1. Gather your Blackberry, your Kindle, your Macbook, your I-Pod. After using the device of your choice to make a reservation at one of three Sandos resorts on Mexico’s Caribbean Coast, pack every one of those devices into the nearest carry-on. Deposit said bag in the farthest reaches of your closet. Take a couple deep breaths and back out slowly. Do not, under any circumstances, look back. Grab another duffle, toss in a bathing suit, a pair of flip flops, a couple t-shirts and voila! not only have you mastered the Sandos dress code, but you’re packed for at least a week.

2. Throw away your guilt. I know. You’re making a valiant effort to lead a carbon-lite life and flying to the Yucatan creates anthropogenic greenhouses gases. In fact, you’re probably thinking of getting out one of those devices from step one and googling a scheme to carbon offset. Don’t do it. Instead, assuage the old conscience with this offset: Sandos, a young company headquartered in Spain, lives and breathes sustainability. They’re busy remodeling all their properties, adding solar panels and since 2011, have reduced carbon emissions by 70 percent. There’s even an on-site windmill and an interactive program on Climate Change developed by NASA at the Caracol property.

3. Do your sightseeing in one place. If you’re heading to the Yucatan, you’re practically indebted to swim in a cenote, visit a Mayan ruin, “ooh” and “ahh” over jungle animals and take in at least one Mexican or Mayan cultural show. And, of course, you have everything intention of doing just that. You want enviable vacation photos as much as the next guy. But then the warm ocean breezes and those smiling waitresses bringing free drinks with umbrellas seduce you into staying….just one more colorful drink longer.

At Sandos Caracol, an eco resort on 59 acres, you can do all those things without ever leaving the property. There’s an ancient Mayan ruin right on the property, 16 cenotes and, because the property was built around the jungle, monkeys, agoutis, macaws and all sorts of tropical birds, live right outside your window. As Heidi Verschaeve, Sandos sales manager, told me, “I never know what new animal I’m going to see. Every day, it’s something different.” Sandos Caracol also has a real Mayan herbalist, Mayan bees (they’re considered sacred and their honey, harvested once a year, is medicinal and used at the spa) and a kick-ass Mayan Fire of Life show.

4. Say, “Yo queiro tequila!” Despite its reputation as a fire-breathing shot to be swallowed with a lick of salt and a squirt of lime, tequila is a serious spirit with a 500-year-history and aficionados who pay thousands for a good bottle. Greenhorns in the U.S. tend to drink mixto tequila, a shabby wannabe with a mere 51 percent of blue agave. Like wine, the good stuff is aged in oak barrels and savored like a glass of fine cognac. At Sandos, included in the all-inclusive price, you can sample the good stuff. And after an afternoon of blanco, reposado, joven and anejo, four classes of the smooth, aromatic elixir, beach bumming came as natural as saying, “Ohmmm.”

5. Enjoy a liquor-infused cupcake. To further cement your new laidback attitude, head to Sandos Playacar that just opened an adults-only Cupcake Café. I sampled a vodka-infused cupcake (yes, it’s all part of the all-inclusive) that set the stage for one of the best massages of my life. And speaking of food, Sandos’ chef Angel Ibarra has been incorporating local ingredients, things like chaya (tree spinch grown in the Yucatan Peninsua) and flor de calabaza (it’s an edible flower suffed with cheese or used as fillings for quesadilla) into the Sandos menu.

6. Indulge in an indigeneous spa treatment. Each of the Mexican Riviera Sandos has a fabulous spa and each incorporates Mayan rituals and indigenous medicine into its treatments. The Playacar property, for example, added a Temazcal which is a Mayan sweat lodge and Caracol offers a wide range of Xcalacoco treatments from skin regeneration with Mayan honey to hydration using chaya and savila.

7. Build a sandcastle. Grab a lounge chair or a beach towel or make a sand snow angel and relax into the loving arms of this legendary sand that’s white as a newborn’s bottom and soft as the baby powder that’s applied there. And while you’re at it, toss the Ambien in the nearest bin. At Sandos, you’ll sleep like you did in first grade before money, before responsibility, before members of the opposite sex moved in our your mental turf.

It’s the only city that has a dance named after it, a 10-term mayor (a Prius-driving Democrat, go figure, in a state that re-elected a famous womanizer on the single merit of being Republican) and weekly full-dress military parades complete with bagpipes.

It has also, for two years now, been voted as the top American city by readers of Conde Nast Traveler. Which goes to prove I’m not the only traveler with a thing for the one-off, quirky and unique.

