Robert E. Lee’s sword to go on display at Appomattox

by Sean McLachlan on

On 9 April 1865, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met at Appomattox, Virginia, so that Lee could surrender his Army of Northern Virginia.

This momentous event effectively ended the American Civil War. With Lee and his army gone, the Confederate cause lost hope. General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee on April 26, and in Louisiana General Kirby Smith surrendered his Trans-Mississippi Confederate forces on May 26. The last Confederate general to surrender was the Cherokee Brigadier General Stand Watie in the Indian Territory on June 23.

Now a new museum will open at Appomattox dedicated to the war and its conclusion. A centerpiece of the display will be Robert E. Lee’s golden ceremonial sword. Owned by the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, the sword will grace a branch museum it’s building at Appomattox. The museum is also building branches at the important Civil War sites of Fredericksburg and Hampton Roads. The Appomattox museum will open next spring.

The sword was the same worn by Lee during the surrender. Lee famously showed up in full dress uniform with his French-made golden sword at his side. Grant showed up unkempt and wearing a muddy uniform.

The sword has recently been restored with a new layer of gilt that has restored its original luster.

[Image of Robert E. Lee courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Five ways to improve business travel with your family

by Tom Johansmeyer on

It usually seems easy to mix a business trip and a family vacation. You’re already on the road, and your company has picked up the tab for your flight. So, a good chunk of expense has been taken out of the equation from the start! Especially if you go to a great destination, extending a business trip into a vacation can be a smart move. You may even get to absorb some of your hotel costs into your travel budget at work.

The problem, however, is that you have to make it all work. Just plopping your family into the middle of a business trip doesn’t turn it into a vacation. Trying to squeeze too many pieces in at once can actually turn into a nightmare. Before turning your business trip into a work-and-family-hell-on-wheels, let’s take a look at five ways to avoid disaster:1. Just know your spouse won’t have support: if your family is traveling to meet you at your business (or another) location, you won’t be there to help. You might be able to chip in on the flight home, as long as you can get everyone booked on the same plane. Be ready to greet frustration along with your family.

2. Avoid overlaps with your business trip: having your family meet you after your business obligations are finished is much smarter than trying to cram family and business into the same time. Quite simply, it never works. Your days are occupied, as you’d expect. However, your nights can get pretty crowded with business, as well, from drinks with colleagues to client dinners. You’ll wind up getting back to our room late … and you may have more work to do. Even if your family is tolerant of all this, they’ll still notice, and it will put a bit of a damper on the experience for everyone.

3. Don’t force the destination: I spent the better part of a year traveling to Omaha from my home in Boston. Let’s be realistic: the odds your family would be happy with this as a family destination are pretty low. Unless you’re going on a business trip to a major vacation destination, you should be ready to offer up some flexibility. See if you can get a multi-city fare for less than your regular roundtrip, and you’ll save the company some money while making sure your own expenses are covered (thus preserving the benefit of adding a family vacation onto the front or back end of your business trip).

4. Take a day in between: being out of the office causes obligations to pile up. Whether you’re on a business trip or vacation, stuff is happening back at your company, and some of it is likely to have your name on it. Now, think about the accumulation of stuff when you put both a business trip and a vacation together! Give yourself a day in between to catch up on things before you disappear again. This will also help ensure that your time with your family will actually be with your family – not cleaning up from the week of work you spent outside the office.

5. Know your audience: you may want to change hotels when your family arrives. Even if the cost isn’t an issue for you, simply changing spaces will help you with your mindset as you transition from work to play. In fact, it’s better if you can even change neighborhoods, for example, if you’re staying in a city. Make sure it’s as different as possible. You’ll sacrifice any special treatment that the hotel would offer you because of your relatively long stay, but it’s probably worth it to shell out the extra cash to make sure your family vacation isn’t tainted by remnants of your business trip.

[photo by rabble via Flickr]

World’s craziest race – the Barkley Marathons

by Meg Nesterov on


Would you be tempted to enter a race that covers 100 miles, has no set trail, and only nine people have completed? How about if you add a cumulative elevation of over 59,000 feet – that’s twice that of Mount Everest, natural obstacles of all varieties including thorns and rats, and no aid or resting stations along the way? Hundreds have entered and attempted the Barkley Marathons in Tennessee each spring, known as one of the world’s most challenging races. Even if you “only” complete the 60-mile “fun run,” chances are you’ll come out bleeding, sleep-deprived, and a little insane (though perhaps no more so that when you agreed to enter this run) and if you give up, you still have a few hours’ walk back to camp.

This month, Believer Magazine has a fascinating account of the people behind this insane race and the culture that has developed along with it. Gary Cantrell – known as Lazarus Lake or just Laz – started the race 25 years ago, inspired by the prison escape attempt of James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King Junior’s assassin. Ray ran around the same woods for 55 hours during his attempt and made it only 8 miles, prompting Cantrell to imagine he could do at least 100 miles in that time. Now, Cantrell begins the race each year not with a starter pistol or bullhorn, but a lighter and a cigarette. Runners depart from Frozen Head State Park in Tennessee, about 50 miles from Knoxville. There’s no set start time (runners camp out the night before and await the warning via conch shell from Cantrell) and runners have to chart their own course from a map made available the day before the race. Participants have 12 hours to complete each of 5 loops, and have to tear out a page matching their race number of a book on each loop to prove they made it.
You can read another account of the race on Runner’s World, and the author’s post-script is another amazing story: after attempting the Barkley and making a documentary about running across the Sahara Desert, he’s now serving prison time for mortgage fraud.

Still want to enter? Hope you have good Googling and writing skills – there’s no official website or entrance instructions and only 35 will be allowed in each year, after completing an essay called “Why I should be allowed to run Barkleys Marathons.” The race is held in late March or early April each year, giving would-be runners a head start on figuring out how to enter.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Michael Hodge

Starwood makes checking in a social affair

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Starwood Preferred Guest, the rewards program for such brands as Sheraton and Westin, just took “checking in” from the front desk to the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android. The hotel company is launching a new program with social media company foursquare to increase member benefits.

According to foursquare’s blog, this partnership is “the first truly global loyalty integration of its kind,” an appropriate statement for a corporate blog, of course. Here’s the upside for you: when you check in (on foursquare) while checking in (at a Starwood), you can pick up more points, get free nights and win contests.

In the past, foursquare has worked with Heineken, American Express and others, but this appears to be its first foray into travel, a natural fit for a company that has built its business around location.

Travel spending from abroad jumped almost a billion dollars

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Visitors from outside the United States are bringing plenty of cash with them. In February, they spent $11.6 billion on travel to the country and on tourism-related activities once they got here. That’s an increase of $970 million over February 2010. To top things off, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, this is the fourteenth month in a row that foreign visitor spending has increased.

On average, the cash that visitors from outside our borders being spent has grown more than $1 billion a month, on average, this year. It looks like people are traveling – and spending – again!

Foreign visitors spent $2.7 billion on travel to the United States in February, up close to 15 percent year over year. Spending on travel- and tourism-related goods and services in the United States hit $8.9 billion in February, up 7 percent. This includes “food, lodging, recreation, gifts, entertainment, local transportation in the United States, and other items incidental to foreign travel.

In January and February, foreign visitors spent a total of $23.3 billion on travel to the United States and once here, up 10 percent year over year.

Meanwhile, Americans have spent $17.4 billion outside the country this year (including travel), representing an increase of 4 percent from the first two months of 2011.