Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Fall 2013 - (Page 35)

you’re doing. It could be a huge production with big lights and a crew of dozens, or it could be an intimate shoot on a downtown street. Either way, you are always going to discover something about the city you didn’t know before.” FA L L I N G I N L O V E W I T H … FA M I LY T R AV E L BARCELONA A CITY TO WANDER THROUGH, TO MARVEL AT, TO FEAST IN, BARCELONA IS A HOME THAT NO ONE CAN LEAVE, SAYS RICHARD SCHWEID SUNNY SIDE UP A PR I ST I N E B E AC H, A CATA MA R A N A N D SO M E I G UA N A S C R E ATE A PE R F E C T HO L I DAY M O O D, W R I TE S CO RY JACO B S PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON SCHM IDT W MAGIC MOMENTS Clockwise from left: Jules aboard the Lady Lynsey; on the beach; reading on the terrace. 88 We arrive in St. Thomas with the ﬂustered excitement of every family recently departed the big city for a long Caribbean weekend. Hands grasping documents, bags and sunglasses, all eyes on the weather: the weather in the sky, which is a ﬂawless blue, and the family weather, which is less predictable. On the beautiful but windy road from airport to hotel, my carsick-prone 5-year-old, Jules, whispers to me, “I never want to come to St. Thomas again.” My husband and I exchange a practiced smile, as though to will away the gathering storm clouds. A short while later we arrive at The Ritz-Carlton, St. Thomas, where Jules is handed a bag of beach toys and my husband, Jason, and I rum punches. We’re given a quick overview of the 30-acre property, drop our bags in the room and head downstairs to the Club Lounge for a snack. Sitting on the terrace overlooking the Great Bay and after a grand total of 15 minutes at the resort, Jules declares, “I want to stay here.” I reply that we are indeed lucky enough to be staying for a long weekend. “No,” he responds, “I mean I want to move in … forever.” Even on our travel day, we manage to pack in what feels like a full itinerary. Jules puts his new construction tools to work, building rapidly collapsing castles from the ﬁne white sand, while we go swimming in the turquoise sea, and watch the Lady Lynsey — a beautiful 53-foot catamaran that is a trophy of the property — roll in to pick up guests heading to St. John for dinner. We take a sunset walk over to Coconut Cove, one of the three restaurants one can choose for dinner, which tonight has live music to accompany the Caribbean fare. As we sit down, the band is singing, “Don’t worry about a thing, ’cause every little thing gonna be all right,” the chorus to Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” Jason and I can’t help but burst into laughter. Yes, everything is all right. The sun goes down, the torches are lit, and Jules starts to dance as we sip our gin and tonics. W W W. R I T Z C A R LT O N . C O M New York-based photographer JASON SCHMIDT (“Sunny Side Up,” page 88) was lucky enough to take a family vacation to St. Thomas and call it work. Schmidt’s clients include Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair and W, among others. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Deitch Projects, New York. His second book, “Artists II” (Steidl), will be published in early 2014. T The first few times I passed through Barcelona, in the early 1970s, the cit y registered as grit t y, grimy and gray. It was an industrial por t, where residents were separated from the Mediterranean by railroad tracks and warehouses that sat along an unsightly coast. There were slivers of dir t y beach along the seaside neighborhood of Barceloneta, its narrow, shadowy streets and small flats home to the city’s fishermen and their families. A few screened-in, low cement-block kiosks at the edge of the sand ser ved fresh, cheap, delicious seafood, but the beaches were far from the kinds of destinations favored by tourists in search of sand and sun. And the streets of the Barri Gòtic (Gothic quar ter), where I stayed, were patrolled by no-nonsense police — it was better to be lost than to ask for directions. But what a place to be lost in for a youngster like me from Nashville! I spent days walking through streets that had been full of life for well over a thousand years. Rambles through the Gothic quarter would yield remarkable wonders: opulent palaces from the 15th centur y on the street named Montcada; the strikingly plain and powerful Santa María del Mar Cathedral; the Plaça del Rei, where Columbus is said to have repor ted to Ferdinand and Isabella on his return from his first voyage to the New World. And all of these sites were built on ruins of first-centur y Roman Barcelona lying just beneath the ground, or hidden behind a medieval wall. 40 W W W. R I T Z C A R LT O N . C O M HIGH ART The ceiling of the Sagrada Familia basilica, Antoni Gaudí’s still-in-progress masterpiece. KICKER TK henti conet acipsam, sitatur arundelibus sam doluptatur?Sim que re lautem lam etur sapita que T H E R I T Z - C A R LT O N M A G A Z I N E 41 RICHARD SCHWEID (“Falling in Love with Barcelona,” page 40) is a journalist and an author from Nashville who has had the good fortune to live in Barcelona for 20 years. He is the author of nine books of nonﬁction and co-founder of the English-language city magazine Barcelona Metropolitan. T H E R I T Z - C A R LT O N M A G A Z I N E 35 http://WWW.RITZCARLTON.COM http://WWW.RITZCARLTON.COM http://www.baltica.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Fall 2013

Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Fall 2013
Contents
Contributors
Editor’s Letter
President’s Letter
Falling in Love With ... Barcelona
Design
Shopping
Beauty
Gifts
Jewelry
Watches
Behind the Scenes
Family
Local Knowledge
Outdoors
As It Was
Culinary
Let Us Stay With You
Heritage

Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Fall 2013