Here are the top five things you can only find in Charleston, a city that’s a good 106 years older than the country in which it resides:

1. A famous arts festival started by a Pulitzer-prize winning composer who had never lived there. Charleston’s annual Spoleto Festival, a huge 17-day performing arts festival has been around since 1977 when Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti wanted the “perfect American city” for a companion festival to the Festival dei Due Mondi he started in Spoleto, Italy. Although the composer of Amahl and the Night Visitors was successful in his original vision of showcasing emerging talent (Twyla Tharp, Yo-Yo Ma, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Emanual Ax all performed at Spoleto USA early in their careers), he and festival organizers parted ways in the early 90′s in a rather torrid fight that caused 19 of 46 board members to resign.

With those days long behind it, Spoleto is still going strong with more than 150 annual late-spring performances of opera, dance, classical music, theater and jazz. It produces its own new operas and has presented more than 100 other international art premieres including Tennesse Williams, “Creve Coeur” and “American Clock” by Arthur Miller. More than 700 local and regional artists are also highlighted at Charleston’s Piccolo Spoleto (it happens at the same time) including Atlanta’s Seed and Feed Marching Abominable, a marching band of grownups wearing outrageous costumes. As one 70-something dancer said, “It seems to solve the problem of how to have fun as an adult.”

2. Divorce-inducing, muscle-straining hot dogs. The Charleston RiverDogs, a minor league baseball team that, in a decision that had nothing to do with gay rights, used to be called The Charleston Rainbows, sells a half-pound, foot-long hot dog called the Homewrecker. With a possible 25 toppings (everything from pickled okra and cole slaw to sauerkraut and jalapenos), this bad breath-inducing hot dog gave Travel Channel’s Adam Richman a run for his gullet on Man vs. Food. The Food Network’s Rachel Ray also visited The Joe (the Joseph P. Riley Stadium is named for the country’s longest sitting mayor I mentioned earlier) although no reports on whether she tangled with the monster weiner. Fans call also try Bull Dogs, Dixie Dogs, Yankee Dogs and Pig on a Stick, this year’s new corn dog wrapped with bacon.

3. A ghost that shows up in broad daylight. Zoe St. Armand, one of hundreds of ghosts still allegedly residing in Charleston, was a spinster school teacher who used to live in a grand Victorian home that, in 1976, became Poogan’s Porch, a popular Charleston restaurant that serves killer buttermilk fried chicken. Although Zoe’s body rests just north of downtown in Charleston’s St. Lawrence Cemetery, her spirit likes to walk into Poogan’s ladies’ room and to wave at guests across the street. Most people have no idea she’s a ghost. Although her round spectacles and long black dress are markedly dated, Zoe’s apparition which, at last count, had been photographed more than 200 times looks surprisingly life-like. Police have even been called to investigate “the elderly woman trapped upstairs in a restaurant.”

4. A secluded dueler’s alley paved with cobblestone from the ballast of colonial ships. Charleston had the country’s first community-based historic preservation organization, hobbled only by having survived two wars, an earthquake and numerous hurricanes, so it’s not surprising there are still hundreds of glorious restored mansions, quaint cobblestone streets and more history re-enactors than years in its history. There are even a couple old, old trees (the 400-year-old Angel Oak that is reportedly capable of whomping 10 Hogwarts willows and a cypress tree on Grayson Carter’s former lumber yard) that won development battles with shopping centers, something that doesn’t happen very often.

Tucked away in the French Quarter, between Cumberland and Queen Street and unknown even to some locals, Dueler’s Alley (a.ka. Philadelphia Alley) was the official site for settling gentleman’s disputes. Some by sword, some by pistol, these duels were sanctioned by South Carolina governor John Lyde Wilson (there was even a code of rules, one of the worst offenses being to insult a woman) and remained popular in the South long after they were outlawed in the North following Aaron’s Burr and Alexander Hamilton’s 1804 duel.

5. A tea plantation that grows the official White House tea. Despite years of trying, commercial tea cultivation in the United States has never been what you could call successful. In fact, ten years after a US government experimental tea farm outside Summerville, South Carolina was shut down for being “too unstable a climate to sustain the tea crop,” the Department of Agriculture issued an 1897 report estimating the minimum cost of picking tea in South Carolina to be eight times that of Asia.

Nevertheless, Dr. Charles Shepard, using seed obtained from China and labor obtained from the kids at the school he built, grew award-winning teas in South Carolina until his death in 1915. In 1963, the Lipton Tea Company moved Shephard’s tea plants, that had remarkably survived, to a former potato farm on Wadmalaw Island that, to this day, (although no longer owned by Lipton) grows and harvests tea. The Charleston Tea Plantation’s American Classic is overseen by William Barclay Hall, a third generation tea taster.

Where to stay:

1. Renaissance Charleston Historic District. With location being everything, especially in a hotel, this four-diamond, boutique-style hotel is right in the heart of everything. 68 Wentworth Street, 843.534.0300.

2. Andrew Pinckney Inn. This B&B, across from Charleston’s historic City Market, was named for a second nephew of Charles Pinckney, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. 40 Pinckney Street, 843.937.8800.

Harris, of course, grew up in Albuquerque and while he once told a reporter he’d never dream of staying anywhere except with his parents at the home he was raised in, he and partner David Burtka now have two-year-old twins. Enough said. Besides, it’s never too early to teach Gideon and Harper, the twins who were born October 2010, where their food comes from, a lesson about which Los Poblanos is avidly passionate.

The 25-acre organic farm, not only grows 60 percent (90 percent during growing season) of the hotel’s meticulously-prepared food, but it has chickens, cows, honeybees and giant purple-blue lavender fields.

As for Gyllenhaal, she hopes to instill the same field to fork-style knowledge into her New York brood, offering them a chance to gather eggs and milk goats. And, besides, she and her brother Jake have a thing for exquisite food. The duo, along with their mom, appeared on two episodes of Molto Maria, an Italian cooking show on the Food Network.

San Ysidro, the patron saint of farmers, has been watching over the growing of food at Los Poblanos for some 81 years. In 1932, Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms, a former Congresswoman from Illinois, and her husband, Albert Simms, a congressman from New Mexico, started an experimental farm on 800 acres that stretched to the Sandia Mountains. They started New Mexico’s first dairy, experimented with sugar beets and other crops and built a greenhouse for new varieties of roses and chrysanthemums.

They also commissioned famous Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem to renovate their ranch house and design a 15,000-square-foot cultural center for political and community events.

La Quinta, as they called the cultural center with its carved doors and mantels by Gustave Baumann, tinwork by Robert Woodman, ironwork by Walter Gilbert and fresco by Peter Hurd, still hosts meetings and weddings and still serves as the cultural heart for this inspiring farm that, needless to say, holds a prominent spot on the National Historic Register. Since 1976, when it was purchased by Penny and Armin Rembe, who raised their four children on the property, it has been lovingly overseen by three generations of the Rembe family.

As I drove up the cottonwood-lined lane leading to Los Poblanos’ hacienda-style courtyard and sun-drenched dining room, past the expansive lavender fields, strolling peacocks, kitchen gardens and pond with lotus blossoms—I could feel the extraordinary energy of this landmark New Mexico ranch.

As I feasted on the locally-sourced cuisine, melons from nearby fields and eggs from hens that strut through the property, I felt as if I’d entered a different time, a different place with no clue that I was in the desert or a short four miles from one of the largest cities in the Southwest. Executive chef Jonathan Perno, a New Mexico native who trained in France, London and San Francisco, makes good use of the farm’s heritage, heirloom and native crops, incorporating things like tepary beans, chiles, cardoons, figs, parsley root, jujube dates and epazote into what he calls “Rio Grande Valley cuisine.”

And while scheduling didn’t permit taking one of the many workshops offered at Los Poblanos (things like aromatherapy, botanical art, field sketching, wine tasting, barn animals 101), I learned a lot just walking around the gardens, being inspired by the ecological consciousness subtly perpetuated by the living museum’s water conservation programs and use of natural biodegradable cleaning products.

As Kenyan manager Nancy Kinyanjui said, “We don’t want to hit people over the head with it, but we hope they recognize our commitment to sustainability and possibly take a little green consciousness home with them.”

The inn’s 20 suites and rooms have adobe kiva fireplaces, hand-hewn ceiling beams, hardwood floors, folk paintings, painted viga ceilings and, of course, the farm’s signature lavender spa amenities. Breakfast, also made with ingredients from the property’s organic farm, is included.

Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Cultural Center, 4803 Rio Grande NW, 505-344-9297.

I have Becky Creighton to thank (or perhaps to curse, since, as I said, I’ve been unable to think of much else) for introducing me to MacKissock, currently on a Food and Wine list of the country’s top new chefs.

Creighton is the owner/creator of this three-hour tour, one of several she offers through the company she started five years ago, and not only did I get the opportunity to swoon over MacKissock’s fresh, innovative dishes that treat plants (Squeaky Bean owns six garden beds and an organic farm called the Bean Acre) like movie stars, but I got to meet him and his crazy partner, Johnny Ballen, who produced a hilarious video spoof of what they called “the bionic restaurant” that sprang back to life in June 2012.

The Squeaky Bean, that took root in 2009 in Denver’s Highland neighborhood in a ridiculously teensy space, was never hurting for fans or customers. But it occurred to the partners that if MacKissock was able to work that kind of magic in that handkerchief size of a kitchen, just think what might be possible in a former saddlery building in LoDo with three times the space.

Let’s just say Annie Sullivan** has nothing on MacKissock. And getting to meet him and the other star chefs on Creighton’s culinary tours was a highlight of my trip to Denver, like meeting the reclusive artist who painted your favorite painting. Or running into Brad Pitt in an elevator.

