The doubt rang out like a cowbell by a French Alps: “Where did Darley go?”
The horde of PBS’s “Travels With Darley” was missing. She was final seen during a bottom of Isola 2000, a ski review about 55 miles north of Nice. A member of a ski unit expelled a tide of French into a walkie-talkie, his difference punctuated by puffs of cold air. Darley’s cameraman desperately scanned a lift lines for a pinkish helmet with a swishing blond ponytail. The other dual members of her film organisation weighed a knowledge of bursting adult and acid for her. The probability of a missed tie assured them to stay put.
But they had to find her, and fast. Because though Darley, there was no Alpine skiing shred for a South of France part set to atmosphere in a spring. No host, author or producer. In short, no Darley Newman meant no “Travels With Darley.”
“Travels With MIA” wasn’t scarcely as appealing.
After several mins of investigator work, a review worker finally located a instructor reserved to Darley. The span were on a ski run; her film organisation bolted for a lift. After several hours of shooting, they returned to a board and, drink eyeglasses in hand, explained a confusion.
“I told him to go and afterwards stop,” Chip Ward, a show’s executive writer and Darley’s husband, pronounced of his progressing sell with a French ski instructor. “But he heard, ‘Go to a top.’ ”
Pitch to Hollywood studio heads: It’s like “Lost in Translation” for a pledge-drive-tote-bag set.
The 39-year-old Bethesda resident, who grew adult in Myrtle Beach, S.C., has been mouth-watering viewers to tab along on her trips given 2007, when she debuted her initial series, “Equitrekking,” a travel-by-horseback show. Two years ago, she tempered a equine and picked adult a surfboard (Ireland), white-water rafting paddle (West Virginia) and potion of consequence (Tokyo), among other brave gear, for her new show, “Travels With Darley.” Over 13 episodes per season, Darley spins a origination with a solid hand, clearly defence to a afflictions of a common traveler: hunger, thirst, jet lag, crankiness, rumpled garments and raccoon eyes. However, during each shoot, a apart dramedy plays out behind a camera. Darley and her three-person organisation have contended with some unusual occupational hazards, such as a charging elephant in Botswana and Chagas’s illness in Belize, as good as some-more walking nuisances including prosaic tires, destitute apparatus and pointless print bombs.
[Answers to your tip questions about roving to Europe]
“Let’s keep it genuine and let’s do it,” she pronounced of her proceed to her twin vocations, filming and travel.
To know a rigors of a TV transport host, we assimilated Darley on a five-day fire in a South of France in mid-December. We had designed to accommodate during a Nice airport, though after a moody delay, we finished adult rendezvousing with them in Antibes.
The party had usually been on a belligerent for a few hours and were already swatting divided obstacles. The airline had unnoticed a checked bag carrying a XLR cables, for one, and they had to improvise a audio. And afterwards there was this . . .
“Oh, look, we usually got a tiny bird doo on me.”
The glamorous life of Darley, indeed.
Darley’s short, black-heeled boots clicked on cobblestones once overwhelmed by a soles of Greeks and Romans. She walked down a slight lane, afterwards incited around and steady her steps. Her predecessors would have certainly scratched their heads in problem during her U-turn.
“We’re blazing daylight,” pronounced Chip. “Walk and speak and keep it simple.”
Piero Bruni, a Nice-based beam and driver, stood to her left, explaining a story of Old Antibes for a second time and take. Darley carried her chin and carried her gawk toward a godlike Gothic architecture, a mural of courteous contemplation. A tree of chattering birds threatened to drown out their conversation.
The Picasso Museum in Antibes is filled with a works of many top-notch painters, including Nicolas de Staël. (Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo)
Chad Davis binds a microphone and Greg Barna fixes a camera on Piero Bruni, a internal guide, and Darley Newman as they plead Picasso’s “La Joie de Vivre.” (Travels With Darley)
The organisation done a approach to Chateau Grimaldi, where Pablo Picasso embellished for about 6 months in 1946. The commanding 14th-century castle, that has a unsound hardness imitative Rice Krispies treats, became a Picasso Museum in 1966, a initial establishment clinging to a peripatetic painter. Picasso donated 23 paintings and 44 drawings to a city, a starter pack for a collection that has some-more than tripled in size.
Short on time, we dashed adult to a second building to a gallery that would give any Picasso traveller shivers.
“This is a room where he worked,” pronounced a museum guide.
During his time on a French Riviera, Picasso was sincerely verbatim about his influences. His tone palette evokes a baby blue sweeping of a Mediterranean sea, and his subjects are informed characters around town: birds, boats, sea urchins, fish and, depending on your absinthe intake, fabulous creatures. Acting like an unsupervised child, he embellished “Les Clés d’Antibes” directly on a wall. The contingent of shapes with black dots for eyes and a true line for their mouths demeanour utterly amused by his impertinence.
The unaccepted debate finished with a sound of clapping hands, a vigilance that a camera was rolling and all low organisation contingency hush up.
We strike a strike in a channel that night. We were ostensible to revisit Hotel Belles Rives, where F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, had lived (it up) in a 1920s. Chef Aurélien Véquaud and fritter cook Steve Moracchini were going to ready a image for us during a hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant, La Passagere.
