travel

Tips for Hiking Mt Kilimanjaro

When I was planning my trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro, I wish I could have found a list of tips for hiking Mt Kilimanjaro to help me prepare. What’s out there is every tour organizations plug for why they are the best at getting people to the top, but not really helpful info from someone who had done it. For the 35,000 people who hike the mountain each year, this lack of information is a gaping hole in the internet where you can usually find answers to everything. Everyone has a different experience, and you may discover you have different needs than I did. But after hiking, these are the things I wish I could have known earlier. Each of these helped make my hike better and easier. There is no particular order here. I’d want them all.

Tips for Hiking Mt Kilimanjaro

Balaclava: Bring a balaclava for the journey. A thin one like they wear in the television show Survivor works best. This becomes a very versatile tool. You can cover your face to protect from dust and sun. You can cover your nose to help warm the cold air a little […]

Tips for Hiking Mt KilimanjaroMaggie Downie2018-02-14T16:29:00-05:00

Peabody Ducks

On our recent trip between Dallas and Nashville, which included Oklahoma City, Hot Springs and Memphis, we liked Memphis the best. In part this was because the Peabody, an historic hotel in Memphis, may very well be one of the nicest hotels we’ve ever been in. The place was so comfortable that I wanted to spend time in the hotel, which is not like me. The lobby usually had a live pianist. And ducks. They were known for ducks in their fountain. The Peabody Ducks. We didn’t know this when we arrived, but we read something about it online: “Don’t miss the ducks.” So we asked, “What’s up with the ducks?”

The Story of the Ducks

The Peabody Lobby

It turns out that in 1933, the general manager went duck hunting with decoy ducks. After a day of drinking, he brought the ducks back, put them in the fountain, and fell asleep. Upon rising he recalled the error of his way. He ran to the lobby expecting the ducks to have destroyed the place. Instead he found that all the […]

Peabody DucksMaggie Downie2018-02-14T16:47:10-05:00

Public Bathing and Massages in Hot Springs Arkansas

Hot Springs, Arkansas is known for natural hot springs that are plumbed through the hotels and bathhouses positioned around bathhouse row. This might be a little bit underappreciated today, but during Hot Springs heyday, hot running water in a building may have seemed miraculous. My grandma who was born in 1926 once told me that the most life changing technology of her lifetime was hot running water. We take it for granted now.

Hot Springs seems like a time capsule. Bathhouse row came to prominence in the nineteen-teens. As far as I can tell, some buildings did some updates in 1960, and no one has touched anything since. It’s a cross between two distinct times.

Buckstaff Bath House

I was eager to try the public bathing experience offered at Buckstaff Bath House. (I’ve gotten braver after my Turkish bath.) Buckstaff offers the same experience you would have received in 1912, except the attendants don’t dress as nurses. I was game. Matt was not. (After his Turkish bath, I think he’s had enough strangers bathing him and public nudity for a […]

Public Bathing and Massages in Hot Springs ArkansasMaggie Downie2018-02-14T16:46:25-05:00

How Egypt Opened the World for Travel

A friend asked me recently how I decide where to go on vacation? From the beginning, I’d always enjoyed social studies and history class in school, but my freshmen year of high school when I took Western Civilizations with Dr. Dan Kelly, I fell in love with history. I knew then that I wanted to teach history at the college level and see the pyramids. I’m a graduate school dropout so teaching history never came to fruition. I left the PhD program in Early Modern European History with a focus in gender and sexuality almost as soon as I started. But less than a year after leaving graduate school, I was in Egypt at the pyramids with Matt. Our time in Egypt opened the world up.

It was two years after September 11^th and our families were pretty worried about our safety. I was concerned. Egypt seemed like a scary, intimidating place from back home, but once there it wasn’t. I was more afraid driving on the skinny, one lane, cliff-edge roads of the Dingle peninsula in Ireland than I was in Egypt. That didn’t […]

How Egypt Opened the World for TravelMaggie Downie2018-02-14T16:49:38-05:00

Comic-Con Comfort Zone

Going to Comic-Con wasn’t exactly outside my comfort zone, but it wasn’t on my list of things to do, and certainly wasn’t something I’d normally be interested in attending. I’ll plan a hike, a fire walk, a giant slip and slide and build an igloo, but I wouldn’t suggest a day at a comic convention. The only reason I wanted to go was to spend time with my brother and Matt and to watch them enjoy it. That was the only reason until I discovered John Cusack was going to be there. I’m still not sure why Cusack was at Comic-Con, but I’ve been a fan before I even knew who he was as a child watching Natty Gann.

The awkward, though understandable, thing about Comic-Con is that you basically have to pay for any interactions with “the talent.” If you want an autograph, you pay. If you want a photo-op, you pay. If you are someone who collects signatures that makes sense to me. If, like my brother and Matt, you know Stan Lee is 93 and you probably won’t get another chance in life to interact with […]

Comic-Con Comfort ZoneMaggie Downie2017-12-29T20:19:54-05:00