Getting the flavor of...A Grand Canyon aerial tour, and more

A Grand Canyon aerial tour

Touring the Grand Canyon by helicopter definitely “puts your life in perspective,” said Naomi Kooker in The Boston Globe. That’s especially true if you are traveling with your 75-year-old mother and she has put the trip on her bucket list after cancer surgery. At first, I wasn’t thrilled to arrive at the canyon’s crowded South Rim, after a quiet week with my mom enjoying dazzling walks along the North Rim. But not even the roar of the engine and propellers is a significant distraction when we board a helicopter along with three young Aussies. The heavy headsets we’re handed seem designed merely to cancel the noise, but then U2’s “Beautiful Day” kicks in, and it proves “a surprise bonus.” The music calms us “as we hover and dive along the walls of the canyon, one view more stunning than the last.” My mother is “overcome with a sense of gratitude for being alive,” tears welling as she gazes out the window.

A 900-foot-deep coal mine

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To me, coal mining has always seemed like work no one would choose willingly, said Timothy R. Smith in The Washington Post. Besides the low pay and grim working conditions, there’s the prospect of early death. But I was forced to mildly revise that opinion during a recent tour of the Exhibition Coal Mine, in Beckley, W. Va., where our guide, LeRoy White, was a retired third-generation miner. White snapped on his headlamp as our rail car clattered down a dark, low tunnel, taking us 900 feet into the cool earth. I didn’t exactly learn to envy the men who’d worked there in the 1890s, “lying on a damp floor” for hours and hand-drilling holes in which to stuff some dynamite. Worse was that the coal companies often paid less than they charged for tools and housing. But before we left, White cheerily informed us that his own grandson now works in a mine. “That’s all he ever talks about,” he said.