Visions of a pearl-in-blown-sugar-shell dessert danced opposite a Med. Unfortunately, a timing confusion forced Darley to thwart a plan. Quickly rebounding, we ventured over to Mamo Le Michelangelo, an Italian grill that is studded with celebrities during a Cannes Film Festival. Photos covering a walls and framing a open kitchen showed chef-owner Mamo grinning alongside such high-voltage famers as Mick Jagger, Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood. Several depressed stars, including Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, were grouped together in a Column of Shame.
For a Facebook Live segment, Darley and a special guest (me) gabbed with a barkeeper over an Aperol spritz (Prosecco, seltzer and Aperol with an orange slice) and assimilated a cook behind a stove for a discerning pasta-and-red-sauce lesson. At a bar, Darley took a off-hand punch and described a image as if she were channeling another PBS personality, Julia Child. Once a live event ended, a rest of a film organisation grabbed forks and dug in. Because one person’s food demo is another person’s dinner.
To devise a show’s fifth season, Darley had to make some pithy decisions. She had to select a destinations and a activities, pairing telegenic images with kinetic practice that could crack a fourth wall. On a balmy though cold morning, she stepped outward a Hotel Royal Antibes to confront one of a some-more formidable choices on a France trip: Jaguar, Porsche or Rolls-Royce?
“I don’t expostulate manual,” she said, nixing a Porsche a tone of heirloom silver.
Darley slid behind a circle of a immature Jaguar F-Type automobile and checked her pinkish lipstick in a rearview. Greg Barna, a executive of photography, and Chip piled into a Rolls-Royce Corniche II and organised their rigging in a behind chair — a oppulance automobile operative double avocation as a camera dolly. we slummed it in a Porsche.
The Grace Kelly impulse was injured by audio problems. The Jag and a Rolls stopped frequently to adjust a magnitude on a microphones. My Rent a Classic Car motorist pulled adult to a quell and we waited. And waited. we burnished my hands for warmth, and he handed me a nap blanket. Finally, we saw a train approaching, a jester carpool finish with red noses.
We gathering in fits and starts along a Cote d’Azur before hooking west into a hills. We upheld tiny villages that clung to a mountainside like climbers in crampons. My guide, who spoke singular English, forked out an olive oil indent and a circuitously trees origin a golden potion comes.
The highway outing finished in a parking lot of a Fragonard Parfumeur in Grasse, that has ragged a cincture of “Perfume Capital of a World” for some-more than dual centuries. The city is within easy plucking stretch of roses, jasmine, irises and tuberoses. The atmosphere smelled like a nosegay.
Much of a redolence attention is secretive. Out of some-more than 40 factories, usually 3 offer open tours, including Fragonard, that non-stop in 1926 and honors a Grasse-born painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
See how Darley Newman got her start..
Perfume consultant Corinne Marie-Tosello led Darley to a all-white lab, where she would qualification her possess Eau de Darley. Each hire came versed with an apron, pipettes, paper incense testers, potion beakers, 6 essences in brownish-red bottles and Evian water, given we can unequivocally work adult a lust sniffing.
“Perfume origination is personal,” Corinne explained. “It’s not usually chemistry and molecules. It’s an romantic journey.”
Corinne kicked off a diversion of Feel a Essence.
“What does this remind we of?” she asked Darley, handing her a tester frame dipped in bergamots.
“This reminds me of summer. It’s fresh, worldly and grassy,” she responded.
“Would we wear usually that smell?”
“No.”
First lesson: Perfumistas, we need to blend.
Darley inhaled neroli, lavender and petit grain.
“I am removing a tiny redolence high,” she admitted.
She combined a dump of floral, a lurch of citrus and a smidgen of tobacco scent.
“We have combined a sharp perfume,” Corinne pronounced with a honour of a midwife.
Our organisation over underneath a cloud of perfume. The smell of Grasse trailed us all a approach to Cannes.
‘Can we do it again?” Greg asked Darley, “but be reduction fearful of a stairs, and repair your hair.”
“It’s adhering out during a right,” Chip combined helpfully.
Darley has walked a red runner during a Emmy Awards on several occasions, though this was her initial time strutting a stairs during a Palais des Festivals et des Congres, a categorical venue for a Cannes Film Festival in May. With ethereal baby giraffe steps, she descended while delivering her opening lines.
“That was good,” Greg said. “But there was a tiny bit of motorcycle.”
Unfortunately, we can’t make a “quiet on a set” order or forestall pointless people from deviate into a shot. Noise and preoccupied tourists happen, as does Chad Davis, a show’s consulting producer.
“FYI, Chad is in your shot,” Darley told Greg on a wharf of Sainte-Marguerite Island, a 15-minute packet float from Cannes.
The largest of a Lerins Islands is best famous for a 17th-century restrained whose face remained perpetually dark behind an iron mask. The film organisation diluted among a Roman fortifications and Aleppo hunger and eucalyptus forests. we followed a Cannes guide, Karin Osmuk, into a Fort Royal museum and even deeper into a dour dungeon of a different inmate. And afterwards we waited for Darley. And waited.
