Stowe, Vermont (CNN) — “When he wants a break from the family business, Sam von Trapp grabs his mountain bike and rides into the woods near the lodge that bears his last name. Those are the same woods that his father Johannes, the youngest child of Georg and Maria von Trapp, spent time exploring when he wanted to get away from a house filled with children.”
There were seven from his father’s first marriage to Agatha and three with Maria, including Johannes, who is now 78.
And it’s where Sam and his sister Kristina explored as children and connected with nature.
“My family settled in Vermont because it reminded them of Austria,” says Sam, who was born in Vermont and moved back to help run the family business.
“They initially were living outside of Philadelphia and the hot, humid summers there weren’t what they were used to (coming) from Austria.”
A concert tour took them to Vermont, and someone let them stay in a house there for the summer. They fell in love with Stowe, “and that was it,” says Sam, 45.
CNN
The Mayan city of Tikal is an outsized time capsule with a natural ambiance that hasn’t changed in 1,300 years.
ICYMI NASA News.
Want to buy a ticket to the International Space Station?
NASA announced on Friday that the ISS will be open for commercial tourism business “beginning as early as 2020, if the market supports it.”
The NYT’s reports,
NASA announced on Friday that for the first time it is allowing private citizens to fly, if not to the moon, at least to the International Space Station, the only place where people currently live off the planet.
NASA is not transforming into a space travel agency. Private companies will have to pay it about $35,000 a night per passenger to sleep in the station’s beds and use its amenities, including air, water, the internet and the toilet. (The companies would charge much more to cover rocket flights to and from space, and to make a profit.)
Friday’s announcement was one of several new policies designed to allow companies to take advantage of the space station as a place for business, something that NASA has often frowned on in the past.
“This is a huge different way for us to do business,” William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said during a news conference at Nasdaq in New York.
Although, as the Morning Canary has been reporting, citizens going to the moon may not be too far behind.