Iowa polishes its Frank Lloyd Wright gem

MASON CITY, Iowa — This town of 28,000 knew it had something special in the world's last standing Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel, but it also had a problem. The hotel was a decrepit shell.

For years no one quite knew what to do with the building that had slid slowly into decline since its heralded opening in 1910: from a hotel to stores and offices to apartments and, finally, by the 1970s, a shuttered mess.

There was talk of knocking it down. There was a suggestion — and failed attempt — to sell it on eBay. Finally, a group of locals created a nonprofit group and pledged to restore the building to his early glory. The city sold it to them for $1 and bid them luck.

Close to $20 million later — mostly the product of grants and fundraising — they've kept their word, and the Historic Park Inn has risen again, re-establishing an unlikely bond between a small Iowa town and our nation's most iconic architect.

But Wright's Mason City legacy is much more than one hotel. During his brief time here, the native Midwesterner also designed a single-family house for the Stockman family that has been restored with period-era furniture and is open for public tours.

Also, several of his disciples followed Wright to Mason City to work on the hotel, and they too were commissioned to design single-family houses. The product of such an influx of world-class vision left behind Iowa's unlikely capital of Prairie School architecture

Until the hotel reopened last year, all Mason City lacked was a centerpiece tying its architectural riches together. Now the Historic Park Inn draws both long-distance travelers and natives to explore Wright's genius.

"When we heard it opened, we knew we had to stay here," said Bryan Morrow Way, 69, back in town from Las Vegas for a school reunion.

"You don't think of someone famous doing things like this in small towns," said his wife, Kathy, 65.

Driving into town, you'd never know you are entering an architectural hot spot. Mason City's edges are made of the same strip malls and gas stations you'd find anywhere. But deeper into the city, you begin sensing an inventiveness you rarely see in Midwestern homes in towns of this size. Most stunning, of course, is the hotel in the heart of town, a long, elaborate yellow brick behemoth across from the grassy town square.

The restoration was an exacting effort that knew when to reproduce yesteryear and when to leave things alone. In some hands, for instance, the low-ceilinged lobby would have been gutted and converted to a luxurious space. Here it remains in a simple, stark condition that makes it easy to imagine the original version. In any other hotel, the dark scuff markings in the lounge floor just past the lobby would be appalling; here they're history, showing Wright's original vision and layout of the room. Though a little dingy, it's something you wouldn't dare replace.

The rest of the hotel toes closer to comfort, if not luxury. Clean and well-appointed in handsome dark wood, it all merges somewhere between elegant and cozy as you're reminded at every turn you are in a Frank Lloyd Wright space: muted colors, wood trim, countless right angles (even in the light fixtures) and long windows. The common spaces, too, are handsome and engaging.

The sleeping quarters are roomy and comfortable, highlighted by such modern conveniences as bedside lamps with dimmer switches and MP3 docks. Even the bars of soap have Wright-esque recessed ridges.

In truth, you need a night to fully appreciate the hotel and soak up the detail, such as the mezzanine that seems to float above the front desk. Besides, when there's only one Wright hotel, it becomes more than a place to stay. It becomes an experience.

If you go

Getting there: A car is needed to get to Mason City, which sits off Interstate Highway 35 in the north-central part of the state, just south of the Minnesota border. It is 350 miles northwest of Chicago.

Eat: Chop (11 S. Delaware; chopmasoncity.com) is a solid steak house with local beef and pork. My favorite spot, which is just across a courtyard from the Wright hotel, was Ralph's Garden Cafe (5 S. Federal Ave.), which serves a fresh, no-frills breakfast and lunch before transforming into a white-tablecloth dinner destination with a couple of local beers on tap.

Stay: The Historic Park Inn (15 W. State St., 800-659-2220, historicparkinn.com; wrightonthepark.org), of course. The hotel has 27 rooms that vary in size and layout, but the amenities are consistent. Also, the common spaces are beautifully restored to conditions worth lounging. Rates: $100 to $275.

Do: Mason City is known for two things: architecture and the Tony-award winning musical "The Music Man." Meredith Wilson, author of the musical, grew up in Mason City and has been honored with The Music Man Square (308 S. Pennsylvania Ave.; themusicmansquare.org), which includes a museum and tours of Wilson's boyhood home. Otherwise, in Mason City, architecture is king. The Wright hotel alone is worth the visit, but there's much more Prairie School architecture to see. Touring the Stockman House (530 First St. NE; stockmanhouse.org) is a must, but seeing the rest of Mason City's best architecture also is worth the time. Head to the MacNider Art Museum (303 Second St. SE; macniderart.org) and buy a walking tour guide to see the best of Mason City architecture, including the unforgettable Melson House (56 S. River Heights Drive).

