Daily Archives: October 16, 2019

You, by some minor miracle, have your full collection of Van Winkle whiskeys for this year. You also have your Van Winkle cigars to go with them. For the latter, perhaps you need another Van Winkle lifestyle product to keep them in until you are ready for your hedonistic Van Winkle evening? If so Pappy & Company, a whiskey lifestyle company started some years back by those bearing the Van Winkle name, has you covered with a new humidor made in part fromPappy Van Winkle bourbon barrel staves.

The new Custom Pappy & Company Handmade Humidor, according to those behind it, was the result of a collaboration between the Van Winkle family members and Heritage Handcrafted, an outfit known for their custom whiskey barrel items. The two first collaborated back in 2014 on a custom Van Winkle barrel wood box holding a decanter and whiskey glasses. This humidor is said to be the second custom piece done between them.

What you have here is a humidor with an outer shell made from Pappy Van Winkle bourbon barrel staves. The boxs top showsthe inside char of the bourbon barrels while the sides display the exterior staves. Inside this box, which is cedar lined, isa hygrometer and built in Boveda 2-Way humidifying system to store and age your cigars for extended shelf life and improved flavor.

The humidor, which includes a removable tray, is designed to hold 150 cigars and weighs a somewhat hefty 8 pounds. It prices around $595 and is said to take four weeks to make from the time you order it. It was not immediately clear if this would be an ongoing item or if it was limited in quantity.

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Embrace Your Van Winkle Hedonism With This Custom Barrel Stave Humidor - The Whiskey Wash

It starts with a faint tremor that I feel in the soles of my feet. Engines rumble and the horizon shifts subtly on its axis. I rush to the ship's railings and see ropes cast off and the gap to the quay widening. This is the most exhilarating moment in cruising, which I never want to miss. The inconveniences of travel have been navigated and stowed away with my suitcase. Everything is easy from now on, and adventure awaits over the watery horizon.

Sailing out of Athens is particularly thrilling. Over thousands of years others, from Odysseus to Herodotus, have enjoyed this same moment, though perhaps minus the cocktail. Athens rises from the Attic Plain in the orange haze of the late-afternoon sun. The Acropolis is a stubby outcrop crowned by temple columns that are the exclamation marks of a culture that has influenced the world.

Azamara Pursuit picks its elegant way between container ships into the inky-blue Aegean Sea. The ship is taking me on a 10-night Greece Intensive cruise that finishes in Venice and visits Kotor in Montenegro, but which concentrates on the Greek islands.

There are few better places to sail. The Aegean has been crosshatched by the wakes of ancient Greeks and Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans, crusaders and invading sun seekers. It has history and hedonism. It stirs the intellect, yet tempts with salty swims and chatter-filled cafes.

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Tourists and tourist boats in the famous Navagio Bay on Greece's Zakynthos island.

READ MORE:* Patmos: The heavenly Greek island that mass tourism can't reach* Tinos: The sleepy Greek island time forgot* An alternative side to Santorini

Each island has its distinct character, but all are close enough that passengers are off the ship all day and transported by night. Next morning, our first port of call is Spetses, which is almost ignored by international tourists. Wealthy Athenians come here to escape to bougainvillea-draped villas on pine-scented hillsides. The pines have supplied ships' masts since ancient times. In the harbour boatyard, workers are still making wooden fishing boats with traditional tools. Wrinkled men sit in the sun playing backgammon. The port town is stately with neoclassical buildings. Cars are banned and horse carriages clip clop along the waterfront.

Spetses has no particular sights, but everything that makes Greece magical. A rugged landscape of rocks, hills and scented forest, a tumble of whitewashed houses, shadowy chapels hung with icons and scented with candle wax and polish. Blinding light and blue sky, the blue domes of churches, the silvery shiver of olive trees, the happy splatter of red and orange beach parasols. This is a delicious nothing-to-do cruise day. I meander along the waterfront, hike up to a ruin, devour the first of many baklavas accompanied by thimblefuls of thick Greek coffee.

