エピソード

  • Dogs on the Road: The South’s Best Cities for Travel With Your Pup

    Dogs on the Road: The South’s Best Cities for Travel With Your Pup
    2026/09/20
    Radio segment from Mornings on Maine With Bill Maine Dogs on the Road: The South’s Best Cities for Travel With Your Pup Pet travel stats, airline and national park rules, and five great Southern getaways for you and your dog Annita and her English Lab. By Annita Stokes Thomas If there’s a dog riding shotgun in your car more often these days, you’re not imagining it. Americans are traveling with their pets in record numbers, and the hospitality industry is scrambling to keep up. Here’s a look at where that trend stands right now, what to know before you fly or head into a national park with your dog, and five great Southern destinations worth the trip. Are We Really Traveling With Our Dogs? Short answer: yes, and more every year. Multiple recent surveys peg the number of American pet owners who travel with their pets annually at right around 78 percent. More than half of dog and cat owners say they now plan their trips around their pet, not the other way around. And it’s not just a domestic trend. A global pet-parent study out last year found that 56 percent of people worldwide now own a pet, with nearly half of those being first-time owners, a whole new generation of pet parents who don’t want to leave the dog behind. A 2025 survey of US and UK travelers found that 27 percent of pet owners who brought their pet on a big vacation last year were doing it for the very first time. The number one reason people leave the dog at home? Fear that travel would be too stressful for the pet — that’s the top reason cited, followed by not trusting that a destination is truly pet-friendly. How are they getting there? Road trips still win, hands down — nearly two-thirds of pet owners, right around 64 percent, say they prefer traveling with their dog by car.Flying is a distant second, with roughly a third of pet owners saying they’ve flown with a pet.About 75 percent of hotels nationwide — luxury, midscale, and economy — now allow pets in some form, and the vast majority of pet parents say they’d choose a pet-friendly hotel over any other option.RVs and camping are part of that road-trip boom too — pet owners increasingly point to hiking and fresh-air destinations as their top pick for a pet-friendly trip, right up there with beaches. The trend line is clear: dogs are road-tripping more than ever, hotels are adapting fast, and flying — while it’s growing — comes with a lot more fine print. A little dog in an airline pet carrier sized to fit under the seat in front of you. Flying With Fido: What the Airlines Actually Allow Here’s something that surprises a lot of people: as of this year, only two major U.S. airlines will still fly a dog in the cargo hold for an everyday passenger — Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. American, Delta, United, Southwest, JetBlue, Spirit, and Frontier have all discontinued or paused their pet cargo programs for the general public. If you’ve got a bigger dog who can’t fit under an airplane seat, your options for flying with them have really narrowed. Here’s the cabin picture, airline by airline: Delta: small dogs, cats, and household birds only, in a ventilated carrier under the seat in front of you. No cargo option for regular travelers.American Airlines: small cats and dogs in the cabin only, around $150 each way, first-come first-served with a limited number of pet spots per flight.United: dogs, cats, rabbits, and household birds allowed in an approved hard- or soft-sided kennel under the seat, roughly $125 each way, advance reservation required.Southwest: small cats and dogs only, in a carrier under the seat, about $95 each way — and no pets on international flights.JetBlue: small dogs and cats, combined pet-and-carrier weight can’t exceed 20 pounds, about $125 each way. One more wrinkle worth knowing: the rules changed a few years back for emotional support animals. They no longer have protected status the way a trained service dog does — airlines can now treat an ESA like any other pet, subject to the regular carrier fees. A true service dog still flies free, but it needs the Department of Transportation’s standard Service Animal Air Transportation Form, usually submitted 48 hours ahead of the flight. Bottom line: if your dog is small enough to ride under the seat, flying is very doable, just book early, since cabin pet spots are limited per flight. If you’ve got a bigger dog, ground transportation is your best bet, which most pet-travel experts say is safer and less stressful anyway. Expert traveler tip – always call ahead to check airline rules, regulations and fees. They change and your fur baby is looking forward to the trip too. And, always consider your pet’s temperament. Talk with your vet about the best way to ensure a pleasure flight for your pet, you and the other passengers. National Parks and most campsites have specific rules to follow. Can Your Dog Come to the National Park? If your road trip includes a ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    8 分