Creighton, who worked in tech for 10 years before shooting off in a completely different tangent, was burnt out, fed up and “hated going to my job every morning.” She went to Sedona with a journal (don’t we all?) and with a glass of wine in hand, set out to design a job she would love.

“Ninety-nine percent of what I wrote related to food, wine and people,” she says which is exactly what Culinary Connectors is all about—connecting people with the chefs and the food they’re experiencing.
The fact the food scene in Denver was about to explode, something she was told by Lon Symensma, the lemongrass-loving superstar who ran the kitchen at New York’s Buddakan before choosing Denver as the spot for his own restaurant, didn’t hurt the success of her pioneer entrepreneurial effort.

“Denver has long been known as a craft beer town,” Creighton said. “But its adventurous, young population is now being recognized as well for pushing the culinary envelope. There’s so much creativity here. Denver wouldn’t dream of becoming another Portland or another New York. The food scene here definitely calls its own shots.”

Besides the Squeaky Bean, which I’m happy to report still maintains its Farrah Fawcett memorial (wasn’t fair, Ballen said, that she died the same day as Michael Jackson) and added a Roger Ebert memorial (with two candles up), we visited Symensma’s ChoLon, a contemporary Asian (well, duh?) bistro that showcases the culinary luminary’s rampant imagination, and The Kitchen, the Denver version, that like its Boulder elder sibling, believes in creating community through food. I particularly loved their commitment to the environment including composting, wind power and the recycling of used cooking oil to power one of the server’s car.

I could go on and on about Denver’s provocative and inventive food scene, but hey, my stomach will only stretch so far.

Although Creighton didn’t play matchmaker at these restaurants (she does, but not on the particular night I imbibed), I also loved, loved, loved TAG and Root Down.

Get in touch:

The Squeaky Bean, still dedicated to irreverence and fun with its vintage cookbook menus, bills clipped to seed packets, wine poured from lab beakers, cocktails categorized by movie titles and a lit-up bingo board, is at 15th and Wynkoop, 303.623.2665, http://www.thesqueakybean.net.

ChoLon, named after the largest Chinese market in Saigon, is at 1555 Blake Street, 303.353.5223, http://www.cholon.com.

The Kitchen, a spinoff of the popular Boulder concept that was started nearly 10 years ago when Kimbal Musk and Jen Lewin’s black lab jumped in Hugo Matheson’s lap, is at 1530 16th Street (Entrance on Wazee Street), 303.623.3127, http://www.thekitchencommunity.com.

TAG, created by Chef Troy Guard who says he goes to bed thinking about food and wakes up thinking about it, is 1441 Larimer St, 303.996.9985, http://www.tag-restaurant.com.

Root Down, whose bottomless blood orange mimosas during Sunday brunch will leave you grinningly blissful, is at 600 W. 33rd, 303.993.4200, http://www.rootdowndenver.com.

Culinary Connectors, whose Becky Creighton grew up with loud Lebanese family members eating lots of food, can be reached at Box 271441, Littleton, CO, 303.495.5487, http://www.culinaryconnectors.com

**She’s the Miracle Worker who taught deaf and dumb Helen Keller to read and write

Bill Gates, who started that little company of his in a garage in Albuquerque, abandoned this city with 310 yearly days of sunshine for Seattle that’s lucky to get 60 days of blue skies, but as Apple has proven, he doesn’t know everything.

Here are the top five things you can only find in Albuquerque:

1. Businesses who ask, “What would Walter White do?” New Mexico was the first state in the country to offer a film tax rebate. Consequently, its biggest city has played a starring role in many of the last decade’s films, including 2012′s $1.5 billion-grossing Avengers and the about to-be-released Lone Ranger. But the production that has brought the most fame to Albuquerque is the AMC hit, Breaking Bad, which has spawned dozens of profitable Albuquerque businesses. I was lucky enough to visit Great Face & Body that makes “Bathing Bad” bath salts, lotions and scrubs. Urban eco-shamans Keith and Andre West-Harrison, who count the show’s Giancarlo Esposito as a friend, cook up red cabbage for the organic blue meth bath salts that are selling faster than you can say Heisenberg.

Debbie Ball, owner of The Candy Lady, didn’t consider selling blue ice candy at her store until she saw Bryan Cranston offer up a bag to David Letterman. Since she’s the one who sold him that bag (the show hired her to make 100 pounds per season), she decided to capitalize, adding a whole line of Breaking Bad products, including Heisenberg’s famous porkpie hat. There’s even an Albuquerque artist who turned his struggling career around by making Pez dispensers of the show’s characters.

