The Week USA - August 24, 2019

28 LEISURE Travel

Visiting Sweden? Bring a basket, said
Andrea Sachs in The Washington Post.
When I heard that the country’s tour-
ism board had recently launched Edible
Country, a program that encourages
people to cook meals foraged from the
forests and fields, I had to have a taste.
In Sweden, access to privately owned
undeveloped land is a constitutional
right, “as integral to the Swedish lifestyle
as universal health care and pickled her-
ring.” The so-called right to roam allows
all people to wander—and forage—
pretty much anywhere that isn’t a private
garden or within 75 yards of a residence.
And you don’t have to be Swedish. “As
long as you follow the edict of ‘Do not
disturb or destroy,’ you, too, can shop in
Sweden’s supermarket without walls.”

To inspire foraging adventures, Edible
Country has set up 13 summer cooking
stations, scattered about the country, that
visitors can reserve for free. Each one is just
a large picnic table in a beautiful setting,

This week’s dream: Foraging for food in the Swedish countryside

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Downtown Milwaukee’s new-

est visitor attraction “takes

the concept of an arts hotel

and kicks it up a notch or 20,”

said Lori Rackl in the Chicago

Tribune. Packed with work by

big-name contemporary art-

ists, Saint Kate is also home

to a gallery of rotating exhibi-

tions and a 90-seat theater

where an in-house troupe of

actors, dancers, musicians,

and jugglers puts on free

shows. Five of the 219 guest

rooms are artists’ creations,

including one whose walls

and furnishings are blan-

keted in leopard-like spots.

All rooms are equipped with

a ukulele, colored pencils,

and a roll of doodling paper.

saintkatearts.com; doubles

from $279

Hotel of the week

“Running for six days in Colorado can leave

one believing its trails are simply limitless,” said

Brennen Wysong in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Every year, a small group of amateur endurance

athletes joins guide Rickey Gates for Hut Run

Hut, a 100-mile jog that starts in Aspen and stops

at wilderness cabins for its five overnights before

finishing in Vail. Last summer, I joined the run, a

“seriously difficult” outing that also proved to be

“a joyous exercise.” We climbed “lung-busting”

peaks that pushed 12,000 feet, but the path we

cut through the Rockies was “absolutely baffling

in its beauty.” We skirted deep-blue lakes and

crossed valleys “aglow with yellow aspen groves”

before refueling at each stop on chef-prepared

meals. The run will be held Aug. 25–30 and

Sept. 15–20 this year, and I recommend it. I also

recommend sleeping outside the cabins, cocooned

in a sleeping bag and “watching the sky fill so

completely with stars they seemed cramped.”

Getting the flavor of...

A notch above arty

Last-minute travel deals

Floating through history

Book a 2019 river cruise

through central Europe or

Asia by Aug. 31 and save up

to $1,500 per passenger. For

example, the 10-day cruise

from Frank furt to Cologne

departing Nov. 5 starts at

$2,499 with the discount.

uniworld.com

India’s many marvels

Explore glittering palaces

and track Bengal tigers with

Collette’s “Mysteries of India”

package. The Nov. 14 departure

costs $400 less than usual,

bringing the 15-day trip to

$2,599, including 25 meals—

one of which is a cooking class.

gocollette.com

European imperial capitals

Exoticca has curated a two-

week tour of Europe’s imperial

landmarks, including stops

in Berlin, Dresden, Prague,

Moscow, and St. Peters burg.

Book the all-inclusive package

by Aug. 14 and pay just $1,999

a person.

exoticca.travel

but all are run by local hotels or outfitters

happy to rent out cooking equipment or

provide experts for hire. And the variety

is wonderful: “You can reserve a seat on

a windmill-dotted island in the Stockholm

Archipelago, a seagrass-fringed beach on

the Kattegat Sea, a forest overlooking the

19th-century Gota Canal.” I joined a group

of four others at Asa Herrgård, a hotel

in the southern province of Småland.

Because bushes right on the hotel

grounds “popped with gooseberries

and currants,” we filled our foraging

baskets before hopping into an ATV

and riding past fields of sheep on an

unpaved road to Lake Asa.

Thanks to guidance from the hotel’s

chef, Pontus Sjoholm, we gathered

a bounty of purple clovers, yarrow,

hazelnuts, fir tips, and lucerne (which

tastes a lot like peas). We tossed those

ingredients into a light salad that whet-

ted our appetite for a second course of

pike and parsnips smoked in juniper,

with potatoes, wild onion, and artichokes.

“I cleaned my plate. The food was fresh,

bright, and pure—no preservatives, no pol-

lution, no faking the seasons. I am pretty

sure I had plant stems and berry skins in

my teeth, a smile that shone through my

dirt-streaked cheeks.”

At Asa Herrgård (asaherrgard.se), doubles

start at about $112.

Colorado’s hut-to-hut mountain run

“Even if you’ve never heard of Monhegan

Island, there’s a good chance you’ve seen it on a

museum wall,” said Christopher Reynolds in the

Los Angeles Times. The tiny island 11 miles off

the coast of central Maine has been a haven for

artists since Edward Hopper, George Bellows,

and Rockwell Kent began painting its misty sea

and landscapes, and it “looks today largely as it

did a century ago.” I took a ferry to Monhegan

from Port Clyde and spent three days walking

the wooded island, coming across a lighthouse

that Hopper had captured on canvas, a beached

tugboat in Lobster Cove that had inspired Kent,

and a red house that Jamie Wyeth once rendered

in watercolor. On a summer day, you’re likely to

see a dozen artists working outside at their easels

in quiet coves filled with lobster boats or on

windswept, 150-foot ocean cliffs. Though I wan-

dered more than I painted, “my pulse seemed to

slow with every hour I spent on Monhegan.”

Maine’s most painted island

Milwaukee

Saint Kate

Foraging for salad ingredients in Småland