  • Episode 56: The Three Fifths Compromise

    Episode 56: The Three Fifths Compromise
    2026/09/16
    The Three Fifths Compromise What it was and who benefited COLD OPEN [SOUND: Quill scratching on parchment. A gavel, once, distant. Silence.] ANNITA (V.O.): In the summer of 1787, in a locked room in Philadelphia, fifty-five men sat down to build a government. And for weeks, in that room, they talked about hundreds of thousands of human beings — argued about them, bargained over them, measured them, weighed their worth against tax revenue and political power — and not one of those human beings was ever asked what they thought. Not one of them was in the room. Not one of them had a vote, a voice, or a name that made it into the record. They were husbands and wives. Mothers who had already buried children sold away from them. Grandfathers who remembered a homeland none of these delegates could have pointed to on a map. Blacksmiths, healers, midwives, farmers, cooks — entire lives, entire families, entire histories, reduced in that room to a single question: how much of a person should the law say they were. The men in that room decided on three-fifths. Not because they believed it. Because it was useful. [SOUND: Silence holds, then fades.] This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. On this show, I always tell you — we say their names, and we tell their stories. But today, that promise is harder to keep than it’s ever been. Because the truth is, we don’t have most of their names. History didn’t record them. The Constitution didn’t ask for them. An entire population was debated, decided, and written into law — without a single one of them ever being permitted to speak for themselves in that room. So today, we’re not just telling you what happened in Philadelphia in 1787. We’re standing in for the hundreds of thousands of voices that should have been in that room and weren’t — and we’re telling their story anyway, exactly as fully and as honestly as we can, because somebody finally should. SEGMENT ONE: The Number That Came Before [SOUND: Soft, sparse instrumental bed, low — something unresolved, not comforting] ANNITA (V.O.): This story doesn’t start in Philadelphia in 1787. It starts four years earlier, in 1783, in a much quieter argument about money. Under the Articles of Confederation, the fledgling national government had almost no way to fund itself. It could only ask the states for money — “requisitions” — based on the value of land within each state, a system nobody could measure fairly or enforce honestly. So Congress considered a fix: base each state’s tax burden on population instead. And here, for the first time, the question arrived — a question this country would spend the next seventy-eight years failing to answer honestly. If a state’s population determined what it owed, did enslaved people count as part of that population? James Madison, then a young Virginia delegate to the Confederation Congress, proposed a number: three-fifths. It wasn’t drawn from any principle about human worth. It was, by most accounts, simply a number that split the difference between two sides who couldn’t agree on anything else. That 1783 proposal came up for a vote as an amendment to the Articles — and it failed, falling two states short of the unanimous approval required. But a number, once spoken aloud in a room full of powerful men, doesn’t simply disappear. It waits. SEGMENT TWO: The Room Reopens the Question ANNITA (V.O.): Four years later, delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia, in the same stifling summer heat we’ve talked about before on this show, to write an entirely new Constitution. And on June 11th, 1787, the three-fifths number walked back into the room. It was delegate James Wilson of Pennsylvania who formally reintroduced it — proposing that enslaved people be counted at a three-fifths ratio as an amendment to the Virginia Plan, the framework then being debated for how the new government would be structured. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina seconded it. Here’s something worth sitting with: Wilson wasn’t a slaveholder, and by most historical accounts, he wasn’t ideologically committed to protecting slavery. He appears to have simply reached for a number that had almost worked once before — a number he calculated might actually get enough votes to hold this fragile convention together. Practicality, not principle, put that fraction back on the table. And once it was on the table, the room split — but not in the way you might expect. SEGMENT THREE: The Argument Nobody Wants to Admit They Made [SOUND: Music drops low, more tense] ANNITA (V.O.): Here is the detail that should stop you cold, and it’s the one most people never learn: the two sides of this debate did not argue from principle. They argued from advantage — and they switched sides entirely, depending on what was being counted. When it came to representation — how many seats a state got in Congress, how many electoral votes it held — southern delegates...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    27 分
  • Destination: The History of America’s Labor Force