2. A trolley tour on an adobe trolley: Hard to find a city these days without a trolley tour, but ABQ Trolley is the only open-air trolley made from adobe. And, yes, the two Burquenos (an affectionate term for local) who own it give all the tours themselves, including a three-and-a-half hour tour of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman’s haunts. Guests on this popular, always sold-out tour see the Crossroad Motel, Saul Goodman’s law office, Tuco’s hideout and are even offered a drink at Los Pollos Hermanos which, in its civilian life, doubles as Twister’s Grill.

3. A movie theater with hundreds of lit-up buffalo skulls and swastikas. Albuquerque’s Kimo Theatre is the only theater in the world designed in the Pueblo Deco style. Built in 1927, its adobe architecture, log ceiling beams, chandeliers shaped like war drums and indigenous motifs like funeral canoes and wrought iron birds separate it from other palatial theaters of its time that tended to be decorated in Egyptian and Chinese motif. Needless to say, it’s on the National Historic Register so when it was renovated in 2001 just in time for Route 66′s 75th anniversary, the fact that the swastikas meant peace and prosperity to Hopi and Navaho cultures long before Nazi Germany adopted them gave city planners reason enough to leave them be. The interior of the Kimo (it’s an Indian word that means, “King of its Kind”) looks like the inside of a kiva, has murals depicting the Seven Cities of Cibola and is allegedly haunted by the ghost of a six-year-old boy who was killed when a lobby water heater exploded in 1951. Either way, it’s a great place to catch a Hitchcock flick, a series the Kimo happens to be running this summer.

4. A restaurant that makes salsa with the faces of Hillary Clinton, Katy Perry, Lil Wayne and Joe Biden on their labels. El Pinto, the famous 1200-seat restaurant that first coined the term “New Mexican cuisine” is run by a couple identical twin brothers who wouldn’t put anything artificial in their mouth if Breaking Bad‘s Gus Fring tried to slit their throats. They grow all their chiles to specification, fussing over them like a vintner fusses over his grapes. Jim and John Thomas have cooked on Air Force One and in the White House when George W. Bush decided to celebrate Cinco De Mayo with recipes the Thomas twins learned from their grandmother, Josephina Chavez-Griggs. Just about every actor with an agent has made it to this 12-acre property that serves 140 types of tequila and nothing that’s not organic and locally-grown.

5. Horses parked next to cars and bikes. Josh and Heather Arnold, a cute young couple who own Routes Bicycle Rentals & Tours, give brewery tours, movie tours and general Albuquerque tours on cruiser bikes. They also rent bikes to the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger who took them up on their offer five or six times during the filming of The Last Stand, his “I’ll be back” film after politics. And while bike-riding is cruiser friendly through the flat streets of Old Town and along the Paseo del Bosque trail, Josh says they occasionally encounter traffic jams with horses who are still ridden to local coffee shops from time to time. Thanks to the city’s acequias — communal irrigation systems — it’s still possible to own and ride a horse in the center of a sprawling city.

Horse photo by Bob Tilley.

First, termites taste just like black pepper, an amazing discovery I made after sticking my finger in one of those gigantic termite nests you often see in the jungle. The second useful piece of information is that if you want to catch a jaguar on camera, soak a rag with Calvin Klein “Obsession.” Seems, they can’t get enough of the scent.

And lastly, you can’t always believe every travel warning you hear. The U.S. Department of State recently issued a security warning about Honduras, insisting that crime and violence are serious problems throughout the country. Furthermore, the city I was flying into, they said, ranks as the most violent city in the world.

All I can say to that is “hogwash.” I have never felt more safe, met kinder, gentler people or had a more peaceful trip. In fact, I’d pit Lodge at Pico Bonito where I stayed against any five-star property in northern climes. It’s set smack dab in the middle of the jungle, nearly two miles from a main road and the only “threats” are getting so wrapped up in watching keel-billed toucan nests or so enthralled by the pendulum swing of a motmot tail that you accidentally run into a tree.

Pico Bonito, bordering the national park of the same name, was started by a couple U.S. entrepreneurs. It was chosen by National Geographic as one of the world’s top ecolodges, belongs to Small Luxury Hotels of the World and, well, let’s just say that Sports Illustrated didn’t film one of their swimsuit issues there for nothing.

Gabriel Cambon, the general manager, is French and a former chef for Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysees. Before he was at Pico Bonito, he directed Food and Beverage at Palmilla One and Only. In other words, the food here is spectacular. Many times I had to pinch myself. Is this a dream or am I really in the middle of this rainforest, being serenaded by birds and red-eyed tree frogs, while eating coffee and chili tenderloin medallions? Can it be true that pan-roasted rack of lamb with ratatoullie and sautéed haricot vert is on a menu served only steps from ocelots and agoutis and troops of howler monkeys?
Although the food alone is worth the trip to this secluded lodge within swimming and snorkeling distance of Honduras’ Caribbean coast, the biggest draw, the reason its 22 cabins are consistently booked, is Mother Nature herself. Head Naturalist James Adams, a refugee from New Jersey, is just as excited about the birds he photographs, the snakes he catches and the butterflies he observes as he was when he first visited Honduras 13 years ago.

