In autumn, Highland Perthshire turns copper, red, and gold: it’s known as The Big Tree Country, and with good reason. As roads and walkways traverse mountain and valley in central and eastern Scotland, there are gorgeous views to be seen at any season, really, but the flaming colors of autumn add depth and color to a journey there.

So does music. Songwriter Dougie MacLean grew up in Dunkeld, and still makes his home there, though his music has taken him all over the world. Both those things play into the festival he started several years ago. It is called Perthshire Amber, and it is coming up this year beginning on 29 October and running through 7 November.

Dougie has been writing and playing music for several decades now, and at first he created a weekend event during which he could pull out old favorites, revisit lesser known pieces, and have fun trying out settings beyond the usual in the concert hall for two hours format. As musical friends came along to join in, a festival was born. This year, artists will include many whose music draws on tradition and keeps it fresh and new as well. The band Grada, whose members hail from Ireland and New Zealand, will be on tap, as will Crooked Still, who are known for their creative take on bluegrass, are coming from the United States. Kris Drever, inventive guitarist and singer from Orkney, will pair up with long time friend Eamonn Coyne, from Ireland, who plays the banjo and is part of the Latin Celtic fusion band Salsa Celtica. Michael McGoldrick, who seems to be everyone’s choice to play flutes and whistles on their album projects and who has a fine solo album of his own out, will bring his tunes to the stage. Karen Matheson, lead singer of Capercaillie, will be fronting her own band at the festival, and Fred Morrison will offer his always intriguing music on the pipes too. MacLean will play solo concerts and share bills as well. At the opening concert, he will host award winning musician Julie Fowlis, who brings Gaelic song into the mix.

The gigs at Perthshire Amber are not confined to concert stages, either. There will be several of those, and music will also be offered in a castle, a distillery, and a crannog, as well as on song bus tours of the Highland Perthshire landscape, and at other venues.

A highlight of the festival in addition to the music is its care for the community. This is expressed in several ways, including The Big Knit and Amber Harvest. All through the year, people in Scotland and around the world knit squares which are made into warm blankets and other items, which are auctioned off at the festival with funds raised going to organizations which help those in need. When Dougie was touring in the United States several years ago, he was introduced to the idea of people bringing non perishable food to concerts to go to food banks to help those in need. He brought the idea to Perthshire Amber, and each year, festival goers have increased their donations of food to Amber Harvest.

There will be workshops and talks as well as formal concerts, and no doubt much good fun and good fellowship to be had as another year of music unfolds during the days of Perthshire Amber. Last year, several of the the concerts were a available to see online, too, by subscription. Plans are still being finalized about that this year. There will be more information about this, as well as news about other festival events, at the Perthshire Amber web site.

photo of Dougie MacLean by Calum MacIntosh, courtesy of Perthshire Amber

It’s just past 6:30am, and I’m sitting in a screened-in veranda at Kandy Cottage, a small locally run guesthouse located deep in the lush foothills that rise above Sri Lanka’s hill country capital. With my internal clock not yet fully reset after the long haul from New York a few short days ago, I’ve already been up for about an hour, and I could really use a cup of coffee. Strong coffee.

In the absence of caffeine, a shower does some of the trick. Austere and simple, just like the people of Kandy, the bathroom is all bare concrete walls. Busy rows of ants wind their way around the bathroom door, over the mounted water tank and it’s long pull-string flusher, past me in the walk-in shower, and out a small crack in the window. The wonderful reality of where I am on the map sinks in a little bit more.

On the veranda, I catch my journal up on the magnificent train ride from Colombo to Kandy. Tropical bugs are batting and buzzing against the screen. Birds are chirping, crickets are creaking, and monkeys are scrambling through the tropical-green canopy of trees. Flights through Abu Dhabi, and onto Colombo are behind us, and over a month of travel through Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and South Africa is ahead of us. I’m drunk on the invigorating newness of traveling and that intoxicating thrill of extricating myself from everyday life and everyday surroundings. Of dropping myself off in a foreign place, of re-awakening all five senses, and of kickstarting the curiosity that inevitably dulls from time to time during the weekly grind.