Karin offering to uncover me a inlet route that winds past a bird-speckled pool and leads to a beach with transparent views of Saint-Honorat Island. Across a sea, Cistercian monks lived, prayed and constructed booze from grapes grown on a fingernail of land.
I didn’t see a organisation until we boarded a final packet of a day. we am not certain how Darley spent her time on Sainte-Marguerite. But I, along with large other viewers, will learn her locale shortly enough.
More from Travel:
Can’t confirm where to stay in Paris? A beam for each form of traveler.
In France’s Dordogne region, a land of castles and caves calls for low exploration
Start formulation your 2018 vacation now: Here are a best times to book flights
If we go
Hotel Royal Antibes
16 Blvd. Marechal Joffre Leclerc, Antibes
011-33-4-8361-9191
The 64-room boutique hotel has complicated bedrooms and a primary plcae by a waterfront. Amenities embody a private beach, sauna and aptness center, and dual restaurants, including one on a beach. Rates from about $170 a night.
Hotel Splendid Cannes
4-6 Rue Felix Faure, Cannes
011-33-4-9706-2222
The desirable 62-room skill is bathed in history: It was a initial hotel in Cannes and has been invariably open given 1871. Annick Cagnat, a doyenne of a family-run operation, mostly chats adult guest and points out some of a some-more singular antiques and artworks found via a property. Rates from about $105.
Hotel Windsor
11 Rue Dalpozzo, Nice
011-33-4-9388-5935
The fashionable hotel resembles a contemporary art gallery, with provocative pieces sprinkled around a open areas and guest rooms. The skill also has a grill that serves Mediterranean cuisine, including Nice specialties, a anniversary outside pool, and a sauna and aptness center. Rates from $136.
Mamo Le Michelangelo
3 Rue des Cordiers, Antibes
011-04-9334-0447
The grill in a aged territory of Antibes serves Italian and Mediterranean cuisine, such as pasta, pizza and risotto. The dining mark is a luminary magnet; a explanation is on a walls, that are lonesome with photos of a cook with luminary diners. Main dishes from about $20.
Restaurant Acchiardo
38 Rue Droite, Nice
011-33-4-9385-5116
The restaurant, that a Acchiardo family has run given 1927, is famous for a normal South of France dishes, such as salad Nicoise (hold a immature beans and potatoes) and octopus salad. Main dishes from about $14.
Fragonard Parfumeur
2 Blvd. Fragonard, Grasse
011-33-4-9336-4465
Put your nose to work in a Perfumer Workshop, a perfume-making category and bureau tour. The $80 price includes an apron, redolence bottle to reason your origination and diploma. Hit a present emporium for inspiration.
Isola 2000
Mercantour area, French Alps
011-33-4-9323-1515
The winter sports review offers skiers and snowboarders 42 slopes of several problem levels. From some runs, we can see a Mediterranean Sea. Grab a image of oven-baked coupler potatoes and a drink during a bottom lodge. Full-day adult pass costs $42. Reduced rates accessible for seniors, students and kids.
Sainte-Marguerite Island
About a half-mile from Cannes
cannes-destination.com/sightseeing-cruises/sainte-marguerite-island
The largest of a Lerins islands is a discerning packet float from Quai Laubeuf in Cannes. On a island, revisit Fort Royal and a Museum of a Sea (learn about a many famous inmate, a Man in a Iron Mask), and transport inlet trails lined by hunger and eucalyptus trees. Round-trip packet costs about $19 for adults and $12 for children 5 to 10.
Rent a Classic Car
Promenade des Anglais, Nice
011-33-9-5400-2933
Cruise a French Riviera like Grace Kelly and Cary Grant — though though chasing a burglar — in a oppulance car. Choose among such classics as a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, a Porsche 911 Targa and an Austin-Healey 100-6. From $246 a day, depending on a form of car.
A.S.
As an general transport TV uncover host, Darley Newman has wracked adult a pass stamps. At final count, she has visited 22 countries and 23 U.S. states for her shows “Equitrekking” and “Travels with Darley.” Along a way, she has also amassed a shortlist of favorites. Here are some of her picks.
Food Destination: Hong Kong, for prohibited pot
Restaurant: L’Air du Temps in Eghezee, Belgium
Hotels: Castle Leslie Estate in Monaghan, Ireland; La Suite Villa on Martinique; and Devonshire Arms Hotel and Spa in North Yorkshire, England
Museums: City Museum in St. Louis; Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y.; and ESSE Purse Museum in Little Rock
Hiking Trails: Continental Divide Trail, N.M.; Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyo.; and Cappadocia, Turkey
Markets: Manchester Crafts and Design Centre in Manchester, England; Motsana Cultural Centre in Maun, Botswana; PMQ in Hong Kong
Cocktails: Aberdeen Street Social, Hong Kong; Le Petibonum, Martinique; Pant Du Vineyard and Orchard, North Wales
Cheese: Hostellerie du Chateau des Monthairons in Les Monthairons, France
A.S.