More information: visitmasoncityiowa.com and masoncityia.com.

jbnoel@tribune.com

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Helsinki bars break tradition

"Finns drink hard," confides Timo Siitonen, bartender and managing director at A21 Cocktail Lounge (a21.fi) in Helsinki. This is especially the case during the long summer days, when the midnight sun encourages tipplers to go for the long haul.

Cocktail culture is still nascent in Finland's capital, where the locals are fond of beer and the ready-mixed "Gin Long Drink" (lonkero) originally developed for the Helsinki Summer Olympics in 1952. The canned mix, which some liken to gin blended with carbonated grapefruit soda, is "the world's first alcopop," says Siitonen.

But, Siitonen says, "cocktail culture is growing rapidly, which is changing the landscape of the whole drinking culture."

On a cocktail crawl in Helsinki, expect to find Finland's two iconic spirits, Koskenkorva (or Kossu), a clear spirit distilled from barley, similar to vodka, and Jaloviina (cognac cut with water). Typically, locals enjoy these liquors with soda water or cola.

A handful of Helsinki bars, including A21, are finding more creative ways to use spirits. A21 takes a culinary approach, utilizing traditional Finnish ingredients such as birch, sea buckthorn and cloudberry jam to transform stalwart Jaloviina into the more contemporary sea buckthorn sour.

Siitonen also recommends Kamp Bar (hotelkamp.com/brasseriekampbareng), a tranquil cafe/bar space in the opulent Hotel Kamp, and Grotesk (www.grotesk.fi), a stylish bar and restaurant housed in the former home of a Helsinki newspaper.

American Bar (ateljeebar.fi/en/american-bar.html) at Sokos Hotel Torni (Helsinki's oldest landmark and the only "skyscraper" in the city) is known for well-made but particularly pricey cocktails, as well as wines and Champagne. But business travelers may find one aspect of this bar particularly welcoming: It opens at 4 p.m., one of the few to do so.

"There is no real after-work culture in Finland," Siitonen explains, which is a foreign concept for many accustomed to unwinding with colleagues after a long workday.

A Helsinki cocktail: Sea buckthorn sour

Sea buckthorn sour is a cocktail served in Helsinki's A21 Bar. Sea buckthorn is a plant with vibrant orange berries that have a tart-sweet flavor some compare to sour oranges mixed with pineapple. They're also said to be rich in antioxidants and other nutrients.

The recipe: Mix 3 teaspoons Finnish sea buckthorn jam with 11/2 ounces fresh orange juice, 11/2 ounces Jaloviina (traditional Finnish cut cognac) and 3 dashes orange bitters. Shake all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Strain into rocks glass. Serve over fresh ice. Garnish with orange slice or fresh sea buckthorn berries.

Kara Newman is the author of "Spice & Ice: 60 Tongue-tingling Cocktails."

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New frequent flyer help online

Do you have trouble figuring out where and when to use your miles? Whether you're better off buying a ticket with miles or paying cash? If so, two new websites offer to help.

MileWise (www.milewise.com) is the more ambitious of the two. It searches paid and award tickets and compares them. It also ranks options in terms of the best potential use of your cash and point resources.

You start by entering your frequent-traveler programs: airline, hotel, and car rental, with the info required for the site to get at your data; the site tracks balances in more than 400 separate programs, including credit cards that allow transfer of mileage to individual airlines or cash transfers to buy tickets.

When you plan a trip, you enter the itinerary information -- origin and destination points, preferred cabin, and number of travelers. You can search for fixed dates or for a plus-or-minus one-week "flexible dates" range -- a really big plus for leisure travelers. The site searches paid airfare options, directly and through online search aggregators, covering "all the airlines you'd expect." It also searches for award seat availability on Alaska, Delta, JetBlue, United/Continental, and Virgin America, checking directly with each line. The resulting flexible dates search displays a one-week matrix of departure and return dates, with each entry showing either a dollar fare or a mileage requirement. Once you select dates, the final display shows the best 15 alternatives -- some paid, some awards -- along with the ability to book by credit card, redeem miles from an airline program, or transfer miles/points from a credit card.

When I tested MileWise, it worked as advertised:

-- On my first sample trip -- a simple coach flight from my home airport at Medford, Ore., to Boston -- the site provided all I needed to make a decision. On the specific preferred date I submitted, MileWise couldn't find any low-mileage award seats on any of my airline programs so it recommended buying a ticket. But if I had been willing to shift my dates a day, I could have found seats for 25,000 miles on Continental or 37,500 miles on Delta.