    Destination: The History of America’s Labor Force
    2026/09/05
    The History of America’s Labor Force “The Price of a Day’s Work: Labor, Jobs, and the Fight for Fairness in America” *Photos at the bottom SEGMENT ONE — approx. 9:00 The History of America’s Labor Force and How Labor Day Became a Holiday [SOUND: Show theme, warm, fades under welcome] ANNITA: I’m Annita with Travel With Annita, and this weekend, most of us will fire up a grill, maybe hit one last beach trip, and enjoy a day off work. Let’s talk about The History of America’s Labor Force. But Labor Day didn’t start as a cookout holiday. It started as a protest — and understanding how it became a national holiday tells you almost everything about how hard-fought every single workplace protection in this country has been. The story actually has two men fighting for credit, and historians still argue about which one truly deserves it. Peter J. McGuire has long been called the “Father of Labor Day” — his gravestone in Pennsauken, New Jersey, is inscribed with those very words, and every year, labor leaders still gather there to honor him. McGuire’s own story is worth knowing: he was the child of Irish immigrants, and he quit school at a young age to go to work himself, long before he ever became a labor leader. He co-founded the United Brotherhood of Carpenters in 1881, and helped lead the movement that eventually became the American Federation of Labor. The AFL-CIO itself has said that McGuire “probably did more than anyone else” to convince skeptical, locally-minded union activists around the country that a national labor federation wasn’t just necessary, but actually possible. But there’s another man in this story — Matthew Maguire, a machinist who served as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York, and many historians now believe he actually proposed the idea first. It was Maguire who sent out the announcements and invitations for that first Labor Day gathering, and Maguire who rode in the lead carriage of the parade itself. For decades, credit for founding Labor Day actually went to Maguire — it wasn’t until 1924, forty years after the fact, that the credit was formally shifted over to McGuire instead, and the debate over who truly deserves the title has never fully settled. That first parade happened on September 5th, 1882, in New York City. Somewhere between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand workers marched that day, sponsored by an organization called the Knights of Labor — one of the largest and most influential labor organizations of the era, open to nearly all workers regardless of skill, trade, race, or gender, at a time when that kind of inclusiveness in a labor union was genuinely radical. There was no deep historical significance to that particular date, by the way — McGuire simply said it fell about halfway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, giving working families a break during that long stretch of the calendar with no holiday at all. It took twelve more years, and something far more tragic, to turn that one parade into a national holiday. In the summer of 1894, the Pullman railroad strike erupted — and we’re going to come back to Pullman a little later in the show, because that story matters more than you might think. That strike turned violent, and federal troops were sent in to break it up. Workers died in the clashes. Congress and President Grover Cleveland, looking to make peace with an angry and grieving labor movement, rushed a bill through just days after the strike ended, and Cleveland signed Labor Day into law as a national holiday on June 28th, 1894. Here’s a detail that doesn’t often make it into the story: Cleveland specifically chose to elevate Labor Day, held safely in September, rather than embrace May Day, the international workers’ holiday already celebrated in many countries. May Day carried socialist and radical associations in the public mind at the time, tied to earlier labor unrest, and Cleveland wanted nothing to do with that reputation. So America ended up with its own separate labor holiday, deliberately distanced from the more radical politics of the labor movements happening elsewhere in the world. So the very holiday we use to close out summer was born, in part, out of federal troops firing on American workers, and a president trying to calm public anger without embracing the more radical wing of the movement that made the holiday necessary in the first place. When we come back, I want to take you somewhere this history rarely goes — because you cannot talk honestly about American labor without talking about Black workers, both enslaved and free. [SOUND: Music bridge] SEGMENT TWO — approx. 9:35 From Bondage to the Fields — Sharecropping and the Migrant Workers of Florida ANNITA: Welcome back to Travel With Annita. I want to be honest with you. For the first two hundred fifty years of this nation’s story, Black labor wasn’t paid at all — it was stolen. When ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    41 分
  • Destination: America A Young Nation – The War Was Won — Now What?

