I’ve always been a Med and Carib girl. My husband and I bought La Fiorentina in St-Jean Cap Ferrat, France, when there wasn’t a Russian in sight in 1970 and my children spent all their summers there. We bought our home in Mustique in the West Indies to spend Christmas and Easter warming up. The rest of each year we spent flying, busing, driving or training from town to town, country to country. My husband built and ran airlines, terminals and hotels all over the world. I ran an ad agency and had offices and clients from Detroit to Peru to London to Brazil. When we dreamed of vacations they were dreams of being in France and Mustique, swimming in warm seas, burning in hot suns with our kids.  

Click here for photos of Vancouver, Mary’s new apartment and a visit from some of the other wOw women.

When my husband died I had a crazy fit and started selling the big houses we had. I bought a boat I love — Strangelove — but after four years of calming down in the Mediterranean, I began to resent the economics of the weak dollar and 50-euro coffees. So I wandered around my atlas and saw Vancouver on the southwest Pacific coast of Canada — I had an image of Alaska and polar bears and whales. I have never been a fisher-girl or much of a sport of any kind. My vacation clothes have always been bare and floaty and I have been either barefooted or in Manolo’s highest heels on balmy evenings. But I am curious to the core and I didn’t know a thing about the Pacific Coast beyond Malibu, CA. So I made a deal with a very big boat to carry Strangelove from Italy all the way around and through the Panama Canal and then all the way up to Vancouver. I flew to meet it in Seattle which is a short sail to Vancouver. When I saw Strangelove it seemed to have grown since it left Europe. Strangelove is 156 feet. In the Med that is not a big boat. There are hundreds of boats between 200 and 400 feet. But between Seattle and Alaska, the new monster boats and the Russians and Middle Easterners who own them are still very rare and Strangelove is usually the biggest boat around. I am the Queen now on a BIG boat that hasn’t grown an inch!

Arriving by boat from Seattle, the sight of Vancouver is pure J.K. Rowling! You sail past vast purple-green mountains with blinding snow-white tops and furry dark-green islands so dense, so sexy that Hollywood stars hide in them while shooting films here — and there are 1,200 of those islands streaming all the way to Alaska. The sea is clear blue-green to the bottom. Little water planes fly about like paper darts and armies of beautiful young women row in their underwear in kayaks with men in little boats beside them yelling “bend those legs, chest to thighs, stretch those arms!” at them. Whales splash and have right of way. (Each one has a name and a number; this is Whale Land and there are as many whale people as there are green people here.) Then — as you get closer to Vancouver you imagine that it was created last night just for you by Peter Gelb, who orders those great sets for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Vancouver is not an old town left over from 150 years ago. It is illusionary. It is a dream. It can’t be real. It looks as if it was thought up and built last night — towers of shimmering pale blue-green glass with just a pink tower here and a bronze tower there all in a row gazing into the sea. It is a crystal city. The glass matches the sea. How the Vancouver fathers got everyone to agree on building all their glass towers the colors of the sea says something for the theatrical imagination of the leadership in Vancouver. I have a picture of our captain David Hoey, the crew and me with our eyes open wide saying oooooooooh! entering Coal Harbour of Vancouver.