In honor of Cinco de Mayo, I thought it would be appropriate to let my readers in on a fantastic discovery I made recently:  I found the best margarita ever.  Believe me, I’ve done extensive research on this topic, and I can say with confidence that you will never find a better ‘rita than the ones served up at the poolside bar at Southernmost on the Beach in Key West, Florida.

Meet Kevin, the master of the margarita craft.  He mans the pool bar five nights a week at Southernmost on the Beach, and he’s the engineer of the greatest cocktail I’ve ever tasted.  Go for frozen rather than on the rocks — both are good, but Kevin’s blended margaritas are truly superlative.

Key West is a beautiful island with lots to entertain a tourist, and Southernmost on the Beach is a top notch resort in all regards — but Kevin’s margaritas are reason enough alone to make the trip.  Trust me.  I’m an expert.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

While the rest of the country is still moaning about snowpocalypse or snowmageddon or whatever other bad not-even-puns you people are using for this winter, the Pacific Northwest has had beautiful weather.  Today’s forecast was sunny and clear with highs in the 60s, so McKenzie and I put on our hiking boots and drove north to Mount St. Helens to take advantage of the perfect hiking weather.

I just got a new DSLR camera and this was the perfect excuse to test it out.  A helpful ranger at the visitor center in Castle Rock, Washington, suggested the Hummocks Trail on the northwest side of the mountain — one of the few hiking areas that’s open in winter.  It’s about an hour’s drive from the visitor center up Spirit Mountain Highway to the trail head, and then the trail is an easy 2.5-mile loop with spectacular views of Mount St. Helens throughout.  Here are some of my pictures from the drive and the hike.

This is the view of Mount St Helens from the visitor center:

Some views from the drive:

Debris from the blast, and by “debris,” I mean the entire north face of the mountain, gushed through the Toutle River Valley, traveling 10 miles in 14 minutes.

A few spots on the drive offer views of nearby Mount Adams, the peak in the middle of the shot below:

The best views of the crater are from Johnston Ridge Observatory, which is closed in winter, but you do get some nice close-ups from the highway.

Inside the crater, the cone is rebuilding itself.  The rate of growth is surprising — geologists estimate St. Helens will be back to its pre-blast height in as few as 200 years.  The 1980 eruption reduced the summit by 1,312 ft, from 9,677″ to 8,365″.  That’s a lot of mountain.  Isn’t this earth amazing?

One of my favorite parts of this drive is the new growth forest.  Young noble firs have such perfectly geometric trunks and branches, it was like driving through computer graphics.

The rest of the photos are from our hike on Hummocks Trail.  We were walking over rock deposits that used to make up the peak of Mount St. Helens — in a way, we summitted the 1980 mountain!

The trail takes hikers to the edge of the valley carved by the debris flow from the 1980 blast.

Life is slowly but steadily returning to the blast zone.  Eventually, forests will cover most signs of the eruption, and wildlife will flourish here, but 30 years since the big blast, the evidence remains clear.  The stumps on this hillside are all that remains after the volcano wiped out the trees that once stood here.

The eruption launched this tree like a spear into the ground miles away from the blast (at least, that’s what I imagine happened here):

When I learned about the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption in elementary school, I pictured a mountain blowing itself to smithereens, but even 1,312 feet shorter, Mount St. Helens remains one of the giants of the Cascade Range.  It’s now one of my favorite places to visit on a day like today.  Read what I wrote about my first visit here.

Around the holiday season, airports and planes will be packed with travelers, and the holiday travelers tend to be a more inexperienced herd than the typical airport population at any other time of year.  Inexperienced travelers create logjams at security, holdups at the check-in desk, and can just be an all-around drag for other people trying to get where they’re going.  Here are some tips to help ease your holiday traveling stresses, whether you’re trying to avoid the common holdups or avoid causing them:

• Try to avoid checking bags.  If you’re just traveling for a few days on a holiday weekend, you probably don’t need large bags.  With almost all airlines charging for bags, you’ll save money by packing light, and you’ll save time by not having to wait at baggage claim.  You also won’t have to worry about the small but significant possibility of lost luggage.
• Check in online for your flight.  The earlier you check in, the more likely you are to get the seats you want and the overhead bin space you need when you get in an early boarding group.  If the flight is overbooked, checking in early ensures that you won’t get bumped.  You won’t have to wait in long lines to check in at the airport when you check in online, and if you have bags to check, many airlines offer a discount when you prepay online.
• Fly home on Saturday.  Most holiday weekend travelers will be flying home on Sunday and heading back to work on Monday.  When you fly on Saturday, you avoid the biggest crowds, you give yourself a day to decompress at home, and you have built in flexibility in the event of a delay or bump.  With that flexibility, you can volunteer to bump on any overbooked flights and take advantage of the generous compensation from the airlines — almost all airlines give refunds and travel vouchers to anyone who volunteers to bump from an overbooked flight.
• Enjoy free Wi-Fi at airports and on flights throughout the holiday season.  All of my favorite airports have free Wi-Fi all the time, but we don’t always get to choose our airports — Google is offering free Wi-Fi at 47 additional airports throughout the holidays, as well as on board all Virgin America flights.  Check www.freeholidaywifi.com to see if your airports are on the list.  Several other airlines are offering holiday specials for in-flight Wi-Fi as well.
• Don’t wrap any gifts before you fly.  Baggage inspectors may have to unwrap them, so save the wrapping until you and your gifts arrive at your destination.
• Be familiar with the rules about flying with liquids.  The not-really-new-anymore rules about flying with liquids seem to cause the biggest delays at security as ignorant passengers argue with TSA about their bottles of liquor and shampoo.  You can’t put any liquids over 3oz in your carry-ons, and you have to remove all liquids and put them in a clear plastic baggie before going through security.  Honestly, it’s easiest just not to bother with it at all.  If you must bring liquids, follow the rules and be prepared at security, and put everything you can into your checked luggage.
• Put on a happy face.  Traveling makes people grumpy, and grumpiness feeds on grumpiness, so do your best not to fan the negativity flames.  Know that you’re going to face lines and waits and crowds, and mentally prepare yourself for that.  Be friendly to other travelers and especially to your flight crew.  A little thoughtfulness can go a long way.

Don’t let a rough day of travel dampen your holiday fun.  Have a great time, wherever you’re going!

I’ve mentioned that I used to work at the front desk of a resort.  I often wondered how some of our guests got along in the real world.  They were always calling us with the stupidest questions — I just couldn’t imagine these people surviving on their own.  It was also pretty crazy what they thought they could get away with.  Theft is very common at hotels, usually guests stealing from the hotel.  Of course this is illegal and often infuriating, but sometimes the thievery reaches a level where you can’t even get mad — you just have to laugh and applaud the crook’s boldness.

The craziest thing that ever went missing during my time at the resort was a queen-sized bed.  Not only did someone swipe a mattress, box spring, and bed frame, but they took it from the top floor of our hotel.  How they got these very large items down several flights, out the door, and off resort property (which required passing through a guard station) is a mystery.  Of course we know who took the bed, because they gave us their credit card and ID at check-in — this definitely falls under “incidentals” — so despite their best efforts, this was far from the perfect crime.

Everyone has taken hotel toiletries (though I don’t think it counts as stealing when they’re free and they’re there for your use), and it’s not uncommon for a towel or bathrobe to find its way into a guest’s luggage, either — but there are some things the hotels probably never had the slightest worry of losing, until they were gone.

For instance, an entire marble fireplace went missing from the Four Seasons Beverly Wilshire Hotel.  How is that even possible?

At the Birmingham Hotel du Vin and Bistro in the UK, a drunk guest was busted attempting to steal a stuffed and mounted boar’s head from the hotel’s billiard room.  It would be more impressive if he’d been successful…

The Residence in Bath, a luxury retreat in England, reports that sex toys are their most frequently stolen item.  This begs the question — why does a hotel provide sex toys?  And it’s uncomfortable enough to think about what’s happened in the hotel bed you sleep in — but sex toys?  No mystery there.  Yikes.

A former Starwood Hotel Group GM noted that in his 20-year tenure with the hotel chain, the wildest theft he ever encountered was when three people walked into a hotel lobby and wheeled the hotel’s grand piano right out the door and down the street.   Wow.

What can I say?  I’m impressed.