There is little to do here in the cottage this morning except read, write, and wait for our home-cooked Sri Lankan breakfast; I’ll later look back on those meals at the cottage as some of the most memorable of the trip. It’s now 7am, and Kumar, Kandy Cottage’s gracious host, live-in manager, and one of the kindest men we’ll meet in the country, softly knocks on our door and produces a pot of coffee. The wily neighborhood monkeys are clamboring across the roof now. “They are not afraid of us, and they tease my dog,” says Kumar. “They come here and they pull the plants out. They are not even afraid of firecrackers.”

Boom! Boom! Boom!

On queue, the morning jungle tranquility is broken by what sounds like shotgun blasts on a firing range—Sri Lankan firecrackers, apparently. The dog starts barking as the monkeys scamper into a small tree just outside the cottage’s back door. A plate of steaming hoppers, a bowl of curry, and fresh fruit is laid out on the kitchen table. I stare at 4 ½ more weeks of this, and smile.

There’s a lot of flesh in Las Vegas.

I know – so what else is news, right?

Given my general dislike of fakery and skepticism about Vegas before my first visit there this past week (for BlogWorld and New Media Expo, ’cause ya gotta go where the geeks are to get ahead of them) I want to report that I actually had a pretty good time and look forward to returning.

Whoa, did I just type that? Um, yes.

Here’s what I brought home as impressions….

***   There are more amazing restaurants than you can shake a stick at, run by renowned chefs and many clustered in a single resort like the MGM Grand or the Mandalay Bay (where I stayed.)  Below the top-shelf food offerings, though, is something of an overpriced vast wasteland with long lines.  Bring PowerBars for the between-expensive-meals starvation.

***   There’s a lot of flesh bared by people who are deluded that they look good in skintight outfits.  Yeah, I said it. We’re not that into you, even at midnight, in a casino.  Skank-o-Rama.

***   My hotel room had chilled vodka and tequila, but no coffee maker. Priorities!

***   Everything is pretty spread out along the Strip and you’ll do a ton of walking. Cabs are not cheap and the monorail system is not very efficient. I love to walk but didn’t expect quite that much of it so didn’t bring enough Rockport-ish shoes.

***   I got a great perspective on the fake places like New York, New York, the Mini Me Eiffel Tower, etc.  Gary Arndt, who writes the blog Everything Everywhere, said to look at them like a Beatles tribute band – not the real thing, but a nice version of it.  I can live with that.

***   The people-watching there is simply unparalleled.  I sat outside of the House of Blues and watched some fairly decent half-nude dancers, a bar fight and families going by in strollers.  All in the same half-hour.

***   You can make a run out to see Hoover Dam for a morning or afternoon (takes about 3-4 hours including transit, and depending on traffic.)  It is a magnificent piece of architecture and well worth the jaunt.

***   Be ready for wallet thump, at least at the major resorts. US$4.99 ATM fees. US$5.00 to access the internet from a kiosk so you can check into a flight, then US$1.50 to print the boarding pass. My favorite bourbon and Coke? US$8 – 11.  I seriously considered bringing a flask, and I’m 49 and did college cheapo life already. Isn’t that pathetic?

***  Most Vegas resort properties totally “get” social media and are all over Twitter and Facebook. The Las Vegas CVB? Not terribly responsive on those channels. A missed opportunity, I think.

***   The lights on the Strip at night are really stunning. My favorite was the glass pyramid Luxor resort, with moving lights along the pyramid edges and a big spotlight shooting out of the top.  I was always kind of sad when it turned off around 6 am.

***   The air is super-dry and you MUST drink water….a lot of it….all day and night. Despite my best efforts, I had a dehydration headache the first two mornings till I could hit it with some Tylenol and massive Starbucks infusion. Bring a bottle of acetaminophen with you, or fork over for it in the hotel convenience stores.

***  Each and every staff person I met, at every resort and at every level, was unfailingly nice, enthusiastic and welcoming.

I think we’re going to bring the new Tourism track back to BlogWorld in 2011, so I’ll have a chance to dig deeper into this quirky city.

Thanks to all of you who told me to approach it with an open mind, and have fun. I did and it worked!

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Ever since my hometown of Christchurch decided to transform itself from The Garden City to The City that Rocks, I’ve been busy stocking up the wine rack.

Call it my survival kit if you will, but what better way to ride out a shake or two than with a crisp New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.  It’s a risk as the wine rack sits above the shelves in the kitchen but I figure if we get there in time, we can always catch a bottle as it comes flying out of the rack.

