🐕 Is your dog a wolf? | Bulletin #159

This week: a hotel you're supposed to get lost in 🌀

July 30, 2026

Hey Adventurers! In Denmark, biking isn't exercise, it's transportation. Nine out of ten Danes own a bike, and in Copenhagen over 750,000 bicycles move through a city built to keep them rolling. Danish families take it a step further: about 25% of households with two kids have swapped the minivan for a Christiania bike, a three-wheeled cargo bike built to haul groceries, kids, perhaps a family dog - Great Dane optional.

LAST CHANCE: ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY SUGGESTIONS!

Next week we depart for Buenos Aires and Uruguay! Any final recs? Un tío who owns a pizza shop? Un jardín secreto? Send them our way! ¡Muchas gracias! 🇦🇷🇺🇾

THIS WEEK IN AWA AWESOMENESS

🐕 Dog days of summer
🩺 Getting lost in an asylum
🚲 International clown week?
🧣 Win a custom AWA kerchief

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re in the dog days of summer… so we thought we’d share some of our favorite canine tails … er, tales.

Richardson Hotel 📍 Buffalo, New York, USA 📸 Marjorie Becker Photo

NIGHT AT THE ASYLUM

Three 19th-century geniuses - an architect, a landscape designer, and a psychiatrist - converged on a single project in Buffalo: an asylum built on the radical idea that beautiful spaces could heal the mind. The corridors were designed to flood with light. The grounds, sprawling. Today, it's an 88-room hotel where guests sleep inside a National Historic Landmark that once housed 600 patients…

Go Fish! 📍 Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, USA 📸 AWA

HOW FISH MET CHIPS

Britain's national dish didn't start in Britain. It took two survival strategies from opposite corners of Europe, centuries of separation, and one immigrant's shop in 1860s London to create it. Fish and chips became a matter of national morale - with Winston Churchill even declaring it too important to ration during WWII - and the story of how it got there involves frozen rivers, the Spanish Inquisition, and a D-Day password…

4,500 years. That's how long ago clowns were "invented." The practice dates back to ancient Egypt, where performers entertained pharaohs, but history's first professional comedians didn't receive the title of "clown" until 16th-century England. The term was borrowed from Scandinavian and Germanic words for a "clumsy, boorish fellow." Greek theater gave it structure, Commedia dell'arte gave it slapstick, and the modern circus gave it oversized shoes. International Clown Week honors this legacy the first week of every August, where we expect at least one seminar on the art of the squirting flower.

AWA x Cantonement Kerchief

FROM INBOX TO ICON

Sometimes the best collaborations don't start in boardrooms - they start because someone noticed a name in an email thread and took a shot. This is the story of how a photograph from Iceland became a friendship, a partnership, and a reminder that the right accessory can turn a trip to your grandparents' house into something that feels like an expedition.

P.S. You may be even able to win one for yourself… 👇🔎

Find this week's Secret Link for a chance to win one of these Goldilocks-sized kerchiefs (bigger than a handkerchief, smaller than a bandana, perfect for Adventures). Happy searching 🕵️

P.S. You can hear more about our friends at Cantonement here!