Tag: Dispatch

On an unseasonably cool day, my teenage son and I make the short drive from our home in Lexington to nearby Versailles. Our mission: explore scenic vistas via pedal-powered railbikes at Rail Explorers Bluegrass Kentucky Division, an outing I’d had on my radar since its opening in 2023.

I am not a painter. The most complex thing I’ve drawn is a stick figure, but I didn’t let this stop me from accepting an invitation to the Bob Ross Art Workshop & Gallery in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The beloved PBS star of The Joy of Painting once said, “I think there’s an artist hidden at the bottom of every single one of us.” If there is an artist inside me, she’s in deep hibernation because I haven’t located her yet.

Within minutes of stepping into Orlando’s My Beer Spa, I’m sporting a waffle-weave cotton robe and holding a cold pint of blonde ale. Down the hall, my husband and I step into a darkened room, soft lights glowing gold like the drink in my hand. Classical music and the hum from the bubbling Jacuzzi tubs float in the warm air. As harried, overcommitted, working parents of a spirited toddler, it was everything we could hope for on a Friday afternoon.

“Checking in?” a voice asks from the call box at Georgia Safari Conservation Park’s Jurassic Park–like gate. We drive down a winding gravel road along high-fenced pasture, and a childlike sense of wonder creeps in. Minutes after setting our bags down in a two-bedroom luxury safari tent, it has all three of us in its grip. A vast savanna unfurls outside the sliding glass door. Is the sky really this blue all the time?

Perhaps it was, as Jonathan Swift once wrote, a bold man who first ate an oyster, but it wasn’t a hard sell for me to join Four Seasons New Orleans’s new Oysters Take Flight experience. On this bright, balmy morning, I set out from the 34-story hotel overlooking the Mississippi River for Southern Seaplane airport in nearby Belle Chasse.

A flurry of feathers and talons, and a Harris’s hawk alights on my outstretched hand, plundering the bit of raw meat sandwiched between my gloved fingers. The surprisingly light bird tosses the morsel into the air and gobbles it down. Then with a turn of my arm, it’s gone, soaring back to the treetops.

At Tank Town USA in Morganton, visitors can bash a junker with a sledgehammer before crushing it with an armored personnel carrier.

“I’ve played enough Minecraft to know where diamonds are,” my 19-year-old cousin says as we schlep across acres of muddy furrows with our rented bucket, sieves, and shovels. Although I’m highly skeptical of the real-world applications of Minecraft, there’s no sense in arguing when he points out a small rivulet of water trickling through the muck.

As the boat meanders through the bay, my guide and captain debate locations to check for manatees. They rattle off familiar ones we might run into—Greased Lightning, Penny Pockmark—named and remembered by the map of scars across their backs. Finally, we stop in a small cove flanked by docks and residential houses. I lower myself into the drink, and my teeth instantly begin to chatter. As I duck under the surface, I see more than two dozen manatees gather by a small spring and graze on seagrass, elephantine mermaids without a care in the world.