His enthusiasm is contagious. “Honduras has everything Costa Rica has. Actually more. But tourism’s marketing budget is practically non-existent,” he says.

Of course, he’s doing his part to promote his adopted country. He speaks regularly to Audubon and other bird-watching groups in North America. He instigated the building of Pico Bonito’s butterfly farm (it breeds more than 40 species of tropical butterflies including the blue morpho), its Serpentarium and Iguana House. When I was there, he was excited about the red-eyed tree frogs that have come to mate in the frog pond he and his crew of bilingual guides recently dug.

The Lodge also offers miles of private trails winding through 100-foot canyons to waterfalls and natural swimming holes, a trio of four-story observation decks overlooking the jungle canopy and such adventures as white water rafting and safaris through the protected mangroves.

Located just 15 minutes from La Ceiba, the Lodge at Pico Bonito has 22 cabins, all around 400-square feet with private decks, hammocks, ceiling fans, free Wi-Fi and native wood and vaulted ceilings.
For more info, contact The Lodge at Pico Bonito, AP710, La Ceiba, CP31101, Honduras, Central America, 888.28.0221, www.picobonito.com.

Um, Rockmount?

Whether you’re aware of this iconic fashion brand or not, you’ve seen it many times. Paul McCartney, when he hosted Saturday Night Live, wore not one, but two different Rockmount shirts. Heather Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal (and indeed most of the entire cast) donned Rockmount’s snap-button shirts in Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain. In fact, the shirts worn by Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist were bought in a charity auction for $101,000 and now reside, entwined together for eternity, in L.A.’s National Autry Center, a museum devoted to Gene Autrey and all things western.

Ronald Reagan, Elvis, Miley Cyrus, Robert Redford, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Hanks and just about every honoree in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame wear or have worn (sorry Elvis) the shirts that Papa Jack Weil started making back in 1946. He served as CEO of the company and showed up every day, sitting at a wooden desk near the entrance of the five-story red brick warehouse in Denver’s Lower Downtown (LoDo), until he died in 2008 at 107. He said he owed his longevity to the wisdom of quitting smoking at 60, giving up drinking at 90 (except, of course, for twice-weekly medicinal shot of Jack Daniels) and losing the red meat at 100.

He told his grandson, Steven Weil, who now runs the store and the Rockmount brand (It’s short for Rocky Mountains, in case you’re wondering) that he got up every morning, read the obits and if his name wasn’t in there, he’d get dressed and go to work.

Papa Jack more or less invented the Western shirt. Or at least the first with snaps. Still in production today, these slim-fitting shirts (Papa Jack claimed they were less likely to get snagged on cactus or sagebrush) with the signature sawtooth pockets, yoke and shotgun cuffs are so much a part of the aura of the West that samples reside in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian.

At the historic store in LoDo (1626 Wazee) where the company has been making shirts for 65 years, there’s a small upstairs museum with saddles, quilts, cowboy lunchboxes, photographs, three generations of shirts and a couple “Jack A. Weil Boulevard” street signs from the city’s annual acknowledgement of the founder’s birthday.

Still scratching your head about Rockmount? Here are a couple other places you may have seen the iconic shirt:

** William Shatner wore one on an episode of “Boston Legal.”

** Costume designers for the 1993 Nicolas Cage flick “Red Rock West” purchased 20 of the same white shirt to ensure Cage’s character was always emanating pristine Rockmount.

** Robert Redford outfits the entire staff at his Sundance Resorts in custom-made Rockmounts.

** Clark Gable wore one in “The Misfits” with Marilyn Monroe

** Rockmount once sent a shipment to Antarctica

** When Cream performed their reunion concert in 2005, Eric Clapton sent an email the day before requesting a couple dozen shirts. Steve, who had to tell him there was no way even Federal Express could get them there on time, ended up flying over and hand-delivering them to London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Why does rock-’n'-roll love Rockmount so much?

“Beats me,” Weil said. “Luck, I guess. And people seem to like the story. We don’t change with the wind. Rockmount is about classic American design.”

Ever since 1983 when a flag-waving, strikingly mulletted Bono belted out “Sunday Bloody Sunday” against its red-tinged sandstone, it has been THE holy grail of performance arenas. In fact, trade magazine Pollstar, after 11 years of crowning this outdoor ampitheater near Morrison, Colorado the best, finally conceded it was only fair to give other contenders a chance so they renamed their annual prize the “Red Rock award.”

Last weekend, I got the rare opportunity to not only visit this magical arena that’s owned by the city of Denver, but I got to go back stage, visit the 300 million-year-old sandstone cave-like rooms where musicians hang before their sets, sit on the very couch Macklemore had set just one month earlier when playing for Icelantic’s Winter on the Rocks and linger in the hidden tunnel beneath the stage where hundreds of famous musicians have signed their names. It felt like getting to mecca.