Turns out I’m not the only one turning to a wine or two as this city keeps on shaking (2000 plus and still counting). One local winery, Mud House, has just brought out a specially blended Sauvignon Blanc to commemorate the day that ‘the ground moved like jelly.’

The name and the drawing on the bottle is the work of eight year old Bella King. In a story that graced the national Sunday Star Times the weekend following the 7.1 earthquake, she compared the quake to a bowl of the wobbling gelatine dessert – a  pretty apt and imaginative description.

Mud House Winery thought so too. They bottled up this emotion into 5000 cases of Sauvignon Blanc and are selling it throughout the country, with the majority of the money from wine sales donated to the Canterbury Earthquake mayoral fund.

Always happy to donate to the cause, I’ve loaded up the few empty spots in the wine rack with bottles of The Day the Ground Moved Like Jelly.  The plan is to hold onto them until next year. But if the Christchurch keeps shaking, they might not last that long.

Meanwhile, while the locals are sipping wine and contemplating Christchurch AQ (after the quake), the newly re-elected mayor is encouraging everyone to spread the word that ‘Christchurch is back on it’s feet’ and open for business.

It sure is, if you like a city that Rocks!

The other day, my good friend Diana sent me an email with this subject line: Did I Kill Gourmet Magazine?

The link was from the Wall Street Journal, and for a moment I wondered whether it was about her, since she’s a very fine food writer –  or somehow about me. So I instantly clicked the link and read an essay by novelist Ann Patchett, detailing her very expensive research for stories, paid for in full by the now-shuttered magazine Gourmet.

The story has provoked some ire, especially from travel writers.  Personally, I thought the piece was amusing. But I also wondered about the answer to the question the headline posed: Did she (and writers like her) actually kill Gourmet with their travel writing?

The fact that she was sent to foreign lands at the magazine’s expense — the expense details that she so lovingly caresses in her WSJ essay — isn’t dispositive, as my lawyer husband would say.

It’s my understanding that Gourmet routinely paid research expenses for writers on assignment, not just famous novelists. Now, there are endless debates about whether publications should pay for a travel writer’s expenses, with sponsored travel, or, if you prefer the pejorative term “freebies”, as the alternative. If you take that position that the travel expenses of writers like Patchett seriously caused the magazine financial harm, this essay could be taken as an argument in favor of travel magazines eliminating research expense accounts, simply as a survival strategy.

I thought I’d have a look at Conde Nast’s financials to see whether I could find some actual financial facts — alas, the company isn’t publicly traded and therefore not required to disclose those numbers.

But from what I could glean from the business coverage of Gourmet‘s shuttering last October, it seems highly unlikely that magazine’s travel research budget was the killer. In its coverage, the New York Times does says that Gourmet was discontinued because it was losing too much money — from travel expenses, yes, but also expensive photo shoots and the magazine’s legendary test kitchens. But it’s not just expenditures that lead to red ink.  The bigger problem seemed to be that the magazine had lost advertising, and lots of it.  I’m not sure you can blame Ann Patchett’s travel expenses for that.

To me, the question really is this: were Patchett’s stories worth the cost of her research?

Or was Bill Sertl really a dotty besotted travel editor, as Patchett sort of implies, who gave her assignments whether she deserved them or not?

Handily, there’s an Ann Patchett archive available on Gourmet‘s website, and I’ve read through it. The question of whether a writer is worth her fee is always subjective, of course.  I admit to being mystified about why Gourmet commissioned and ran one story that Patchett alludes to in her WSJ essay,  the one about Italian opera, since it doesn’t seem to mention food or drink even in passing.  But her other pieces were on topic — and they all seemed pretty good to me.  Amusing, wry, and readable to the last period.

So no, I don’t think Patchett killed Gourmet. And no, I don’t think she was ever seriously suggesting anything of the sort. In fact, the notion that she was some sort of a spoiled cosseted writer-child seems to be her schtick,  one that the magazine not only enjoyed, but promoted — and perhaps even invented.  After all, this is the first line of her  bio on Gourmet.com : “Ann writes for us on anything that strikes her fancy, even if we ask her not to.”

If anything, her WSJ essay seems to be a brief reprisal of that role.