    Destination: America A Young Nation – The War Was Won — Now What?
    2026/09/04
    America A Young Nation – The War Was Won — Now What? I’m Annita with Travel With Annita, and today we’re picking up right where the story usually stops. We all know 1776. We all know Yorktown, 1781, when the war was effectively won. But here’s the question nobody asks enough: what happened the Monday morning after? In September of 1783, the Treaty of Paris made it official. Independence, recognized by the very king who’d refused to grant it. And here’s something that surprises a lot of people — Britain didn’t just recognize a strip of coastline. They ceded territory stretching all the way west to the Mississippi River. Overnight, this brand-new country doubled, tripled in size on paper, and had almost no way to actually govern any of it. Because here’s the thing about winning a revolution — the fighting is, in some ways, the easy part. You know who the enemy is. You know what victory looks like. Building a government from scratch, with thirteen different states that had spent the last several years being fiercely independent of each other, and even more fiercely suspicious of any government trying to tell them what to do? That was a completely different kind of battle. The system already in place at the time was called the Articles of Confederation, adopted back in 1781, even before the war had officially ended. And it was designed to be weak. Deliberately, intentionally weak. Think about what these people had just lived through — years under a king who taxed them without asking, who quartered soldiers in their homes, who dissolved their local governments whenever it suited him. So when it came time to build something new, the instinct was: never again. Never let one government have that much power over us again. So the Articles gave Congress almost nothing to work with. No power to levy taxes — Congress could only ask the states nicely for money, and the states, more often than not, simply didn’t pay. No power to regulate trade between states, which meant New York could tax goods coming in from New Jersey like they were a foreign country. No real national army, no national currency worth trusting, no executive branch at all to actually enforce anything Congress did manage to agree on. Congress was, in a very real sense, a room full of representatives who could debate and recommend, but couldn’t compel anyone to do anything. For a couple of years, the country limped along like this. States printed their own money, which lost value practically as fast as it was printed. Trade between states got tangled in a mess of competing tariffs. Soldiers who had fought the entire war often went unpaid, waiting on promises from a Congress that had no actual money to give them. There’s a reason historians often call this stretch “the critical period” — because in hindsight, it’s genuinely unclear whether this experiment survives. And then, in the fall of 1786, that fragile situation broke wide open — not in some far-off frontier, but in Massachusetts, among ordinary farmers who had, in many cases, fought in the very war that was supposed to have earned them a better life. These were men crushed by debt. The state was demanding taxes paid in hard currency, at a moment when currency of any kind was scarce, and courts across western Massachusetts were foreclosing on farms right and left. So a former Continental Army soldier named Daniel Shays helped lead an armed uprising — farmers marching on courthouses to physically shut them down before they could hear another foreclosure case. At one point, they even attempted to seize the federal armory at Springfield, hoping to arm themselves properly. The rebellion itself didn’t last. Massachusetts militia put it down by early 1787. But the effect on the country’s leadership was seismic. Because think about what this proved: under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had essentially no ability to respond. Massachusetts had to handle this entirely on its own. If ordinary citizens could take up arms against courts and come dangerously close to seizing a federal armory, and the national government simply had no mechanism to help — what happened next time? What happened if it wasn’t put down so easily? Leaders like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had already been warning for years that the Articles were too weak to survive. Shays’ Rebellion turned that warning into urgency. Even George Washington, who had largely retired from public life after the war, wrote with real alarm about what he was seeing, wondering aloud whether the revolution had been fought for nothing if the country couldn’t even govern itself in peace. So a meeting was called. Delegates from the states would gather in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 — officially, just to revise the Articles of Confederation. Just to patch a few things up. That is not remotely what ended up happening. When we come back, I’ll tell you exactly how ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    41 分
  • Episode 55: Togo The Alaskan Sled Dog