The thing that’s so amazing about Red Rocks, besides the scores of well-known names featured in the Performer’s Hall of Fame, is the knee-buckling display of natural beauty, the perfect acoustics that makes you sure that God herself left those majestic rocks in that exact position because she loves us and wants us to experience awe. Stories are legend about sitting in one of those 9450 seats and watching a full moon rise over the back of the stage or the clouds parting to reveal a fully-formed rainbow right at the exact moment Widespread Panic, the band that holds the record for most Red Rocks performances, was belting out an acoustic rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Wish you Were Here.”

While it was U2′s 1983 release of “Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky,” a performance listed by Rolling Stone as one of 50 Moments that Changed Rock and Roll, that sealed its fame, Red Rocks has served as a natural ampitheater since 1906 when John Brisben Walker, former publisher of Cosmo, produced a summer concert series there on a makeshift stage. The magazine magnate brought in opera singers (Renowned Scottish soprano Mary Garden pronounced it as the finest venue at which she’d ever performed), 25-piece brass bands and a Feast of Lanterns complete with four military bands and fireworks off surrounding peaks before selling it to the city of Denver in 1927 for $54,133.

The Beatles, in their only U.S. performance that wasn’t sold out, were the first to take the stage after it was rewired and rebuilt for rock concerts . Since then, everyone from Jimi Hendrix, Steve Martin (his “A Wild and Crazy Guy” was produced there) and Jethro Tull (whose rock-lobbing fans at a June 10, 1971 concert inspired then Denver Mayor William McNichols, Jr. to ban rock concerts completely until a concert promoter sued the city for discrimination) to the Zac Brown Band (who will be playing three already-sold-out concerts this summer) has performed here.

When the buses of music’s biggest names aren’t precariously winding their way up the steep entry to the 6450-foot stage, people from around the world show up to hike and bike Red Rock’s trails, practice yoga in its stands and to run up and down its 69 rows of benches.

Red Rock’s 640 acres are one of Denver’s 46 Colorado Mountain Parks. The Sunday I was there, the arena resembled a Gold’s Gym for the young and beautiful, most of whom were running avidly back and forth along the rows, doing crunches with legs tucked beneath the seats and jumping with feet together from Row F to G and so on all the way to Row TT, without breaking so much as a sweat.

But back to that secret tunnel. Every inch of the walls, steps and electrical wiring leading to the sound engineering room is covered with autographs: everyone from John Mayer, Sting and Santana to perennial favorite The Grateful Dead.

I simply couldn’t resist. I took a deep breath, grabbed for my pen and signed my name.

He’s one of the most significant and influential artists of the 20th century, yet rather than seek the celebrity of such contemporaries as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, he dropped out, went into hiding and wouldn’t have posted a Facebook update if a gun was put to his head.

Lucky for us, he never quit painting…even though he fled the art world in the 1950’s at the height of his fame. Instead, he relentlessly pursued his ground-breaking Abstract Expressionism far from the glare of the spotlight.

He cut off all ties with the above mentioned artists, told Peggy Guggenheim and other important gallery owners to go to hell and communicated mainly through vitriolic letters, spouting his desire “to get out of the orbit of their devices and leeching ambitions.” When he died in 1980, he left a one-page will bequeathing his giant body of work, most of which had never been seen, to the American city that would build a museum to showcase his work. Needless to say, there were stipulations. The museum had to be solely devoted to his work, none of his pieces could be lent or sold and it couldn’t bother with any of that foo-foo stuff, things like an auditorium or a restaurant.

Several dozen cities vied for the honor, but it wasn’t until 2004 when then mayor John Hickenlooper (now Colorado’s governor) flew to Maryland and convinced his widow Patricia that Denver, a city with no ties whatsoever to the finicky artist, was up for the task of properly displaying his creative output. As Hickenlooper pointed out in what must have been an extremely charming dog and pony show, Denver was throwing massive amounts of moolah into its Golden Triangle Arts District. And besides, they would bend over backwards to follow every one of Still’s demands.

In return, they would be executors of some 2400 pieces, more than 94 percent of his body of work, created between 1920 and 1980.

An early piece before he pioneered Abstract Expressionism. As Jackson Pollock said, “Still makes the rest of us look academic.”

As British art historian David Anfam said when given the task of joining newly-appointed museum director Dean Sobel at perusing the as-yet-unseen collection, “I feel like the archaeologist Howard Carter about to enter Tutankhamen’s tomb.”

Many of the pieces, rolled up immediately after being painted and stuffed into tubes and assorted plumbing pipes in the Maryland barn where Still painted, still smelled of oil, still had the masking tape that Still himself had affixed.