Next day is quite another experience. The whole world has discovered Mykonos: sun-pink Germans, posturing Chinese photo models, raucous Englishmen, jet-setting party people. Parts of Mykonos town's narrow streets are log-jammed with tourists, their cubic whitewashed architecture hidden under a veneer of hanging T-shirts and postcard racks. Still, it's hard not to be seduced by the whitewashed charm, and a short wander up the hill takes me to silent streets and a dilapidated windmill from which to admire a calendar-worthy island view.

That afternoon I take an Azamara excursion to Delos. This little island on which the Cyclades archipelago centres was considered the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and in ancient Greek times was the location of a prominent sacred and commercial town. Its ruins are scattered with mosaics, headless statues and toppled pillars. Marble lions have stood here since the second century BC, and are a brooding presence in a rocky, sun-beaten landscape.

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It's hard not to be seduced by the whitewashed charm of Mykonos.

I squint towards Mykonos, modern-day temple to tourism, and wonder what will remain in another millennium. Greece does this to travellers. It makes you philosophise and contemplate the vagaries of history, even while it distracts you with all the shameless pleasures of 21st-century tourism: beach clubs and coffeehouses, Insta-views and sunsets, warm waters and inflatable flamingo floats.

As we sail onwards, I find Azamara Pursuit caters to the split personality, too. It offers thoughtful seminars and enrichment lectures, and a ship's library of Georgian-style elegance and considerable literary heft. It's an elegant ship of understated appeal almost as minimalist as the Aegean landscapes, yet is never short of indulgences. I like the pool-side hot tubs, the White Night evening barbecue on deck, the properly made coffee from Mosaic Caf and the foie gras with fig jam from Aqualina restaurant.

As we sail onwards, each island is unexpectedly different. At Rhodes, we sail in under crusader battlements to spend the day exploring one of Europe's best-preserved medieval fortified cities. In Crete, there are wild landscapes and village life, and the crumbling ruins of Ottoman castles. By day seven we've arrived in the Ionian Sea to anchor off Zakynthos, where limestone cliffs plunge into peacock seas and a shore excursion takes me into a rural world of folk tales and saintly miracles.

Azamara Pursuit is ideal for these petite ports. The ship carries 702 passengers and, though it has space and a full range of amenities, is compact enough to visit smaller destinations. It's an attractive ship but caters to those who like to be off it and exploring for most of the day, and sometimes into the evening, too. Azamara Club Cruises is destination-focused, lingering in ports and providing an impressive range of shore excursions. A choice of 10 in Rhodes, nine in Zakynthos and nine in Mykonos, ranging from mosaic-making to a monastery visit, a four-wheel-drive adventure to a culinary walk.

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Azamara Pursuit is an elegant ship of understated appeal.

I like the structure of the shore excursions, and the time they leave for exploration on my own. In Corfu, a morning visit to Achilleion Palace still leaves the entire afternoon free for Corfu old town, the jumbled alleys of which are edged with a fine, arcaded Esplanade and parks, all overlooked by a whopping Venetian-era fortress. This is a lovely place of statues, pastel-painted houses and bakeries hot with the smell of nut biscuits dipped in honey. Tourists surge, but in the Church of St Spyridon local widows in black queue beneath a flamboyantly painted ceiling to kiss the patron saint's silver coffin.

We sail away between the Corfiot and Albanian coastlines. The pie-crust roofs and fortifications of Corfu are left in our wake. Albanian towns are an enigma to starboard, glowing like the promised land in the last of the Mediterranean sun. That could be a place to visit one day, I think as I pace the decks. A good cruise leaves you wanting more, as the travel muse sings across the silvery sea.

FIVE SIGHTS BEYOND THE PORTSKNOSSOS PALACE

From Cretan port Agios Nikolaos, a shore excursion takes you to these 1250BC Minoan ruins, one of the world's most famous archaeological sites. The nearby Museum of Heraklion's artefacts highlight the sophistication of this ancient civilisation. Seeheraklion.gr

REMOTE ZAKYNTHOS

To prove there are still untouched spots in Greece, a 4WD tour winds into the rugged Vrachionas Mountains and onwards to remote inland villages Anafonitria and Volimes. There's also a stop above Shipwreck Beach, one of Greece's most stunningly blue coves. Seevisitgreece.gr