-- For my second trip, I chose what I knew would be a tough challenge: Medford to Paris in business class. Here, somewhat to my surprise, MileWise actually found award seats on Delta for the low-range 100,000 miles. But the itinerary was lousy: Medford to Salt Lake City, a long layover, an overnight red-eye to Atlanta, an all-day layover, and finally another overnight to Paris. There's no way I would actually have endured this marathon. And the result included an oddity: a much higher rating for using AmEx points rather than the same number of Delta points for the identical itinerary, given that I would have to transfer the same number of AmEx points to Delta.

Is MileWise ready for prime time? Yes, at least for simple domestic trips. And it's probably OK for simple international flights, as long as it can find seats on the five U.S. lines it covers, plus their partners. But you start by knowing that finding award seats on itineraries that require a change of planes is, at best, a tricky proposition, so MileWise probably isn't yet totally up to the task. Still, for many of you, it's worth a try.

Superfly (www.superfly.com) doesn't help you find award-ticket availability. But, for any trip, it does tell you whether you're better off using miles or paying, and it rates paying options in terms of the ticket price offset by the value of mileage you'd earn. The site also keeps track of your mileage accounts, and it says it expects to provide information on airport lounges. As in almost all search systems, you can specify cabin (economy, business, or first, but not premium economy) and the number of travelers in the party. When I tested it, the system worked as advertised. The main drawback -- at least for leisure travelers -- is that the search system does not accommodate "flexible date" searches.

Send e-mail to Ed Perkins at eperkins@mind.net. Perkins' new book for small business and independent professionals, "Business Travel When It's Your Money," is now available through www.mybusinesstravel.com or www.amazon.com

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Google's little flight search problem

If you haven't Googled a flight itinerary recently, you should try it.

Google's Flight Search, the fledgling search engine that lets you find a ticket and book it directly through an airline, is getting better. Much better.

In recent weeks, the new service has quietly expanded the number of U.S. cities it covers. (It won't say how many destinations are being served, except that the number has doubled.) Google has also integrated flight searches into its authoritative search results, making them easier to find and use.

When I wrote about Flight Search in the fall, it was widely regarded as a work in progress. But that work is progressing at a speedy clip. You might even say that it's flying. "Our goal here is to develop the best possible user experience," says Sean Carlson, a spokesman for Google.

But for whom is the upgraded Flight Search better? For customers like you and me? In the short term, yes. We get to find cheap flights through its slick and blazing-fast search engine, which is powered by recently acquired ITA Software.

For Google? Of course. A more functional site means more bookings, although the company declines to say how many tickets it has sold through this new flights interface.

For the rest of the travel industry, and particularly online travel agencies such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity? Maybe not.

Those online agencies want to sell their tickets through Flight Search, and although Google says discussions about including the big three agencies are "ongoing," no agreement has been reached. Google describes these discussions as a good-faith dialogue, but some think that the online agencies aren't a part of Google's business plan and will never be included. Buy a ticket through Flight Search, and you're taken straight to an airline website, although Google says that it's displaying search results from online agencies on a "test" basis under some results.

Think this has no bearing on how you travel? If only.

This little squabble is a sign of a much bigger challenge down the road -- one that led Google's farsighted rivals to fight hard, but unsuccessfully, to block Google's ITA purchase.

The problem isn't the Flight Search of today, an emerging competitor to the big three online agencies. It's what Flight Search could be in a year or two.

Look around at other Google products. If you need to find something online, your first choice is Google's dominant search engine. Often, it's your only choice. If you're looking for a sleek, intuitive e-mail service, it's Gmail. A place for online video? Google's YouTube. For easy online ads? AdSense by Google.

We live in a Google world. Google holds more than a 70 percent market share among online search engines. Gmail is one of the most popular e-mail services and certainly the easiest to use. Sites such as YouTube and AdSense don't have any meaningful competition.

To suggest that Google isn't in travel to do anything less than dominate in the same way would be naive.

So what's the problem? Isn't the current system -- with travel agents facilitating the purchase -- inefficient and in need of a smarter approach? Possibly.

But there may be such a thing as too smart.

It isn't difficult to imagine Google controlling most online travel purchases in the not-too-distant future. And until recently, I didn't have an issue with that; after all, if Google can offer cheaper tickets or better flight options by cutting out the middleman, who cares?

And then, one recent Sunday afternoon, I posted a trailer (http://youtu.be/iejNE9gba6w) for my new book, "Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals" on YouTube. Within a few minutes, the video was deleted -- erroneously tagged as spam by Google. (With a title like "Scammed," that's an easy mistake to make.) But then YouTube pulled my entire channel down without notice. And then my Gmail account went dark. Within a few minutes, my entire digital life had been suspended.