As Sobel said as he showed us around the two-story, 8500-square foot concrete museum that opened 31 years after his death, “We’re still going through his estate. It will take ten years, maybe more. It’s like opening a long-lost treasure chest.”

In addition to the nine galleries on the top floor of the Zen-like building, beautifully designed by architect Brad Cloepfil, the museum displays archival materials such as sketchbooks, photographs, tools and letters including the one Still wrote to Betty Parsons officially seceding from the art world. A glass door on the first floor reveals the conservation studio where, every week, never paintings, some spanning 12 to 14 feet, are unfurled and painstaking prepared to be exhibited for the first time.

To give you an idea of how important this reclusive artist was and still is, four of his pieces (from his wife’s collection, not in the collection protected in that one-page will) sold for $114 million in November 2011.

So, yeah, Kim Kardashian may have a lot of twitter fans now, but I’d be willing to place a hefty bet that in 50 more years, Clyfford Still will have a lot more followers. In the end, talent always trumps PR.

To that end, I’m launching this special George Clooney Slept Here feature with five exceptional, unexpected and singular things a traveler can find in the many destinations I visit in my work as a travel writer.

I’ll start with the Cook Islands, a little-known (at least to most Americans) island chain with 15 don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss them blips of land spread out over 756,000-square-miles of the South Pacific, most of which is protected as a marine park.

What follows are the top five things you will only find in the Cook Islands:

1. A deserted island with its own post office: Tapuaetai, a small motu in Aitutaki’s stupendous 8 by 10-mile lagoon, is also known as One Foot Island. It’s deserted except at lunchtime when small boats drop off snorkelers and other assorted picnickers for ika mata and other Cook Islands delicacies. Although it’ll never compete with Federal Express (delivery from One Foot takes a good six weeks), there’s a tiny post office and an official passport stamp that is sure to stump Customs Officials back home.

2. A 70-something medicine man with waist-length dreads and tea leaves tied around his knees. Whatever you do, don’t ask Pa, who leads cross country treks across Rarotonga, the largest of the Cooks, how old he is. He’ll quickly set you straight: “The only question worth asking is how young are you?” Pa, who swam from Raro to Tahiti, can trace his heritage back 64 generations and has never met a herb he can’t identify, is as young as they get. He scrambles up boulders, incites such breathless pleas from his customers as, “Excuse me, do you mind slowing down a bit?” and, the day I met him, had fireman carried a man 10 years younger than him.

He calls Raro’s jungle “his hospital” and he happily points out remedies for everything from diabetes to itchy mosquito bites. It’s rumored he has cured dozens of cases of cancer and at least some Western docs believe it. An M.D. from the U.S. was slated to arrive the week after me to learn from his encyclopedic knowledge of Cook Island botany.

3. A justice of the peace who has never had to convene court. On Mitiaro, an island with a grand total of 170 residents, Tungane “Aunty Nane” Pokoati Hodson serves as the official, court-appointed justice of the peace. But she’s never had to give out a parking ticket (at last count, there were a grand total of nine cars on the island) or resolve a dispute. The three chiefs on Mitiaro listen to grievances after each of the three Sunday church services and upon hearing recaps and explanations, secure apologies and resolution. Aunty Nane is like the Maytag repairman.

4. A popular restaurant that’s open but one night a week. Called the Plantation House, this 1853 colonial home, one of the oldest on the island, opens its doors one night (occasionally two) a week. Count your blessings if you get in. At 5 p.m. on that night (usually Tuesday), you show up for a tour of Louis Enoka and Minar Henderson-Enoka’s plantation followed by a three-course organic dinner, served on an apuka-shaded veranda. Every dish comes from the jungle garden (even the chicken and the pigs). After desert, often coconut meringue cake with kaffir lime curd or lime cheesecake, guests can enjoy the gift shop the industrious couple built with timber recycled from the old St. Joseph’s School. It sells hand-made Cook Island products, things like pearl jewelry, rito hats, hand-sewn pareus and Noni juice and soap.

5. Beer made from oranges. Also known as bush beer, this homemade brew is popular on the island of Atiu in secret and not-so-secret jungle clubs known as tumunus. They’re mostly men’s undertakings (although visitors of all genders are often welcomed provided they contribute either a bag of oranges for the next batch or $5) where songs are song, tribal business is conducted and the beer concocted from oranges, malt, yeast and sugar is passed around in a coconut shell. Like many Polynesians, Cook Islanders once enjoyed a milky drink made from kava root, but when missionaries showed up, the “evil,” mind-altering plants were destroyed. Tumunus were technically illegal until 1985 when a German ambassador and the Minister of Police attended one. Today, Atiu’s remaining five tumunus are inspected every December by the local health department and nine visitors. It’s a worthy gig, if you can get it.