101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [50]
In retrospect, American Airlines should have found a gate for the plane to park, or at the very least trucked food and water to the stranded passengers. But none of this happened. Instead, concerned about the hassle of rerouting an entire plane full of passengers during holiday season, American Airlines kept everyone on the plane. As time dragged on, flight attendants began running out of water; the only food on the flight, whose 6:05 A.M. scheduled departure was so early that many passengers hadn’t eaten breakfast, was a box of pretzels. Despite the lack of beverage service, the plane’s bathrooms began to overflow, and even after an airport worker emptied them five hours into the delay, the stench lingered throughout the cabin. Parents ran out of diapers for their children; one man exclaimed loudly that he had reached his last piece of Nicorette gum.
The plane languished on the runway for two, three, four hours. Finally, after eight hours of waiting, the captain, who admitted that he was “embarrassed” for American Airlines, made the executive decision to find a gate for the airplane himself. It took another hour for the plane to deboard. By the time the passengers got off, they had spent nearly fifteen hours on the plane—and still hadn’t made it to Dallas.
Chapter 80
The Amsterdam Sexmuseum
It’s hard to know how to react to museums dedicated to sex (specimens exist everywhere from New York to Prague). In theory, they seem like they should be titillating. But as is the case with the Amsterdam Sexmuseum, they’re often less interesting than their subject matter would suggest.
Jessica Curtin
To its credit, the museum does have a fine selection of ancient stone dildos. But still, it’s tough to fully explore sexuality in an institution whose most basic rule is that you should look, not touch. This is especially true in Amsterdam, a place where art and illicit intercourse happily coexist—the museum is just blocks away from De Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district, which is helpfully indicated on museum maps. If you really want to see a twentieth-century wooden toilet seat painted with a bottom-up view of a dangling scrotum, then definitely stop by. But if you prefer a more hands-on approach to your education, there are other places in Amsterdam you might want to visit first.
Chapter 81
The Next Eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano
Few things can put a damper on a family camping trip like the eruption of a supervolcano. So you might want to avoid being in Yellowstone National Park the next time it blows up.
It turns out that nearly all of the park’s 2.2 million acres sit on what is one of the world’s largest volcanoes—a volcano so massive that its full caldera is only visible from space. Its last major eruption was a thousand times as big as that of Mount St. Helens (the most violent eruption in modern American history) and emitted a plume of dust that spread over nineteen western states, plus parts of Mexico and Canada. As National Geographic describes it, “Dense, lethal fogs of ash, rocks, and gas, superheated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit… rolled across the landscape in towering gray clouds,” which “filled entire valleys with hundreds of feet of material so hot and heavy that it welded itself like asphalt across the once verdant landscape.”
These days, many of the park’s attractions—its geysers, its hot springs, its bubbling mud pots—are made possible by the fact that the park sits on a giant magma chamber some forty-five miles across and up to eight miles thick. To give you a better sense of how massive this is, consider this quote from Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything: “Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone