Where to Next: Group Getaways
Where to Next is The Local Foreigner’s guide to traveling in 2021, highlighting hotels destinations, and activities that are open and accessible to American travelers during the transitional period between the pandemic and the eventual return to round-the-world travel.
Combining our desire to (safely) hang out in large groups and travel with family and friends again, these group getaway ideas are perfect for when you want to go big, but also want to go [to a] home.
Group Getaways
"LIFE WAS MEANT FOR GREAT ADVENTURES AND CLOSE FRIENDS”
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Sweet Bocas
Bocas del toro, panama
Sweet Bocas is the realized dream of Canadian born, African raised, restauranteur-turned-hotelier Annick Belanger. As exotic as its owner, this seven-bedroom villa sits on a floating platform above a private lagoon – its open-air, hammock-strung gathering spaces the pure embodiment of a Caribbean vacation. At Sweet Bocas, mornings are filled with yoga on floating pontoons and afternoons are whiled away on paddle boards. Evenings begin with sunset boat rides to beachside rum shacks and end with night fishing for shrimp, knee deep in the river. Sweet Bocas is the opposite of your everyday. It isn’t a place, but a deep exhale.
ACCOMMODATES
16+
BEST TIME TO VISIT
November-April
RIGHT FOR
Families, groups with varied interests
HIGHLIGHTS
Surfing, jungle ATVing, scuba diving and snorkeling, chef led cooking classes, night fishing, mangrove exploration, over water movies, hiking, watersports
Bahama House
Harbour island, bahamas
With its pale peach exteriors, and the pink sand beaches a short pedal away on your beach cruiser, Bahama House is where preppy island style lets the good times roll. White picket fences surround this picture-perfect restored-1800s stone villa, located on the trendy but tony Harbour Island, and the interiors are what Palm Beach puts on its Pinterest board, all parrot prints and palm fronds. Outside, the wrap-around verandas offer views over pastel-colored neighboring hideaways and fireworks of magenta bougainvillea.
ACCOMMODATES
22
BEST TIME TO VISIT
November-July
RIGHT FOR
Beach bums, anglers, easygoing groups
HIGHLIGHTS
Personal experience team, private pool, rum bar, float snorkeling, bonefishing, pink sand beaches, horseback riding
Tesuque Valley Retreat
Santa fe, new mexico
A vision of surreal beauty in the northern New Mexican highlands, Santa Fe looks as though it’s been transported from another place and time. Hundreds of adobe structures, flat roofed and sandy hued, are woven between the mountains, a clay hewn crescendo of creativity and design. Here, detached from the world, The City Different exists without hindrance: a bubble of good living hiding in plain sight. From the owners of the Inn of The Five Graces, Tesuque Lodge embodies Santa Fe’s spirit. The private estate is kitted with the same sumptuous décor Five Graces fans have come to know and love, including onyx inlaid tile work, adobe clay walls, and handcrafted local artwork. Four bedrooms and bathrooms are sprawled across 5,000 square feet on an acre of lush landscaping surrounded by the picturesque Tesuque valley, an exclusive oasis only minutes from downtown.
ACCOMMODATES
8-10
BEST TIME TO VISIT
Year-round
RIGHT FOR
Adventurers, culture vultures, art enthusiasts
HIGHLIGHTS
Sumptuous local decor, indoor/outdoor living, 10 minutes from downtown Sata Fe
Lake Kora
Adirondacks, New York
At the turn of the century, American tycoons of industry built private "camps" for their families across New York's Adirondack mountains. During the summer's sultry months, the city's elite would head north to escape the heat and enjoy the hedonistic pleasures of the outdoors. By all accounts, the grandest of these camps was Lake Kora, the 1,000 acre former residence of the Vanderbilt family. Today, Lake Kora looks much like it did during the gilded age, with nine log cabins dispersed among the pines. It's the perfect place to live out your childhood summer camp fantasies or pretend you're a Vanderbilt on vacation.
ACCOMMODATES
26
BEST TIME TO VISIT
June-September
RIGHT FOR
Activity enthusiasts, nostalgics
HIGHLIGHTS
Lakefront setting, outdoor roller rink, heritage bowling alley, tennis and squash courts, boating and fishing
Sheldon Chalet
Denali National Park, Alaska
There's private, and then there's only-villa-in-a-national-park-in-Alaska private. Located 6,000 feet above sea level, perched on a granite outcropping that's the only constant in an active, 35-square mile glacial amphitheater, finding words to describe the truly epic remoteness of Sheldon Chalet leaves us buried in an avalanche of cliched hyperbole. The Chalet is owned by the son and daughter in law of Don Sheldon, who went bravely into this Olympian landscape in a 1960s Cessna. If the idea of champagne, elk charcuterie, and fresh Alaskan King Crab preceding a one-on-one audience with the Northern Lights speaks to you, then Sheldon Chalet is calling - it's just so far into the middle of the great wide nowhere that you might not be able to hear it yet.
ACCOMMODATES
10
BEST TIME TO VISIT
March-October
RIGHT FOR
Winter sports enthusiasts, northern lights hopefuls
HIGHLIGHTS
Skiing, snowshoeing, snow cavern spelunking, ice climbing, rappelling, glacier trekking, heli skiing/tours