I’ve worked customer service jobs in a handful of different industries, and I can pretty confidently say that travelers are the second-most demanding, abrasive, and entitled group of people in the world.  Second only to holiday travelers.  One holiday season, I was pulling a 12-hour shift at the front desk of a four season resort on Christmas Eve.  At 11pm, a woman came in and screamed and spat at me for 20 minutes, telling me “You have RUINED Christmas!” all because I wouldn’t wash her towels for her.  And get this — she wasn’t even staying at our resort. She was renting a condo near our resort.  Point being, customer service jobs suck.  You take all the abuse for things that are never your fault.

This experience has given me supreme respect for people who work as flight attendants, which I imagine is one of the most trying careers there is.  People are so grouchy when they fly, and everyone resents the airlines for jacking ticket prices and ripping them off with extra fees.  Flight attendants are the face of the airlines, and end up taking all the crap, even though none of them were in on the board meeting where someone decided it would be a good idea to charge $7 per drink.

Flight attendants clean up after you, serve you and answer your questions, no matter how inane, and their number one priority is to keep you safe, even when you treat them in such a way that makes them want to throw you off the aircraft at 35,000 feet.  Somehow, they manage to do all this with a smile.  I know I wouldn’t last more than one flight without losing my composure and going apeshit on the guy who blames me for turbulence or weather delays in Chicago.  I could never do this job — could you?

I don’t think that many flight attendants truly hate their jobs, but I’ve certainly seen them take a lot of abuse that I know they don’t deserve.  That’s why it’s important to me to do what I can to make sure the FAs know I appreciate them.  I got the idea from Heather Poole, a flight attendant and writer, that a small gesture can really go a long way.  She mentioned once that flight crews really love it when passengers give them candy, so every time I fly, I bring a bag of chocolates to give to the crew when I board the plane.  At the very least, it perks them up and they’re extra nice to me, because they can count on me not to be an abusive jerk.  Often I’ll get a free drink or two from a thankful flight attendant.  And I’m pretty sure that if we crash landed on a deserted island, the crew would help protect me from getting eaten by the other passengers when the time comes to resort to cannibalism.

Look, you’re probably paying a few hundred bucks for this flight anyway — what’s another $3 for a bag of candy?  Chances are, the special treatment you’ll get in return is worth way more than that anyway.  But don’t do it for the free cocktails — be kind to your crew because you know they deserve it.  Turn off your phone when they say so.  Pretend to listen to the safety instructions.  Don’t make a mess around your seat.  Say “please” and “thank you.”  It really shouldn’t require any extra effort.

The secret to special treatment on your next flight is simple:  just be kind to your crew.

When I go to Vegas, I’m often on my own at the casino.  It’s not my husband’s scene at all, but I just love hanging out in the casinos, meeting people, downing “free” cocktails, and chasing the dream of a big jackpot.  Of course I never will hit a big jackpot, because I’m not a high roller and I don’t play the slots, but there’s still an adrenaline rush every time a dealer puts another $5 payout in front of me.  My last two trips to Las Vegas have been especially great, because I was there with friends who actually enjoyed the casinos with me.  I learned some new games, checked out a bunch of different casinos, and came back full of ideas to make my next trip to Sin City even more fun.

One of the things I love about the casinos is the way you make friends with everyone else playing with you.  In most games, you’re all playing against the house, not each other, so you get into it together, help each other out, and make a lot of buddies over the course of a few hours at the same table.  While the luxury casino hotels in Vegas are amazing places to stay, dine, party, and see shows, I’ve found that the gaming atmosphere is much, much more fun at the low-limit tables in the cheaper casinos.  I had a blast at the Sahara last month, where I scored a totally average hotel room for $17 a night during the week, and never played more than a $5 bet on anything, even on the weekend evenings.

There are lots of tricks to having a good time gambling.  If you win, it’s hard not to enjoy yourself, but if you could guarantee that, there’d be no Vegas.  So the best thing to do is to choose games that you enjoy, and where you won’t lose your money too quickly, if luck is not smiling upon you.  I used to play blackjack exclusively in the casinos, because the odds tend to be the best (if you know what you’re doing).  I’d sit at the same table for hours, get to know the dealers and other players, and I usually came out about even.  I still enjoy blackjack, but I’ve realized I prefer some other games, even if the odds are a little worse for me.

My new favorite is Pai Gow Poker.  The rules are simple and the dealers will always help — it’s not really a game of making decisions, like blackjack is.  There’s always a right way to play your hand at Pai Gow, and the vast majority of the hands will be pushes, so even if you’re losing, it takes a long time.  In the mean time, you just sit at the table and socialize with the dealer and other players while enjoying the free cocktails and racking up comps on your club card.   I paid for more than a full room night at the Sahara on comps alone — and I was just playing a couple hours each night at the $5 tables.

