Tag: Dispatch

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.