Time to confess: How many of you dreamed of becoming a famous photographer, sailing around the world, climbing sheer mountain cliffs, cooking magical meals at a popular restaurant or flying sky-high on skis, performing aerial twists and tricks in front of admiring crowds? And how many of you traded those dreams for a job, marriage, kids and other glories of the “real” world?
Well, it’s never too late to go back to school to learn a skill that will awaken your dreams. And there’s no need to mortgage the house, dump the job or sign up for a long-term commitment.
The exceedingly cool schools we recommend are geared to adults on vacation. Each school is located in a place ideally suited to the subject of study, and the surrounding areas are loaded with vacation pleasures.
The study halls at our schools are mountain slopes, wide-running rivers and sun-soaked towns. Dorms come in the form of fine hotels, bed-and-breakfasts and graceful inns. An awesome number of good restaurants stand in for cafeterias. And homework is nothing but pure indulgence.
Sailing: A Way Fun as it is, Forest Park’s boathouse can’t quite meet the needs of landlocked St. Louisans who yearn to learn to sail. But the Premier Sailing School at the Tides Inn in Irvington, Va., can—in four days.
Open from early spring until mid-November, when it gets too cold for sailing, the school uses a fleet of different vessels to teach small, personalized classes. Students range from kids on family vacations to adults eager to sail serious yachts to near-professionals sharpening their racing skills. The basic four-day program gives even those who have never stepped off land all the tools necessary to earn a U.S. Sailing Certificate, promises owner Arabella Denvir.
The Tides Inn Resort provides a perfect campus. An old-money destination since it opened in 1947, it stretches over its own private peninsula fingering into Carter Creek on the Rappahannock River (Chesapeake Bay to the east, the Potomac River to the north), an easy hour’s drive from Richmond on the edge of Irvington, Va.
Irvington itself is a tiny, tidy slip of a town with a handful of surprisingly upscale shops and one trendy restaurant (the Trick Dog Café), not that visitors spend much time in town. Water is the draw of this community, and the boat’s approach to the Tides Inn surpasses the automobile’s.
The resort sports a full-service 64-slip transient marina that can accommodate vessels as long as 125 feet. Think of it as a motel for yachts. The big boys taking their yachts up and down Chesapeake Bay and the Intracoastal Waterway to winter and summer homes pull into the marina for few nights’ stay. The owners and crews of these vessels use the resort as well, playing golf, dining in the exceptional res-taurant, having a spa treatment or enjoying the inn’s complimentary Saturday-afternoon oyster roasts.
Although they are owned and operated separately, the Premier Sailing School and the Tides Inn join to offer cost-effective packages. Should you really dig the scene, the school will sell you a yacht and the inn can arrange a marina slip for subsequent visits.
Call me Ishmael.
Epicurean Academy CULINARY INSTITUTE OF AMERICA 800-CULINARY www.ciachef.edu In its 358 pages, The Guide to Cooking Schools describes 708 recreational cooking programs open to the public worldwide. Cookingschools.com boasts 1,285 listings. We know at least 10 places to take cooking classes in the St. Louis area alone. Anyone who wants to learn about food and wine has more choices of classes than there are bubbles in a bottle of Dom Pérignon. So if you are a true enthusiast, serious about food or wine to the point of making it a way of life, cut to the chase and go where the professionals go—the Culinary Institute of America at the Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif.
In addition to offering continuing education for food and wine professionals, the CIA Greystone schedules weeklong programs for adults who are considering careers in the food or wine industry. These Career Discovery Programs not only teach the fundamentals of cooking, baking and pastry or wine but also give insights into the various professions. Best yet, Greystone sits in the heart of the Napa Valley.
Serious cooks, gourmets, gourmands and wine connoisseurs know that tasting is a major part of learning, and oh, does Napa offer the opportunity to taste. Oenophiles may supplement classes by visiting wineries, sampling, savoring and buying to shore up their personal cellars. Food devotees can pick up delectable knowledge at a cornucopia of restaurants (if you have the bucks, don’t miss the French Laundry). The whole region is a food- and wine-lovers’ mecca, and Greystone is a great place at which to combine the pilgrimage with a bit of formal training.
NOTE: Career Discovery classes, offered only at certain times, are limited to 18 participants each and fill quickly, so “advance registration” means far in advance.
Skiing with Olympians OK, so it’s not for everyone. But skiers will love it, and even those who have never stood on skis before can get a thrill, learn a skill and end up bragging that they trained with Olympians at Utah Olympic Park in Park City, Utah.