Probably the most social (and most rowdy) game in a casino is craps.  Some gamblers will tell you craps tables have the best odds, but that involves a creative way of doing math.  Still, craps odds aren’t bad, so it is another game that you can probably play for a long time without a huge bankroll.  There are tons of different bets you can make at the craps table, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, just stick to the pass line.

On my last trip to Vegas, I tried sports book betting for the first time.  The sports book is a totally different atmosphere from the rest of the casino, but I had a lot of fun there, watching my Hokies beat up on the Miami Hurricanes.  I definitely recommend the Las Vegas Hilton for sports book betting.  They have one of the biggest sports theaters on the strip, so you can catch just about any game you want to watch.  The sports book is also a much slower way to lose your money than any table games or slot machines in the casino.

When gambling in Vegas, try to think of it as entertainment.  You pay for entertainment, so you can think of the money you lose in a night as the price you pay for a good time.  Don’t gamble more than you’re willing to pay for that kind of fun, or it will certainly cease to be entertaining.  Get a comp card (they’re free!) and do all your gambling in one casino to rack up the most comps.  Talk to people, make friends, and tip your dealers.  I’ll be back in Vegas in March, if not before.  Look for me at the Pai Gow tables.

If it were legal for a girl to marry a shoe, I’d be signing my name Meg Keen.  As it is, my KEENs and I are in a lifelong, committed relationship.  I’ve had the Newport H2 style for a few years now, and they’ve been everywhere with me:  to the tops of mountains, through rivers and lakes, to the gym, and even to one formal occasion where I accidentally forgot to pack my dress shoes.  (What can I say?  KEEN and I are monogamous.)  I’ve put these shoes through tests that would annihilate a lesser shoe, and following trial after trial, these shoes are still as good as new.  They don’t even look faded.

That made it hard for me to explain to my Newports that I was bringing another KEEN shoe into our lives.  I’m far from done with my first pair of KEENs, but when I saw the new KEEN Whisper, I couldn’t resist.  Some women spend hours deciding on which outfit to wear; now I agonize over which KEENs will be best for the day.

The new KEEN Whisper

The Whisper, like my Newport H2, is specifically designed as a water shoe, but it’s versatile enough to handle any terrain.  While most of the earlier KEEN shoe designs are unisex, the Whisper is made for women.  The Whisper is more slender than the Newport, with thinner straps for a more feminine look.  It is also, without a doubt, the most comfortable shoe I’ve ever slipped on my foot.  This shoe required zero break-in time.  My Whispers and I hit the trail immediately, and we had a blast.  In addition to feeling great, protecting your feet wherever you go, and lasting forever, these shoes have been treated with Aegis Microbe Shield, an environmentally-friendly antimicrobial technology that helps prevent odor, staining and deterioration — so your shoes won’t stink!

I can’t say enough good things about these shoes, so instead of babbling on, I’m going to give you a chance to see for yourself!  I’m teaming up with KEEN to offer a free pair of the new KEEN Whisper water sandals (or the Newport H2 if our lucky winner prefers something a little more masculine).  To enter to win your free pair of KEENs, simply comment below and tell me why you want a new pair of KEEN shoes.  You must enter a valid email address so I can contact you if you win.  We won’t sell your email address to anyone — I promise!  The contest will be open until September 30, 2009.  One entry per person.  A winner will be selected from all the valid entries on September 30th.

While you’re anxiously waiting for the contest results, as I know you will be, fill your time checking out the rest of the Twolia site.  We’ve got some great new sections for music and shopping — enjoy:)

Good luck!

Don’t you hate it how airlines won’t tell you that your flight is delayed until after everyone’s already on the plane?  You just have to sit there on the tarmac until whatever situation clears up.  I guess they have their reasons for doing it this way, but it’s a drag.  Like the flight I was on earlier this week — right before boarding, I was called to the desk because they’d had to change my seat assignment.  Apparently my seat was broken, so they were putting me somewhere else.  Okay, fine.

