.
Each morning at 10:30, one of these speakers will take the stage at the 5,000-seat, covered amphitheater for a morning lecture.
Accommodations run the gamut from boardinghouses with shared bathrooms (about $75 a night) to rental houses, which can run thousands a week.
[$
PLURGE
: A room in the historic
Athenaeum Hotel
(4 S. Lake Dr., 800-821-1881,
http://athenaeum-hotel.com
), on the grounds of the institution, begins at about $300 a night, including three meals a day for two people. Options are detailed on the institution’s website.] Despite the notable names, for some the best part of Chautauqua is meeting other guests. Every summer evening for more than a century now, visitors have ended their day congregating on the front porch of their home or boardinghouse to discuss the day’s lectures, entertainment, and insights with neighbors and new friends.
HOW TO GET IN TOUCH
Chautauqua Institution,
P.O. Box 28, 1 Ames Ave., Chautauqua, NY 14722, 800-836-2787,
www.ciweb.org
.
find out how cranberries
really
grow
MASSACHUSETTS & WISCONSIN
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
—
ALISTAIR COOKE, BRITISH JOURNALIST AND COMMENTATOR
(1908–2004)
61 |
If you think of cranberries as a Pilgrim thing, you’re partly right. Yes, we eat cranberry sauce with Thanksgiving turkey, and yes, that’s partly because cranberries—one of America’s few indigenous fruits—grow on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims set up shop in the early 17th century. But these days, the world’s largest producing cranberry state is Wisconsin—which means those curious about cranberries have two places to find out how they
really
grow.
Whether you’re heading to the East or the Midwest, prime time for cranberry visits is the fall harvest season, when there’s plenty to see in the bogs and cranberries galore to enjoy eating.
Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
In Massachusetts, the Columbus Day weekend is the peak time to visit. That’s when the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association and the A.D. Makepeace Company—the world’s largest cranberry grower—join forces to sponsor the annual Cranberry Harvest Celebration held at
Makepeace’s Tihonet Village
(158 Tihonet Rd., 508-295-1000,
www.cranberryharvest.org
, $2) in Wareham, with crafts, music, cranberry cooking demos, pony and wagon rides, and visits to a cranberry bog. At other times of year, you can check out the
Tihonet Village Market
(508-295-5437,
www.tihonetvillagemarket.com
, closed Sun.) for fresh fruits, vegetables, and specialty items, including fresh cranberries in season.
COOL CRANBERRY FACTOIDS