Marilyn’s Miscellany

If you aren’t already familiar, please give us the chance to introduce Marilyn Terrell, Traveler Chief Researcher, whom we like to call our “human blog.” Since it’s almost physically impossible for us to get all of Marilyn’s suggestions up online, we’ve asked her to pen a new column, highlighting some fun stuff found on the Web. Welcome to Marilyn’s Miscellany.

• The Wall Street Journal had an article last week about the famous beer-brewing Trappist monks at Belgium’s St. Sixtus monastery, and how their celestial beer and deliberately limited production provokes covetousness among beer fanciers, who rate their brew called “the 12” as the best in the world. Traveler scooped this story in our May/June 2006 issue, but this one’s online.

Natchitoches isn’t pronounced the way you’d expect; it’s NACK-uh-tish. The town is known for its Festival of Lights and for Natchitoches meat pies, which are traditionally served on Christmas Eve.   

• Lastly, our friends down the hall at NG KIDS magazine are trying to set a Guinness Word Record for the world’s longest chain of shoes. You can help them win (and clear your closets at the same time) by sending them your old athletic shoes, which will later be recycled by the Nike Reuse-A-Shoe program to make basketball and tennis courts and running tracks, which is better than ending up in a landfill. Postmark deadline January 22, 2008.

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