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Ever swim in a castle? Probably not if you live in the USA, which has 10.7 million pools but only two “castles” with fully operational indoor swimming facilities. Channeling my inner C3PO, your odds of swimming in an American castle are approximately 5.35 million to one. To quote Han Solo: Never tell me the odds. …
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“Ladies and gentlemen, as we begin our descent into Cincinnati, make sure your seats and tray tables are in their full upright position, and fasten your seat belts. I breathed a sigh of relief at the flight attendant’s instruction. Almost there. Our flight from Richmond to Philly had begun in snow, ice, and wind, and…
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Toeing the water of my home pool in Williamsburg, Virginia, I grumbled that today’s swim would be hot as a nuclear reactor. Well, maybe not quite 10 times hotter than the sun, which according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is what occurs in a fusion reactor. Still, the 94F water I was about to…
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Through the oval window, fluffy white clouds parted to reveal an expanse of blue ocean, reaching through the dawning sky toward a yellow horizon. In my dreams, folks. Crammed into a middle row of a packed transatlantic flight, I clung to this image, readjusted my sleep mask, and burrowed into my upright seat, hoping to…
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Do you believe in time travel? I do, in a way, especially after last weekend. As a Christmas gift, my husband had promised me a stay at the beautiful Historic Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach, where I would swim and write to my heart’s content and we would reconnect, momentarily freed from the stress of…
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Public domain imageSunlite Pool, the enormous blue gem of Cincinnati’s Coney Island amusement park, was built in 1925. An engineering marvel even today, this 3-million-gallon tank remains the world’s largest recirculating pool. But it won’t be for long if rapid community action doesn’t work. I’ve never been there, but I feel compelled to write this…
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DOE-Oakridge (1961). Overall View of Oak Ridge Pool DOE Photo by Ed Westcott Oak Ridge Tennessee July 1961. https://www.flickr.com/photos/doe-oakridge Accessed 10 January 2024. Public domain. In the summer of 2021, after more than a year of quarantine and masks and “safer at home,” we fled. We packed up Stickers, our trusty van, and hit the…
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Cheers! This gem of a hotel pool has special significance to me. For one, it’s gorgeous. I mean, look at it! The columns, the tiny tiles, the Dorothy Draper touches. For those of you unfamiliar with her work, Draper was an interior designer in the mid-20th century who brought bold colors, bright patterns, and luxurious,…
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To “dive in” to this blog, I wanted to write about the hotel pool that inspired me to create it. Nicknamed the “Jewel of the Desert,” the Arizona Biltmore, a magnificent Art Deco hotel in Phoenix, inspired my interest in historic pools. Architect Albert Chase MacArthur, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, built it for…
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Hello and welcome to my blog! If you love swimming in unique pools with stories to tell, you’re in the right place! Who said history has to be boring? Every time I immerse myself in historic waters, I feel a kinship with those who came before, as if I’ve dived back in time and am…
swim history girl 