    Episode 55: Togo The Alaskan Sled Dog
    2026/08/25
    Togo – The Alaskan Sled Dog “The Dog They Left Out of the Story” The Story of Togo In January of 1925, in the dead of an Alaskan winter, a twelve-year-old dog ran across frozen sea ice in the dark, in a blizzard, to save a town full of children he would never meet. History gave the credit to someone else. This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. Today, we’re setting the record straight on Togo. Before there was Togo, there was Constance. She was a young Belgian woman who’d come to Nome in 1905, drawn north during Alaska’s gold rush years like so many others. She met Leonhard Seppala at the races — in fact, she was crowned queen of the 1915 All-Alaska Sweepstakes, the very race that would one day make her husband famous. They married in 1908, and settled into a life shaped by dog sleds, harsh winters, and the rhythms of the North. So when a sickly, undersized puppy was born in their kennel in 1913 — a puppy Seppala took one look at and wanted nothing to do with — it was Constance who stepped in. She nursed him through those fragile early weeks, when nobody expected him to survive at all. Later, when Seppala gave the troublesome young dog away as a house pet, it didn’t take. Togo escaped, jumped clean through a closed window, and ran several miles back to the only home he’d ever known. That was the last time anyone tried to give Togo away. Slowly, that stubbornness revealed itself as something else entirely — intelligence, instinct, an almost uncanny sense for danger on the trail. By age five, Togo wasn’t just part of the team. He was leading it. By 1925, Togo was twelve years old — elderly for a working sled dog — and had already spent seven years as Seppala’s lead dog, guiding him to three All-Alaska Sweepstakes championships. And there’s one more detail worth knowing: Leonhard and Constance had a daughter by then, Sigrid, eight years old — living right there in Nome, in the middle of a diphtheria outbreak that was killing children exactly her age. This wasn’t just a heroic mission for Seppala. It was personal, in the most immediate way a parent can understand. In the winter of 1925, diphtheria broke out in Nome, Alaska — a highly contagious bacterial infection, and one that kills quickly, choking its victims as infected tissue swells and blocks the airway. Nome’s only doctor had run out of antitoxin. A resupply order had gone unfulfilled before winter set in. With more than 10,000 people at risk, children especially, and the nearest available serum sitting 674 miles away in Nenana, officials faced an impossible problem. Flying it in was ruled out — 1925 aircraft simply couldn’t reliably survive Alaska’s winter conditions, and a blizzard was already closing in. There was only one option left: dog sled teams. A relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred dogs would carry the serum across the frozen wilderness in a race against time. Back in Nome, Constance Seppala waited. Her husband and Togo were somewhere out in that storm, and so was her eight-year-old daughter’s fate — Sigrid was exactly the age of the children diphtheria was killing fastest. There was no way to know, in the middle of a blizzard with the phone lines down, whether either of them would come home. Seppala and Togo were assigned what should have been a straightforward round trip — meet the incoming relay partway and bring the serum home. Instead, due to a miscommunication about timing, Seppala pushed his team over 170 miles east from Nome, expecting to travel much farther still, into some of the most dangerous terrain on the entire route: a stretch of coastline along Norton Sound that mushers had nicknamed, without exaggeration, “the ice factory.” He found the incoming relay almost by accident — a musher named Henry Ivanoff, waving frantically through the whiteout, shouting that he had the serum. Seppala took the package and immediately turned back the way he’d come. Now he faced the decision that would define the entire mission. Going around Norton Sound was the safe choice. It was also a full extra day slower — a day the children of Nome didn’t have. Seppala chose to cross it directly. Heading out onto the ice in the darkening afternoon, visibility dropped to nothing. The wind howled so loudly he couldn’t have heard the ice cracking even if it had been right beneath him. He couldn’t see the front of his own team. He simply trusted Togo to find the way. And Togo did something extraordinary. At one point, in the middle of that gale, Seppala gave a command to turn — and Togo, without being told to stop, abruptly halted and somersaulted backward into the rest of the team. Seppala, furious, went to scold him. Instead, he found an open channel of water, growing wider, less than six feet from where the team stood. It wasn’t visible from the sled. Togo had sensed it, or seen it, or simply known — and stopped them from driving straight into the freezing ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • Following Togo’s Trail: A Travel Guide to the 1925 Serum Run

    Following Togo’s Trail: A Travel Guide to the 1925 Serum Run
