Salt & Pepper Shakers

Airplane swag

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[This is a slightly different version of a story we first prepared for The Points Guy site.]

Airplane etiquette frowns on passengers taking home the blankets, the pillows, or the plates meals are served on. But some items are perfectly OK to swipe from your next flight.

Delta Air Lines’ ‘secret’ airplane trading cards

Delta Air Lines says that when they’re not busy preparing for a flight or flying the plane, their pilots are happy to pass out a collectible trading card featuring one of the airplanes in their fleet to “any customer that asks nicely.”

The carrier says there are 11 card types in the current collection and six total Delta collections since the beginning of the program, which has been active for more than 20 years.

Airplane Wings

If you are a kid – or an adult – stepping on a plane for the first time and a pilot or flight attendant hands you a small wing pin with the airline’s insignia on it, that’s going to make an impression.

Delta, Alaska, and Southwest Airlines still have airplane wings for kids and first-time flyers. Most are plastic, but the wings Alaska Airlines hands out are metal.

KLM’s little Delft houses

Long-haul business class passengers on KLM get to take home one of the more unusual and collectible items: a miniature Delft house.

The little blue-and-white houses are in the shape of historic and notable buildings in the Netherlands or abroad and are filled with Bols Genever, a liquor made with corn, rye, and wheat.

KLM commissions a new little house each year and releases it in October to coincide with the anniversary of KLM’s founding in 1919. This year’s house – the 104th in the series – portrays Valkenburg Station, the oldest existing railway station in the Netherlands.

Salt and pepper shakers

Airlines know that many passengers pocket salt and pepper shakers. And some carriers have fun with that.

Virgin Atlantic’s salt and pepper shakers say “pinched from Virgin Atlantic” on their feet.

And the little see-through airplane (above) filled with salt and pepper on Condor Airlines (remove the propeller for pepper) says “aeroplane souvenir” on the underside.

Amenity kits

Premium passengers on international flights are issued some swanky amenity kits.

United’s new Polaris amenity kits are filled with products from the Therabody wellness brand. And Emirates has a collection of Bulgari amenity kits for First and business-class passengers with a wide variety of upscale products, including an engraved Bulgari mirror.

Museum Monday: Lightner Museum Turns 75

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If we’re not in an airport, you’ll find the Stuck at the Airport team in a museum.

And if it’s a museum with some unusual collections, all the better.

The Lightner Museum in St. Augustine, Florida fits the bill.

And how.

First built as the Hotel Alcazar in 1888, the building opened as the Lightner Museum of Hobbies in January 1948.

The museum was created by Otto Lightner, a great advocate of collecting and the publisher of Hobbies magazine.

Lightner promoted every kind of hobby, from collecting matchbooks and cigar labels to whittling wood. But he was also a great collector himself and had the means to amass a substantial personal collection of fine and decorative art, natural history specimens, Americana, and just plain stuff. 

Cigar Lables

Lightner first opened a museum of hobbies in Chicago in 1934. And in addition to his eclectic and eccentric collections, he encour­aged the readers of Hobbies magazine to send him their collec­tions. 

They did.

Following a stay in St. Augustine’s in 1946, Lightner purchased the Hotel Alcazar to serve as the permanent home for his collections.

The collections include lamps by Louis Comfort Tiffany, shells, geological specimens, a vast number of salt & pepper shakers, Victurian mechanical insturments, and hundreds of thousands of buttons.

We know there also some shrunken heads in the collection.

And in celebration of the museum’s 75th diamond anniversary in 2023, the museum is hosting a special exhibition titled, 75 for 75.

On display is a selection of artwork and objects from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibit opens on February 2nd and we’re making plans to visit soon.

From the Lightner Museum Collection

Ride On!

We love anything transportation. So the Lightner Museum’s new exhibit “Ride On!: Historic Bicycles from the Keith Pariani Collection,” is also of great interest.

Here are some of the exhibit notes on the early popularity of the bicycles and the Hotel Alacazar’s ‘bicycle academy:’

In the 1890s the bicycle took over the hearts and minds of Americans. By the early twentieth century, almost 300 bicycle manufacturing firms were established in the US. Swept up in the craze for cycling, the Lightner Museum’s historic building, the Hotel Alcazar, offered its own bicycle academy, allowing its guests to tour Gilded Age St. Augustine on two wheels. 

First developed in Europe in the early nineteenth century, the bicycle took decades of design and engineering to make it safe and convenient for the average rider.  The first popular models of the bicycle were high-wheeled and dangerous for unskilled riders because of the frequency of falls. However, with the invention of the “Safety” bicycle, the vehicle became a safer and more popular mode of transportation. The women’s safety bicycle, allowing for women’s dress, helped boost the bicycle’s popularity even more. By the 1890s, the safety bicycle was widely used in the U.S. by everyone, regardless of age or gender, for both transportation and recreation.

The “Ride On!” exhibit runs February 2 through September 30, 2023.

Bicycle Academy