A cheeky little number – with just a hint of spud

A short drive from Manhattan, old potato farms are being turned into prizewinning vineyards. Sarah Barrell raises a glass.

Two hours after leaving New York I am sitting on a white sandy beach sipping a fine local chardonnay. Have I travelled by resurrected Concorde to California’s wine country? No. I haven’t even left New York. Or at least I haven’t left New York State. The north-eastern tip of Long Island, known as the North Fork, may be two hours’ drive from Manhattan but it is a world away. California still hogs America’s viticultural spotlight but thanks to Long Island’s vineyards and award-winning vintages, New York is now established on the oenophile’s map.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/a-cheeky-little-number–with-just-a-hint-of-spud-557555.html

Sarah Barrell heads for Milwaukee, home of the world’s most famous motorcycle, to join the centenary celebrations.

Sitting in a quiet roadside café on Water Street it’s hard to imagine Milwaukee as the host of the “world’s largest rolling birthday celebration”. On a muggy evening in mid-August dark dock houses loom over the recently regenerated canal-side area of this modest Mid-West city, the new waterside walkways as deserted as the surrounding concrete shopping precincts. With several hundred miles of highway still ringing in our ears, the silence is oddly deafening.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/harleydavidson-hits-100-with-a-party-on-route-66-537055.html

The Sertao is Brazil’s desert land, where donkeys and cacti proliferate. But it is also home to the continent’s finest prehistoric treasures. Sarah Barrell goes exploring

There is a place in Brazil, it is said, where nothing grows but sorrow and cacti. A place of donkeys and drought where the scalding sky shows little mercy for the creatures below. In this place, potholes are more common than people and distances between towns are measured in days rather than miles. As travel destinations go, the Sertao, Brazil’s north–east hinterland, is one of the world’s less obvious. It is also one of its most spectacular.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/prickly-heat-605341.html

We were in The Doghouse when he popped the question. On bended knee, he made a game job of it, shouting above the clamorous hip-hop playing in the cool-for-canines Soho bar. That was more than six years ago and we never did progress to the ring/invitation/fall-out-with-your-family stage. The asking was, somehow, enough. That was until we reached Vegas.

We hit the highway at 90mph. Wind rushed through the jeep from front to back and we flapped through the outskirts of Las Vegas like an apoplectic air sock. After 72 hours of neon-lit, coin-fed catatonia, we had to get out, even if it was five in the morning. We strapped our bags into the backseat of the jeep, like two plump children, and made north on Interstate 95 with a kidnapper’s haste. Clutching a book entitled Hot Springs and Hot Pools of the Southwest, we were seeking a solace in the Nevada desert purer than Wild Turkey and more magical than blackjack.

They were out there, somewhere. Over millions of years the primordial folding and faulting of the planet’s crust, combined with underground water and earth core magma, has produced a geothermal flow, dotting this desert with hot springs. Long before pioneer settlers “discovered” them, Native Americans had realised that the desert’s “smoking waters” were sacred places. They believed the geothermal source water to be a gift from the Creator, who resided in the earth’s centre. And the hot springs were His Big Medicine, and a neutral area in tribal battles where all could freely heal their wounds. After 72 hours in Vegas, as the local Evangelical radio station put it, we too were “lookin’ for some healing”.