    2026/08/25
    Following Togo’s Trail: A Travel Guide to the 1925 Serum Run Nome, the Diphtheria Outbreak, the Iditarod, and Where to Find Togo Today Every hero has a version of the story the world remembers, and a version that’s actually true. For Togo, the twelve-year-old sled dog who led his team across the most dangerous 260 miles of the 1925 race to save the children of Nome, Alaska, those two versions couldn’t be further apart. On a recent episode of Quarter Miles Travel, “The Dog They Left Out of the Story,” we traced Togo’s journey from a sickly, unwanted puppy to the true hero of the Great Race of Mercy — and uncovered why history handed his statue, his fame, and his place in the public imagination to a different dog entirely. This guide picks up where that episode left off, mapping out the real places where Togo’s story still lives today — from the frozen coastline he once crossed in the dark, to the quiet corners of three states where his memory finally caught up with what he actually did. Why This Guide In January of 1925, a diphtheria outbreak threatened the town of Nome, Alaska, and a relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred sled dogs raced 674 miles across the frozen wilderness to deliver life-saving serum. Togo, the twelve-year-old lead dog of musher Leonhard Seppala, carried that serum across the longest and most dangerous stretch of the route — and for decades, watched a different dog receive most of the credit. This guide gathers the real places where that story still lives — from the town the serum was racing to save, to the museum where Togo himself still stands watch, to the world-famous race his journey inspired. Whether you’re planning a full Alaska trip or a detour through New York City, here’s where to go to trace this remarkable piece of history for yourself. Alaska: Where It Happened Nome, Alaska How to get there: Nome is not accessible by road from the rest of Alaska; visitors fly in, typically via Anchorage This is where the story begins and ends — the isolated coastal town that a diphtheria outbreak threatened to devastate in the winter of 1925, and the town Togo, Seppala, and the rest of the relay mushers raced to save. Nome today remains a small, remote community on the Bering Sea coast, rich with Gold Rush history layered on top of this later chapter. A drive east along the Bering Sea coast follows roughly 30 miles of the historic serum run trail itself, giving visitors a genuine sense of the terrain the mushers crossed. Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum — Nome, Alaska Located in Nome, this local museum holds photographs and artifacts from the original 1925 serum run, offering a direct and tangible link back to that winter. It’s the natural first stop for anyone wanting to understand the event from the perspective of the town it saved, rather than just the mushers who saved it. Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters & Museum — Wasilla, Alaska Location: Mile 2.2 Knik Road, Wasilla, AK (near the intersection with Knik-Goose Bay Road) Website: iditarod.com/plan-your-visit — https://iditarod.com/plan-your-visit/ Hours: Generally open year-round, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., with extended daily hours (roughly 8 a.m.–5 p.m.) during the summer season (mid-May through mid-September); confirm current hours before visiting, especially in winter Admission: Free museum entry; dog-cart rides available for a small fee (around $10/person) during summer months This is the single most important stop on the entire trip: Togo himself, mounted and preserved, stands on permanent display here in a glass case — the actual dog, not a replica. The headquarters also houses decades of Iditarod race memorabilia, trophies, and photographs, and offers dog-cart rides in summer so visitors can get a small taste of what it feels like to be pulled by a real sled dog team. Located about 45 minutes to an hour north of Anchorage, this is an easy and essential day trip for anyone visiting the area. Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Website: iditarod.com — https://iditarod.com The race itself is the living legacy of the 1925 serum run — a roughly 1,000-mile course from the Anchorage area to Nome, run every March by mushers and dog teams retracing much of the same historic ground Togo and Seppala once covered. The ceremonial start takes place in Anchorage, with the competitive restart currently held in Willow, about 70 miles up the Parks Highway. If your travel dates allow, visiting during the race (early March) offers a rare chance to see the modern-day version of exactly what this history was really about. New York City: Where Togo Is Remembered in Bronze Togo Statue — Seward Park, Manhattan Location: Seward Park, bounded by East Broadway, Essex Street, and Canal Street, New York, NY 10002 (Lower East Side) Tucked into a small Lower East Side park, this bronze statue of Togo has stood at the East Broadway entrance since 2001 — one of only a small handful of ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • Destination: Story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis

    Destination: Story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis
    2026/08/10
    Destination: Story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis Ever wonder how travel expert Anita Thomas chooses her next destination? Well, this year she’s just flipping a coin. For eight years, Anita has been hosting her award-winning podcast, Quarter Miles Travel. And this year on Travel with Anita, she is sharing those experiences with you. This season, Anita will take you to the states commemorated on the back of a quarter, revealing hidden hotspots and don’t-miss destinations that you might not have heard about, possibly in your hometown state. The adventure begins as he reaches into her pocket. Here’s Anita Thomas. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, as you know, we are the spot where we don’t just show you a destination, we take you into its history, its heroes, and the stories that make it so unforgettable. And today, we’re heading to the twin island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, a place of quiet beaches, volcanic peaks, and one truly extraordinary claim to fame. Are you ready for this? It is the birthplace of one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton. Now, did you know that? Well, if not, that’s what today’s show is all about. Because now you know Hamilton from the $10 bill, of course we know that. And you may know him from the history books as the main man who shaped America’s financial system as its very first Secretary of the Treasury. Or you may also know him, if you’re one of the millions who have seen it, you may know him from the stage where a hip hop and R&B musical turned his story into one of the most celebrated works of theatrical performances in a generation. So let’s get to the information, though, about Hamilton. Because if you didn’t know about him being born on Nevis, this is gonna be a great show for you to find out a lot of great American history, but also Caribbean history. Born on the island of Nevis around 1757, Hamilton’s beginnings, well, they were anything but easy. Because we may think of one of the Founding Fathers as having an easy life from birth until the end. Well, he was raised in poverty, orphaned as a teenager, and yet through sheer intellect and ambition, he rose to become one of the most influential figures in early American history. He was a key author of The Federalist Papers. Yep, that was Hamilton. He was an aide to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. That was Hamilton. And he was the architect of the young American nation of their banking and financial system. That was definitely Hamilton. So it’s a remarkable journey, a remarkable story. And it all starts on a small Caribbean island to the center of American power. And it’s a story that in recent years found a whole new audience. Because in 2015, the musical Hamilton, well, it reimagined his life on Broadway, turning a Founding Father into a cultural phenomenon, and sending curious travelers looking for the real place where his story began. And that place is Nevis. And today we’re going to take you there. But now it won’t just be me. Joining me is someone who knows this island very, very well, and of course knows Hamilton’s connection to it better than, certainly better than I do, and almost anyone. And that would be Greg Phillip of Nevis Sun Tours. So I’d like to welcome Greg to the show for him to help us tell the story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis Island. So Greg, thanks for joining me today. Alexander Hamilton is celebrated as one of America’s Founding Fathers. But before America knew him, he was a young boy growing up in Nevis. So tell us- Yes… a little bit of, about what life was like on Nevis during his childhood, and how did the island, well, how do you feel the island shaped the man that he became? So Anita, thank you very much for having me. I’m, I’m really happy to be here with you this morning, um, to talk first of all about, um, yes, Alexander Hamilton and his role, um, living here on Nevis. But in addition to that, I’m very much happy to be here to talk about Nevis in general, and also my company, Nevis Sun Tours. Um, Nevis Sun Tours, um, really we’re both a destination management company and a luxury travel enablement platform, which basically means that where it might be difficult for people to obviously find luxury when they’re traveling, we work with, um, them and, um, their travel agencies, et cetera, to ensure that they can enjoy luxury vacations here on Nevis. Now, in relation to Alexander Hamilton, um, I, I probably spend more time with Hamilton than is normal. [laughs] And, and, and the reason, the reason I can say that is because, you know, um, for us at Nevis Sun Tours, we’ve really, um, embraced Alexander Hamilton and, and fully incorporated him into the stories that we tell about this island of Nevis. And it’s important that we do so because, you know, many people do not realize that Alexander Hamilton was born here on the island of Nevis. Mm. Just the ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    41 分
  • Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America

    Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America
    2026/08/10
    Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, Georgia has always produced more than its share of remarkable people, men and women whose ideas, courage, and craftsmanship reach far beyond our state lines and help shape the story of our entire country. We’re going to meet four of them: an industrialist who built a town from the ground up, a woman who started a movement that still shapes girls’ lives today, and a master bridge builder who connected two states with his own hands, and a woman who broke barriers as a teacher, a nurse, and author decades ahead of her time. Now, I’m talking about some really pretty fantastic people, some that you may know very well and others that may be new to you. Henry Ford, of course, we know him from Ford Motor Company. Juliette Gordon Low of the Girl Scouts. Horace King, who built a bridge, and Susie King Taylor, the educator who worked through the Civil War to educate people in reading and writing. Now, four Georgians, four extraordinary stories that we’ll share today. So I’m ready to really get into it now, and I’d like to start with the man that I like to say is the man who built a hill. I’m talking about Henry Ford’s Georgia legacy along the Coastal Bryan Heritage Trail. Some of us may have actually driven through Richmond Hill. It’s just a little south of Savannah in a town that is so charming you’d swear it was designed that way on purpose. And, well, it kinda was. We’re talking about Richmond Hill, Georgia, that is a place that is right off of Highway 17 or Interstate 95. And you may not realize that you just passed through a town that is one of the most famous men in America, in American history, he- that he basically built with his own two hands. Now, Henry Ford, and that is of course the Henry Ford, the Model T Henry Ford of the Ford Company. Well, that assembly line, the man who put America on wheels, and for over 20 years, this stretch of Georgia coast was where he came to slow down. So let’s back up a little because to understand why Henry Ford ended up here, you have to understand who he really was before he even set foot in Georgia. Now, back in 1914, Ford did something that shocked the entire country. He doubled his factory workers’ pay practically overnight to $5 a day. [laughs] That doesn’t seem like much now, but at that time, that was really big money, and newspapers all over the world ran the story. Nobody had ever seen an industrialist share that kind of money with the people actually building his products. Well, now, let’s be honest, though, because it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds. It came with strings attached. Ford had inspectors checking up on workers and home lives, expecting them to save money, stay sober, keep things tidy. [laughs] Wow, that’s quite an involvement there, and people didn’t love that part. You can understand why. But at the heart of it, Ford believed something a lot of wealthy men of his era didn’t, that if you take care of the people around you, everybody does better. The company does better. The community does better. The individual people do better. So keep that in mind because that same instinct, that’s, that’s exactly what he brought with him to Georgia. And by the early 1920s, Henry and his wife, Clara, were spending their winters down in Fort Myers, Florida. But Florida was growing. It was growing fast, and the Fords started feeling really a little crowded. So what did Henry do? Well, what Henry always did. He asked someone he trusted. His good friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, told him about a quiet stretch of the Georgia coast, a little place called Way Station. And Henry and Clara came to take a look, and from what history books tell us, it was Clara who really fell the hardest for that particular area. She loved the Spanish moss hanging off of those big live oak trees and the birds everywhere you looked, and that slow, easy, kind of low country charm that you get in that area. Of course, Henry saw something a little different. He saw opportunity, and before they even left Savannah, he told his secretary he… to start negotiating right away. And that was it. By March of 1925, Henry Ford owned his first 100 acres in Way Station. Over the next several years, Ford just kept buying. Old rice plantations, overgrown farmlands, even the abandoned grounds of historic Fort McAllister. And by the time he was done, Henry Ford owned somewhere around 85,000 acres. Yep, you heard me right, 85,000. Now, that’s 120 square miles. That’s a lot of land, and for those of you who are keeping track at home, that’s actually larger than some countries. That’s pretty big. Henry Ford didn’t buy all of that land just to sit on it and enjoy the view. Way Station at that time was one of the poorest communities on the whole Georgia coast, and Ford, true to that same instinct that gave us the $5-a-day pay, ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    40 分