We boarded, and the flight was mostly full but not completely packed.  Just as everyone’s getting settled in, the captain comes on the PA system to let us know there’s going to be a delay.  He begins to explain that the plane has too much fuel, and will be too heavy, so they have to get the fuel trucks out to defuel the plane.  He’s flustered and apologetic and says to us, “Folks, I’ve been flying for many years, and trust me, this is a rare error.  It’s not something that happens often, but you know, we caught it before it was a problem, so that’s good.  It’ll just be about a 45-minute delay while we wait for the fuel trucks.”

Thus began the groaning.  Then a few minutes later, the captain comes on again.  “Good news, everybody!  Since we have a row of broken seats that we couldn’t sell, the weight of the plane is just fine and we won’t have to remove any fuel.  We’ll be pushing back any minute now.  Thanks for your patience.”

Everyone was relieved that we wouldn’t be delayed for an hour, but this smelled fishy to me.  Can three unoccupied seats really make any difference on a 747?  Doesn’t a jet this size weigh something like a MILLION pounds?  I can understand if a few thousand extra gallons of fuel is too much, but can three people and their luggage really tip the balance?  How does the airline account for different sized passengers?  You don’t have to weigh in when you buy your ticket.  On any given day, the average passenger weight probably fluctuates a lot.  You could have a plane full of high school cheerleaders one day and a college football team the next, and who’s to say what any of them packed in their luggage?.  I just don’t see how the airline can decide that three unoccupied seats makes enough of a difference one way or the other when deciding if it’s safe to put a plane in the air.

Now I’m not accusing this airline of unsafe practices.  I was never worried about falling out of the sky.  It’s just that logic tells me this business about fuel weight was a big fat lie.  I probably never will know why we were going to be delayed, or why they decided to send us on our way anyway, but I do wonder why they told us this story.  It’s definitely one for my WTF? files.

It’s never a good idea to book the first hotel you find online without doing any research, but how do you know what you’re supposed to look for?

TripAdvisor, a popular hotel rating website, has been warning users about possible fake reviews.  So how the heck are you supposed to know where to stay when you’re traveling?

There are some telltale signs that a review is fake.  If it is the only negative review in a sea of otherwise positive endorsements, it may have been put there by a competitor.  On the other hand, if a review seems overly glowing, it may be a hotel owner or employee posting for their own benefit.  If a review mentions specific details that most travelers wouldn’t notice or bother to write about, that should be a red flag.

Before you take a review to the bank, check to see if the reviewer has reviewed any other hotels.  If they’ve reviewed lots of different places all over the world, then they’re almost certainly a legitimate traveler whose judgment you can trust.  But if they’ve only written one or two reviews, that’s a possible sign that the account was created solely to inflate the reviews of one establishment, or to hurt a competitor.

There are over 23 million reviews on the TripAdvisor website, and most of them are legitimate, so you don’t need to write off the site entirely.  I give kudos to the site for actually warning users to beware of fake reviews, and doing what they can to police against them.  Nevertheless, you probably shouldn’t plan an entire vacation around anonymous reviews.

If you want a detailed and unbiased review of a hotel, the best place to look is — who could see this coming? — a travel blog!  Professional guidebooks are fine sources as well.  Just keep in mind that any time you browse reviews where anyone can post an opinion, you’re probably not getting completely unbiased information.

I know that flying is the safest way to travel, and I’ve done enough of it that I’m pretty desensitized to things like turbulence or frequent news reports of airline disasters, but I still get a little nervous at every takeoff and landing — especially landings.

It’s probably not a good idea to fuel my nerves with videos like these, but you’ve got to admit, these landings are pretty hard core.  Not for the faint of heart, though.

As much as I’d love to visit St. Maarten, I don’t think I ever want to get there by plane!  I also don’t think I want to be on the beach when a 747 comes in for a landing:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAfQwDizpRo[/youtube]

At the same airport, planes taking off blast tourists right off the beach:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6doxd_3k5Y[/youtube]

Here’s a video of ten terrifying crosswind landings.  The one at the 1:54 mark nearly made me pass out (and I wasn’t even on the plane!):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X_7Xt2ga-s[/youtube]

The Tegucigalpa, Honduras airport is considered to be one of the most dangerous places to land.  Due to the high terrain surrounding the runway, planes must take a very steep approach and turn at the last second to land.  Here are two videos: first a cockpit view, and next a ground view:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAxAso8xSo0&feature=related[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_z5HtME9n8[/youtube]

Have you ever experienced a frightening landing?  Are there airports you dread flying into?