I managed to restore my e-mail account the same day, but my YouTube channel remained offline for three days, even though I made repeated attempts to persuade Google to review the arbitrary takedown. Google eventually restored my account, but only after I contacted it in an official capacity. The company apologized for the deletion but would not offer an explanation for its actions on the record, citing its policy of not discussing individual cases.

Of course, I'm not saying that Google would ever, or could ever, do the same to its travel competitors. In fact, Kayak has said that it's "confident in its ability to compete" with Google Flight Search. But my experience taught me an important lesson about how integral Google is to my everyday life. I can't function without it.

I can't imagine this breathtaking dominance escaping the attention of regulators much longer. But if it does -- if Google takes over travel -- there could be serious and long-lasting consequences that could harm consumers and businesses. Imagine what might happen to an airline or hotel company that disagrees with the way Google prices its products when it holds a commanding market share in travel? It could be cut off from millions of customers with a single keystroke.

What if Google drives one or two online travel agencies, or a company such as Kayak, which searches multiple sites for flights, out of business? Where do we go when our only viable option is Google? What would happen to innovation when one company controls so much?

"Consumers would pay higher prices for airfares and other products and services as a result of Google coming to dominate the online travel market," predicts Ben Hammer, a spokesman for FairSearch, a coalition of travel companies that compete with Google.

Do we really want to live in that world?

Christopher Elliott is the author of "Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals" (Wiley). He's also the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine and the co-founder of the Consumer Travel Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for travelers. Read more tips on his blog, elliott.org or e-mail him at chris@elliott.org. Christopher Elliott receives a great deal of reader mail, and though he answers them as quickly as possible, your story may not be published for several months because of a backlog of cases.

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Shallow waters of Florida's Blueway give you the place nearly all to yourself

PINE ISLAND, Fla. — On pretty much any trip worth taking, there comes a time when my mind or my body or sometimes both scream:

"What were you thinking?

"You thought this would be fun?"

For me, that time came at about 2:45 the afternoon of Day 3 of kayaking the Great Calusa Blueway along Florida's Gulf Coast.

I was alone and slogging through a very modest chop against a 10 mph northeast breeze.

My back was killing me.

My arms were beginning to feel like Jell-O.

My thighs were aching from bracing them in the narrow cockpit of my kayak.

"Jug Creek has to be just around that point," I kept telling myself as I willed myself to keep paddling toward my destination.

Two hours later, I've had a shower, I'm sitting on the second-floor deck of the lovely Bokeelia Tarpon Inn, drinking a beer, watching pelicans crash into the sea while hunting, and I'm smiling.

I'm thinking about the time earlier today when I sat in the kayak in water barely deep enough to float the boat. I looked to my left, then scanned 180 degrees to my right and saw an arc of 25 pure-white great egrets wading in the flat.

"Wow! What a great day! And what a great trip!"

The Blueway is a roughly 190-mile kayak trail that meanders along the coast between Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, explores a few rivers, heads north along Pine Island, the largest island on the Gulf Coast, then loops around to the outer islands of Cayo Costa, North Captiva, Captiva and Sanibel, right across the pass from Fort Myers Beach.

But you don't come down here to kayak the whole 190 miles. And you don't have to be a kayak stud to do it. Sure, there are parts of the trail, like along the outer islands, that are best left to those who were born with a kayak paddle in their hands. But there are plenty of areas that can be tackled by a novice. And you can do it by yourself.

After all, in most places where I kayaked, the water's so shallow that if you fall out of your boat, you can stand up.

Another attraction here is that it's possible to kayak from hotel to hotel. During three days of kayaking, I sampled a bed-and-breakfast and two motels in Matlacha (Mat-la-SHAY) and a B&B in Bokeelia — all on Pine Island and all with docks you can kayak right up to. But there's enough kayakable water around here that I could have stayed put in one lodging and still covered different areas.

Pine Islanders proudly declare their space as a taste of "Old Florida." This is a place where restaurants remind you of a Wisconsin supper club, every meal is served with a side of smiles and all the waitresses call you honey or sweetie.

It's also an area that invites exploration. Paddle south out of one of the many canals that carve up Matlacha and you can parallel the more exposed eastern edge of the island that faces out onto Matlacha Pass. But cut inside to the sheltered flats and you find still waters where great egrets, white ibises, little blue herons and, if you're lucky, an occasional roseate spoonbill are reflected in the water as they wade on spindly legs, their beaks continually bobbing up and down as they feed.

The Blueway in most places periodically has markers to guide you, but with all of the little channels that invite you in to dally among the mangroves, it's good to carry a GPS or, in my case, an iPhone so you can see exactly where you are.

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