Duckwyn's Travel Blog

There's a moment every traveling family knows. The wheels touch down, the seatbelt light is still on, and every phone in the row comes out of airplane mode at once. It's the first minute of the trip actually beginning. Starting this week, DuckAbroad is part of that moment. Introducing Airport Arrival Alerts. When you land, DuckAbroad welcomes you with a notification: "You've landed at Dublin Airport!" Tap Log Landing right on the notification and the airport goes into your fa

My grandfather, Sergeant Peter Farley, landed at Omaha Beach about twelve days after D-Day. He was a communications sergeant in the 83rd Infantry Division. On July 4, 1944, the day his division launched its first major offensive south of Carentan, he was wounded by grenade shrapnel. He recovered, rejoined his unit that winter in the Ardennes, and came home. I've stood on the beach where he landed and walked the towns near where he fought. And recently, in Amsterdam, I stood i

Kon-Tiki, a new iOS travel widget, De Haar Castle, Antwerp, and still looking for travel bloggers Issue 7 of the Weekend History Hunt went out Thursday. This one is about exploration, the real kind, before GPS and satellite maps, when crossing an ocean meant trusting stars and ocean swells and the flight path of birds. It starts with Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 built a balsa wood raft with five men who had never sailed and crossed 4,300 miles of open Pacific in 101 days to pr

Every parent knows the feeling. You've planned a trip to Washington D.C., or you're halfway through a road trip to the Grand Canyon, and someone hands a phone to the kids. Within minutes, they're deep in YouTube or a game that has nothing to do with where you are. It's a familiar tension. You want them engaged with the world around them, not a screen. But you also know screens are part of life, and fighting them every mile of the trip is exhausting. Here's the thing most pare

In July 1848, about 300 people gathered in a small chapel in upstate New York for the first women's rights convention in American history. In 1903, a woman in Manchester called a meeting in her front parlour and launched a movement that would change voting rights across the British Empire. In the early 1800s, a woman in southern China built the largest pirate fleet in history, negotiated her own retirement with three defeated navies, and died peacefully at 69. Most kids have

My wife reads every plaque. Every single one. She's thorough, she's curious, and honestly she retains an impressive amount of information. My kids experience this as slow torture. I've watched them cycle through all five stages of plaque grief in real time: confusion, mild interest, restlessness, silent suffering, and finally just slumping against the nearest wall while their eyes go completely blank. We've had this exact scene play out at castles, museums, national parks, an