Last month I wrote a guide to getting free one-night stays at IHG Rewards Club properrties. No points required. IHG Rewards Club (the program for Intercontinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, and related brands) will give you the first night of your stay for free if you make a successful best rate guarantee claim. If you […]
The post Easy IHG Rewards Club Free Nights Via Best Rate Guarantee: No Must Claim More Than 24 Hours Out appeared first on View from the Wing.
There's no doubt Malaysia Airlines has had a terrible year, and I feel horribly for all of their employees (and of course the families of those on MH370 and MH17). Malaysia Airlines wasn't doing well financially even prior to these tragedies, and things have only gotten worse since then.
They're about to lay off thousands of employees, and even so, it's still uncertain how they'll be able to survive.
Malaysia Airlines has been running quite a few campaigns to improve their image and get passengers flying with them again. For example, about a month ago they ran a "Bucket List" contest, which ended up backfiring a bit.
But it seems that Malaysia Airlines isn't just trying to lure customers, but also travel agents. Via WatchReport:
The post Malaysia Airlines Offers Travel Agents Rolex Watches appeared first on One Mile at a Time.
Reader J.J. wonders, How come flight attendants have to pick up the cups they serve drinks in prior to takeoff, but they let me keep the Starbucks coffee I brought on board myself? Sort of like Gallagher… If 7-11′s are open 24 hours a day, why do they have locks on the doors? You can […]
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Earlier in the week I wrote about China Eastern taking delivery of their first Boeing 777-300ER.
It's a huge transformation for China Eastern, given that their current Airbus A340-600s are among the most tired planes in the sky, while their new Boeing 777-300ERs feature reverse herringbone seats in business class and fully enclosed suites in first class, including a double bed.
Here's a video of the new 777-300ER:
The post China Eastern 777-300ER Flying To New York Starting November 2014 appeared first on One Mile at a Time.
To truly understand the era and the land that the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum celebrates, one need only look at the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 for context.
Preparations began well before dawn on 22nd April, 1889, in the frontier town of Purcell. By the time the sun rose, several thousand homesteaders - men, women, and children - had amassed on the banks of the Canadian River that separated Indian Territory from a swathe of US-government owned land known as Oklahoma. At other points on the border surrounding this area of land, over fifty thousand had gathered for the same purpose. Only several metres of water separated them from 1,887,796 acres of unoccupied land, staked out into 160 acre plots and fresh for colonization by the first man who was able to claim it.
In Purcell, the bank was lined with prairie schooners, which had positioned themselves at every point along the river where it was possible to ford. Lieutenant Samuel E. Adair and members of the Fifth Cavalry patrolled the bank opposite, warily watching for anyone who tried to get a head start. Anyone who tried to make a move before noon was taken in an armed convoy back to Purcell.
By 11:40 am, those who had assembled on the banks before dawn checked their tack for the final time, as Lieutenant Adair stared calmly from the other side of the river. They were first in line to enter the "promised land," as it had come to be known in the East. It was a warm day in early spring, tempered somewhat by a southerly wind.
At noon, Lieutenant Adair looks at his watch, then motions to the soldier on his right. The soldier raises the bugle to his lips, sounds it once, and then steps back out of the way. The cries of thousands of homesteaders rise from the bank as the nervous tension swells and snaps. The first wagons plunge into the water, and the great Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 is underway. By the end of the day, over 11,000 lots would be claimed across the territory. Tent cities of up to 10,000 people would be established next to railway stations at Oklahoma City and Guthrie, where by midnight the towns’ boundaries and main thoroughfares were already staked out.
The Oklahoma Land Run was the first of five land runs into unoccupied territory in Oklahoma over the next 16 years. These were lands that had been ceded to the state by Creek and Seminole Native American tribes following the Civil War, and by 1889 were considered some of the most desired real estate left in the West. The events that occurred here on the 22nd April embody in many ways the dangerous and pioneering nature of frontier life, which is commemorated at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
The museum itself was opened in 1955 and sits on Persimmon Hill in north-east Oklahoma City, overlooking the expansive lands that were settled here in 1889. Dominating the entrance foyer to the museum is perhaps one of the most impressive works housed in the museum, and indeed, one of the most recognizable of Western art: James Earle Frazer’s End of the Trail, cast in plaster and standing at 18 feet high. The rest of the museum follows nobly from this impressive introduction, with a wide range of stylishly laid-out exhibits.
The site contains several galleries, including Art of the American West, which displays select paintings and sculptures from the museum’s 2,000 plus collection, including painters such as Charles M. Russell, Albert Bierstadt, and William R. Leigh, as well as sculptures by artists such as Gerald Balcair. Many of these paintings represent, naturally, a romanticized image of the Wild West, but it is one that must have been at the forefront of people’s minds as they moved their livelihoods out here in the mid to late 19th century. Then there is the American Cowboy Gallery, with glass cases exhibiting thousands of objects that help to interpret the cowboy’s history through material culture such as saddles, weapons, and items of clothing. There are also full-scale dioramas of various Western scenes such as a bugle boy galloping across the plains, a seasoned hunter teaching a young man to shoot antelope, and a small cowboy camp with a pot of stew, attached to a trammel, boiling over an open fire.
Finally, there is Prosperity Junction, a replica turn-of-the-century cattle town, built in the west wing of the museum. At the entrance to the Prosperity Junction gallery, an information plaque states that the replica town is located “somewhere in the west,” but it does not take much imagination to see the early years of Oklahoma City itself, after the Land Run of 1889, when the town was at the frontier of the promised land.