LINDOS

AnAzamara excursion across Rhodes island goes to the lace-making town of Lindos, whose cubic houses are scattered like white dice below an acropolis of ancient remains and Venetian fortifications. The combination of temple ruins and landscape is sublime. Seerodosisland.gr

ELIA BEACH

For your hedonistic moment, head to one of Mykonos' most magnificent beaches, lapped by emerald-tinted waters and embraced by craggy cliffs. Rent a sun lounge and thatched parasol and enjoy a day of sun-soaking and swimming among Europe's buffed and beautiful. Seemykonos.gr

ACHILLEION PALACE

This odd but attractive neoclassical mansion in Corfu was built in 1890 for melancholy Empress Elizabeth (Sissi) of Austria and later owned by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The curator takes you around the interior and statue-studded gardens with their sweeping terrace views over Corfu. Seeachillion-corfu.gr

TRIP NOTESMORE

visitgreece.gr

CRUISE

Azamara offers three Greece Intensive Voyage itineraries in 2020 that sail between Athens and Venice (or the reverse). They all differ slightly from each other and the one described here. Prices from US$2667 a person, twin share. azamara.com

Brian Johnston travelled as a guest of Azamara.

A return trip for one passenger in economy class flying from Auckland to Athenswould generate 3.2 tonnes CO2. To offset your carbon emissions head toairnewzealand.co.nz/sustainability-customer-carbon-offset.

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An Aegean cruise aboard Azamara Pursuit proves there are few better places to sail - Stuff.co.nz

LAS VEGAS They wandered through the slot-machine maze of McCarran International Airport, through the haze of stale cigar smoke and banners advertising residencies by Calvin Harris and Criss Angel, and into the quiet, cool morning of a city that hadnt yet shaken off sleep.

It was the earliest hours of the first day of October, and these teenagers from every nook of the country were descending on Las Vegas. But they werent going to the strip, or even to nap in their hotel. In a city that represents the pinnacle of uniquely American hedonism, a band of student organizers from March for Our Lives the gun-reform advocacy organization born out of the countrys deadliest high school shooting were headed directly to an empty, gray event venue a half-mile from the airport, to help pull off a presidential candidate forum dedicated solely to the issue of gun violence.

It was, coincidentally, the two-year anniversary of the Las Vegas mass shooting, in which a 64-year-old man dragged 10 rifles into his 32nd-floor Mandalay Bay hotel room and opened fire from the window on a crowd of 22,000, killing 58 and injuring close to 500. Across the strip, between ads for Cirque du Soleil and a farm-to-table restaurant, electronic billboards flashed signs of remembrance: BRAVER. CLOSER. PROUDER. STRONGER. #VEGASSTRONGER. Trump Tower glinted like a lighter in the distance.

The forum was about 24 hours away. The event space was mostly empty. The sound of clanging metal rang through the courtyard as a construction crew assembled white security tents outside. In a ballroom inside, clusters of March organizers, still not old enough to legally drink, slouched over round tables covered in white linens, tapping through their phones and chatting quietly, like reluctant college kids killing time at the library.

Lauren Hogg, the 16-year-old co-founder of March, picked at the straw in an empty Starbucks cup full of ice, hugging her white cable-knit sweater closer to her chest. She was 14 when, on Valentines Day in 2018, a 19-year-old man gunned down 17 students at her high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, in the South Florida suburb of Parkland. Within days, a group of Hoggs friends launched the activist group Never Again MSD; a month after that, they organized a nationwide protest of gun violence that galvanized nearly 2 million people.

In the span of mere weeks, Hogg and a handful of her classmates became some of the countrys most well-known advocates for gun reform, making it a key electoral issue for Democrats running for office nationally. Now, here they were, watching the venue be converted into a made-for-MSNBC event.

I look back at photos right after the shooting, like from speeches I gave. And I don't recognize myself, Hogg said, brown eyes sharp like flint.

We're better now, today, than we were in the beginning. Because I think people forget that. We were not doing well."

Flanking her in the ballroom was 19-year-old Eve Levenson, whos from Los Angeles and helped organize a number of Marchs protests there last year. She joined March full-time as its federal affairs manager this summer, shortly before starting her sophomore year at George Washington University in Washington, D.C, where she piles evening classes onto a full day of meetings on Capitol Hill.