Located 36 miles east of Salt Lake City, in the heart of the Wasatch Mountains, the 389- acre UOP houses the world’s highest-altitude ski jumps and fastest bobsled, skeleton and luge track. Originally built for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, UOP now serves as a competition venue and a state-of-the-art training facility. Granted, most trainees are high-performance athletes, but the facility also welcomes amateurs at skiing and snowboarding camps. Ranging from 6-year-olds to retirees, students move at their own pace under the direction of Olympian Chris “Hatch” Haslock and former U.S. Freestyle Ski Team coach Bruce Erickson.
Half-day and three- to five-day winter camps cover slope style, ski jumping, skeleton and luge, and summer camps focus on freestyle aerials and ski jumping. No snow in summer? No problem. Summer training takes place on a series of plastic-coated jumps, in graduating degrees of difficulty, built around a 750,000- gallon splash pool. Participants learn to fly through the air with the greatest of ease, twisting and turning high in the sky on skis or snowboards before landing in the water.
Après lessons? The Park City area offers the ideal geography and climate for winter skiing and summer mountain biking. And, surprisingly for an old silver-mining mountain town, the area is packed with sophisticated delights. Here is a place where ordinary tourists, outdoor enthusiasts, superathletes and movie stars (who flock to the town’s Sundance Film Festival) can eat (at more than 100 restaurants), drink (yes, there are ways around Utah’s stringent liquor laws) and make merry (try the UOP’s bobsled ride for a $65 thrill).
Climb At Least One Mountain After seeing the movie Vertical Limit, I vowed never to go rock climbing. But even I might be tempted by the Via Ferrata Torrent Falls Climbing Adventure in Torrent Falls, Ky.
Via ferrata (“iron way” in Italian) is a term used to describe climbing paths fixed by steel cables attached to a series of rungs that are bolted into rock face. Originally installed in the Alps during World War I as a way to move troops across mountains, the via ferrata found its way to the United States in 2001, opening at Torrent Falls, near the Red River Gorge Geological Area in eastern Kentucky (about an hour’s drive southeast of Lexington).
Kentucky’s via ferrata offers a safe simulation of the climbing experience. Participants move by attaching ropes and carabiners to the fixed rungs without the risks of traditional rock climbing, because the footholds and handholds are locked into place and climbers are clipped to a safety cable (the ferrata) at all times. The course can be completed in two to three hours, including preliminary training on a practice wall.
Although via ferrata is undeniable fun, much more is required to try real rock climbing, and the Red River Gorge offers gorgeous geography in which to learn or hone climbing skills.
Rugged sandstone cliffs, spectacular boulders, hidden crags, deep canyons, towering rock formations and woodlands thick with vegetation sport well over 2,000 documented climbing routes in about a 20-mile radius, making the area a world-class heaven for just about every facet of modern climbing.
In addition to a climbing-guide service, Mark Meyer offers classes in climbing and rapelling for beginning, intermediate and advanced students. He also runs a climb resort with cabins and B&B rooms, a gear shop and a barbecue restaurant, making him a one-stop shop in this school of hard rocks.
Other places to stay? Campers head to Miguel’s Pizza & Rock Climbing Shop, a climbers-only campground, and families like the kid-friendly Natural Bridge State Resort Park.
Weather permitting, climbing takes place year- round, but the via ferrata is open only March through November. Especially beautiful times to visit the area are mid-October, when the green foliage turns firelight colors, and May, when spring flowers fill the forests with splashes of impressionistic color.
Perfect Exposure Anyone old enough to remember the original Sabrina knows that Audrey Hepburn ran off to Paris to study cooking. The remake has Julia Ormond fleeing to Paris to study photography. And though photography remains the “in” study field, we predict that the next remake will replace Paris with the hipper Santa Fe.
The city has everything a photographer could want: incredible scenery volunteering recordable images at every click, an awesome number of art galleries to show and compare your work and the natural light that inspired Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams. Best yet, it’s home base for the Santa Fe Workshops.
Open practically year-round, the Santa Fe Workshops use a campus on a retreat center at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the east side of Santa Fe, about an hour’s drive from Albuquerque. Here, top photographers teach everything anyone could want to know about photography, attracting beginners who shudder at the thought of a setting a shutter speed and work-worn pros hoping to reignite their creative enthusiasm.
Although some students sign on for a longer self-designed photography residency, most take the weeklong, single-topic sessions with such diverse course titles as “Beginning Photography with Digital Cameras,” “Seeing Light,” “Adventure-Travel Photography” and “Cutting-Edge Portraits.” Whatever the course, students are immersed in photography almost full-time. Many formal classes are sandwiched between group field trips, held in the early morning and late afternoon, when the light is optimal. Students may even sleep on campus in retreat-simple rooms available for a week at a rate a Santa Fe luxury hotel might charge per night.
Although photography is always in sharp focus, the experience includes more than technical skills. Participants report gaining not only new skills but a new way of seeing the world, new friends and the sense of belonging to a photographic community.
