To me, the mark of a great city isn’t the presence of major museums — although you do need those — but the ability to support smaller institutions.

I always felt, for instance, that the presence of Rubin Museum of Art, which focuses on the art of Himalayas, was a great mark of pride for New York City, and, when I visited Warsaw, I imagined that if I lived there I’d feel the same about the Muzeum Karykatury, a tiny museum devoted to  caricature and cartoons.

It’s easy for visitors to miss these quiet places, and so when I travel, I’ve made it sort of a side project not to.

And so, in Toronto, I visited  The Museum of Inuit Art, which describes itself as “the only public museum south of the Arctic solely devoted to the display of art made by Inuit living in Canada.”  I thought I’d given the cab driver the wrong address when I arrived, since it’s located in a downtown shopping mall on Queens Quay — a fact not made entirely clear by the lovely photographs on the museum’s website.

The museum itself is as far removed from a shopping mall as you could possibly get though — beautifully designed, it provides an education through time and by artistic theme on a subject that most of us know very little about: the art created by native communities living in Canada’s arctic region. This display, for example, shows how a master carver is teaching his son his art through apprenticeship and example:

This was another stop on my Toronto itinerary, and therefore part of the all-expenses paid trip which you can enter to win. See previous stories on this trip, including this one on a romance with a hat.  More details here.

I’ve just returned from an action-packed trip to Toronto, where I learned to make hats, decorate cupcakes, and mix cocktails; where I tasted locally-brewed sake and oysters from all over the world, where I took a curator’s tour of one of my favorite museums anywhere — The Bata Shoe Museum — and even got to poke around in their artifact room! I attended something called a Literary Death Match, and then lost a great deal of unneeded dry skin during a sublime scrubbed with local herbs at the Ritz-Carlton spa, which is also where I stayed.

And I did it all for you.

This was part of a project with Canadian Tourism, American Express and Travel+Leisure , in which three bloggers helped to design dream itineraries to serve as a prize in a sweepstakes. The sweepstakes winner gets the itinerary, all expenses paid.

So there’s me, in Toronto, getting my cultcha (and cupcakes) on, there’s Mike Richard of Vagabondish in the national parks of Québec, and there’s Matt Armendariz of Matt Bites eating his way through Vancouver.

I’ll have more to say about my trip in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, enjoy a few images from the trip you too might take, and enter to win.

European castles usually follow a single architectural style and have a long, bloodied history.

Hearst Castle in California, on the other hand, is short on blood and history but makes up with it with outlandish and multiple design styles.

Set amidst 137 acres of floral gardens, cobblestoned paths, and sculpture rich terraces, the Hispano-Moresque style main house overlooks three Italian renaissance style guesthouses and a Greco-Roman style swimming pool.

Built as a summer retreat for William Randolph Hearst, the multi-millionaire publishing tycoon and movie producer, it is one of the most opulent and extravagant estates in the world.

Materials old and new were used to construct the buildings. Steel, iron, and cement provided a base for antique architectural elements acquired from European stately homes, monasteries, and churches.

The exterior of Casa Grande, the 130 room main house, features twin towers emblazed with 12^th century Spanish motifs, Moorish blue and gold tiles, and a 36-bell carillon from Belgium.

Inside, Spanish Baroque doorways blend with French Romanesque fireplaces and hand carved Spanish and Italian wooden ceiling panels. It’s a stately atmosphere that’s further enhanced (or perhaps, more accurately, overwhelmed) by gothic furniture, Persian carpets, Italian and Spanish icon religious paintings, Greek vases, and medieval tapestries.

By 1927, Hearst Castle had become the social and architectural focus of Southern California.  Society gossip columnist Heidi Hopper described a visit there like being in ‘never never land’.

The weekend guest list  – Winston Churchill, Gloria Swanson, Clark Gable, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin – read like a who’s who of the early twentieth century.

By day, the guests did pretty much as they liked, lounging by the pool, playing tennis, or riding out in search of the exotic zoo animals imported to the ranch by William Hearst.

But at night, one had to adhere to a set routine. Believing that it was dangerous for his high spirited and temperamental guests to wander at will during the dark hours, Hearst insisted that they all gathered in the Assembly room for drinks, the Refectory for dinner, and then the Theater for a screening of home movies.

Today, anyone can visit Hearst Castle. But they too must adhere to a set routine. No one is allowed to wander at will. Instead, they must take a tour if they want to get a glimpse into Hearst’s extraordinary castle.

(Disclosure: the writer was hosted by san luis obispo county visitors & conference bureau on her visit to Hearst Castle, staying at the FogCatcher Inn)

Want to see an incredible example of making lemonade out of a busted-industry, corroded, hulking, sad-looking batch of lemons?

Take a look at what’s happened at the site of the old Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Now called SteelStacks, it’s become a performing arts/culture magnet and tourist attraction for the entire Lehigh Valley.

I know; it’s some major cognitive dissonance to say “Bethlehem Steel” and “arts/culture magnet” in the same sentence. But, it’s more than true.

Right in front of a former blast furnace, there’s an outdoor music pavilion (seen in each photo) plus the modern ArtsQuest performing arts building, a new building housing local public television station PBS39 and a bit further away in the complex, a huge (and tastefully designed to fit the industrial area) Sands Casino.

Music events at this pavilion include the fabulously-named Blast Furnace Blues Festival.

Another model for rescuing a blighted industrial area is Landschaftspark in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, which ArtsQuest founder Jeff Parks visited in 2002 and found inspirational.

There’s still a lot of work to be done restoring many remaining brick Bethlehem Steel buildings and bringing in more shops, restaurants and other businesses, but what a start!

I’m afraid that I’m starting to get rather seen-it-all in my traveler old age, and I was truly blown away.  If the only thing you know about this part of Pennsylvania are the depressing lyrics from Billy Joel’s song “Allentown,” you’ve GOT to see what’s happening there today.

(Disclosure: I was in the Lehigh Valley area as a keynote speaker for their annual regional tourism meeting, so my travel expenses were covered by the Convention and Visitors Bureau, but there was no cost to seeing SteelStacks.)

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Imagine packing a pair of these shoes like these for your next trip:

Daphne Guinness would. This fashion icon, brewery heiress (yes, that Guinness), recent New Yorker profile subject has co-curated an exhibit of her wardrobe on display right now at The Museum at FIT in Manhattan. It’s an opportunity to contemplate clothing that is all very far removed from ordinary, much of it quite beautiful, and a few pieces that seems downright dangerous: a body suit spiked with nails, for instance.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the shoes pictured above — only one pair of several in the exhibit — have no heel, forcing the wearer to walk on her toes. Please insert a wince here, as you contemplate how much that has to  hurt.  And Guinness really does wear these — check out this Tumblr for the photographic evidence.

It’s sort of amazing to think of clothing purely as art, with all practical considerations totally taken out of the equation.

You can return to ponder this as much as you’d like, as this exceedingly well-done exhibit, at the fashion design school’s Chelsea campus, is free.  It on through January 7th, 2012.