I called my parents last spring, and basically was like, 'Is it bad to register as a lobbyist?' Levenson said with a booming laugh inside the venues war room, where event organizers spent the morning working.

It's like, obviously, I've never planned a presidential forum before, Levenson said. She was nine years old during the last true open primary for Democrats, in 2007. This was a nice change, though, because the adults I was working with also had not planned a presidential forum. So for once, I was like, okay, it's not that I don't know what's supposed to happen next because I'm young. It's because none of us know.

Hogg sat beside her, spinning in an office chair. Her junior year was only two weeks old, but already shed missed four days, first for testifying in favor of an assault-weapons ban on Capitol Hill, and now for this.

It's almost as if I went from, like, childhood to kind of, adulthood, in regards to having to deal with things that some adults have to deal with, or working in some spaces that are majority adults, Hogg said. I've found myself trying to have to learn how to be a teenager, and especially in spaces where not everyone is traumatized.

She throws around the word trauma like it weighs nothing at all, and still finds it hard to relate to people who havent experienced it.

Trying to interact with teenagers in a non-business, non-political way, is something that is very difficult, she said. But recently, the biggest thing for me is, like, realizing that I need to learn how to be a teenager. And it's hard. It's difficult, you know? It's like, what do you talk about?

Two audio-visual techs walked in. They asked if they could use the room to check its equipment. We scooped up our bags and cleared out, shuffling through the maze of sterile white offices, looking for a place to sit that wasnt in the middle of being made over. We passed by what would, the next day, become the room where forum attendees could sit to decompress from the talk of gun violence and murder, and we passed by the the glamour room, with its silvery mirrors and flattering lighting, where candidates would wait before going onstage.

I find myself kind of disassociating a lot when I'm not with people who are in March for Our Lives or weren't in a shooting, Hogg said, once we found an unoccupied room. The faint untz-untz of electronic Muzak echoed through the venue. My brain kind of just doesn't know how to act in a lot of circumstances with kids, just like trying to have fun and being adolescents.

It's like, when you're like a fish it's like you're a fish in water, she continued. You don't realize that you're in water.

Levenson, sitting directly in front of Hogg and listening intently, interjected. I'm sure that analogy came from the personal experience of being a fish, she said. They looked at each other for a beat and broke into peals of laughter.

***

The next morning, the makeover was complete, a small village erected overnight. Hordes of people spilled into the venue, navigating around circular tables to grab fruit and coffee from a breakfast bar. Reporters in neon green PRESS badges darted in and out of their designated room, staking out spots along the entryway to the ballroom, where the students from March could hang out undisturbed.

A healthy chunk of D.C.s Democratic political machine had made the trip. Every top-polling candidate running for president and their handlers were there, with the exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders, whod suffered a heart attack the night before. So were several members of Congress, Nevadas governor, 100 or so members of the press, and hundreds of political activists.

And though it was the team from Giffords, the gun-reform group founded by former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, that conceived of the forum and did the bulk of the planning, the Parkland students were, by all appearances, the face of the event.

By 10 a.m., Giffords herself was onstage with David Hogg, Laurens older brother and the student who has absorbed the bulk of the flashbulbs, to introduce the forum. His lanky frame cut through the starkly lit, deep blue of the stage.

When the American culture starts to value children and the future of our country more than guns, politicians get afraid, and thats when things change, he said in a brief speech. Giffords and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) flanked him.

After a spoke, Hogg stood on stage for several long beats, struggling, and failing, to take a good selfie with Giffords and Murphy. Youd think David Hogg would be better at selfies than he is! crowed the moderator, MSNBC host Craig Melvin, to laughter from the crowd, as Hogg finally slunk offstage.

It was the selfie that launched a dozen selfies. Tucked into a corner of the venues lobby was a backdrop branded with logos from Giffords and March for Our Lives, and candidates passed through it, alongside students from March, like tourists posing with carnival cut-outs.

A steady stream of them populated the organizations Twitter feed throughout the day: Theres Kamala Harris playing air guitar. Theres Amy Klobuchar, hearing a very good secret. Theres Andrew Yang, sorority-squatting.

And it was clear, from the way the candidates spoke about them, who they were really there to appease.

You did such a good job, Joe Biden said, leaning into the crowd, pointing to the Parkland students sitting in the first rows.

When Emma Gonzalez, a Parkland graduate who joined some of her classmates on the cover of TIME last year, asked former Rep. Beto ORourke (D-Tex.) how he would implement certain elements of his gun reform agenda a plan that March for Our Lives itself wrote he turned the focus back to them.

Id call you, ORourke said, to thunderous applause.

The Parkland students have never had trouble receiving that kind of attention. As quickly as they spun their pain into political action, the country latched onto their tragedy and yanked them, swiftly, into celebrity: a national speaking tour, TV appearances, the cover of TIME.

Then, the backlash. Right-wing media personalities pushed a number of conspiracy theories about Parkland survivors, including David Hogg, fabricating allegations that he was never a Stoneman Douglas student, and that he was a crisis actor hired by Democrats to harm the NRA. SWAT teams had to protect his house.

Close to two years after the shooting, they are expert in the demands made of them, even as March has bloomed into an organization that has very little to do with the specific experience of the students from Stoneman Douglas.

But when politicians talk about gun reform, they tend to flatten it into their likeness.

How in the world could you say that to March for Our Lives? Beto ORourke asked, launching an attack against Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Later, in a small press gaggle at the venues press room, ORourke tore into South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg had just spoken forcefully against a mandatory buy-back program for assault weapons, which March has endorsed, calling it a shiny object that distracts Democrats from pursuing more widely popular gun control measures, like universal background checks and federal red flag laws.

How in the world could you say that to March for Our Lives? asked ORourke, who opposed mandatory buy-backs until recently. A pair of student organizers in their blue T-shirts looked on. I was really offended by those comments. Digging in his heels, ORourke then said Buttigieg represents a politics driven by poll testing and focus group driving, and listening to consultants before they arrive at a decision.

ORourke filed out of the room, and the three dozen reporters and March students followed. Nevada Assemblywoman Sandra Jauregui took ORourkes place in front of the few cameras remaining. A survivor herself of the Route 91 Harvest shooting, Jauregui subsequently wrote and passed a bill banning the sale of bump stocks in the state.

She began to talk about the night of the shooting teary-eyed, beseeching, voice unsteady while rows of reporters sat facing the opposite direction, plugging away at their computers, eating sandwiches. A member of Jaureguis team wove through their tables to let them know she was speaking just behind them.

***

Delaney Tarr was gesticulating to nobody, fingers glittering with rings, an iPhone and small notebook splayed out before her. Tarr cofounder of March for Our Lives, 19-year-old college student, astrology enthusiast was doing press, talking local radio hosts through the groups policy agenda for gun reform.

This was the Parkland students afternoon: darting in and out of the press room to watch and film candidates brief press gaggles, holding court with reporters, and occasionally stopping to greet an old friend.

In those interviews, they were candid and guileless. Marchs spokesperson waited by Tarrs side as she wrapped her radio spot. When it ended, he was quick to ask her how it went. Theyve had problems with antagonistic, conservative media outlets.

Verrry left, Tarr drawled. They asked me what Id say to Mitch McConnell. What I answered was, well, what Id say to any legislator is

It was my turn. Tarr and I wandered into the lobby to talk, but after a few minutes were interrupted by a March staffer. Cory Booker wanted a selfie.

I waited for her return, the blue photo backdrop sitting briefly empty across the room. Outside, through the glass walls of the lobby, I saw David Hogg patiently nodding in front of a camera as a journalist chatted him up.

And then, like magic, Tarr was back, jogging to our table with a shake of her head and frazzled smile.

We talked about veganism, she said. Totally unprompted.

An airpod fell from her hand and scuttled across the floor. She touched her bicep, where the outline of a nude woman, with a sheet of black hair, curled in the fetal position. From the crown of the womans head, above ground, sprouts a tuft of green leaves.

He looked at my tattoo and hes like, Whats that? she laughed, impersonating Booker. Oh, I thought that was a vegan thing.

Are you vegan? I asked her.

No! she yelped. (Booker famously wont shut up about how he is.)

The strangeness of this a sitting member of Congress lightly asking about her body art and eating habits, at a forum for presidential candidates she helped plan and promote seemed to barely register.

Tarr acknowledges that the original Never Again MSD group is aware of their relative privilege that they were afforded a spotlight to discuss their grief, while other victims of gun violence, particularly in low-income neighborhoods and among people of color, go undiscussed. Its a guilt that, she said, she is still learning to process. And it is damaging to the cause, she said, to act as if the Parkland students are operating in a vacuum.

That celebrity aspect is one that I think can be a bit damaging, because we are activists first and foremost, born out of a trauma and a tragedy, Tarr said. This is not about the fame. This is not about cameras. We don't live these glamorous, glitzy lives this is not what it seems to be perceived as.

Like the rest of the students, Tarr is still figuring out how to reconcile the otherworldliness of of her activism with her youth. But the activism itself comes naturally now. She calls it so comfortable that its like pulling on a cozy sweater.

I was like, I'm going to be a college student, and I'm going to have that experience. I'm going to do this and nobody can stop me.

Still, shes worked hard to build herself a new home at the University of Georgia, where shes a sophomore majoring in journalism and minoring in womens studies. Shes joined a dizzying number of clubs debate, literary magazine, film, and poetry among them where, she said, she has a captive audience for her writing. (Her roughly 180,000 Twitter followers dont hurt.)

But she finds other ways to be good to herself. She is learning how to say no. She is very serious about her bedtime routine. She goes to football games. She made friends who are very different from her, friends who, for example, skin deer.

I think part of this was reclaiming what I thought had been stolen from me, she said about enrolling at UGA. I was like, I'm going to be a college student, and I'm going to have that experience. I'm going to do this and nobody can stop me.

Former housing secretary Julian Castro was speaking a few yards away. Tarr went on.

I, even still now, more than a year out, I'm reconciling with the fact that after the shooting, I put my grief in a box and I pushed it aside, she said. We're better now, today, than we were in the beginning. Because I think people forget that. We were not doing well, emotionally, in the beginning. We had a lot going on.

She continued: I would only open up that can of worms of pain and grief and trauma when I was doing these interviews, because I think a lot of us did have to push our emotions and our pain aside because we felt that we needed to do it for the cause.

The original founders of Never Again MSD dont see each other as much as they used to. But they do have reunions periodically, in part to see each other and in part to meet the newer March organizers, who are sprawled across dozens of chapters around the country.

Coming together like thisit helps.

It's like that whole Hero's Journey, Tarr said, recalling the classic storytelling arc that sees its protagonist called to adventure by an unforeseen force before facing adversity, and, eventually, rebirth.

You've learned something new, so you come back with a different perspective and a different outlook. And feel the fire again, she said. It's always nice to feel that fire again. Because it's never the same unless you're at these events with these people. And then you get passionate, you want to roar, you want to shout, and scream, and I love it. I love it.

The afternoon wore on, and they passed each other like orbiting planets: all on fixed paths, rarely in alignment. They tagged each other in for different meetings, gave each other directions about what to do, and when. Where do you need me to be? is a mantra I heard early and often.

After the last speaker, California Sen. Kamala Harris, finished, I saw Tarr wandering alone through an emptying lobby. Around her, people spilled out of the auditorium, out of the bathrooms, back out of the venue through the now-abandoned security checkpoints.

She was headed to the only room off-limits to the press, but a reporter caught her. He asked what she made of the day. She thought it went well, she said, but didnt really get to watch the candidates speak. She was too busy doing interviews.

She and her former classmates would not have time for a prolonged goodbye. All of them would leave at different times that night flights back to D.C., to Florida, to Massachusetts. Hers was a red-eye back to Georgia, where she would land with just enough time to get a bus back to Athens and make her morning classes.

Top: March for Our Lives Co-Founder Emma Gonzalez (R) attends the 2020 Gun Safety Forum on October 2, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Above: Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang poses for photos with attendees after speaking during the forum. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

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'I Need to Learn How to Be a Teenager': 36 Hours with the Parkland Survivors in Vegas - VICE