May I interest you in a rose salad?
And perhaps a psychedelic song, a $5 buffet, and a free hotel in Istanbul while we’re at it.
Welcome to Mappy Monday, where you may find your next travel adventure, a new self-experiment, learn about an AI tool or a money-saving hack, and discover random things you didn’t know you needed to know. I’ll also tell you what’s new on my MappyEverAfter website - because, well, someone has to!
Experiment: 🌹 Snacking on Roses
AI Shenanigans: 🎵 Did Claude Take Mushrooms?
Travel: 🐾 Back at Best Friends (pets + $5 buffet = yes please!)
Health: 🌞 Soak up the Morning Sun
Money: 🛕 Get a Free Mini-break, Courtesy of Your Airline
Watch: 🕸 Sucked into the “Spider-Verse”
Read: 📚 John Baxter - “The Most Beautiful Walk in the World”
Mind Hack: ⏳ Count Time like Peanuts
Just because: 🔥 Four Elements Walk into an Infinite Craft Game
Note: I will always tell you if I’m getting any referral bonuses and how much they are.
There are two Amazon links in this letter, but I’d rather you got the books from the library or your local bookstore (because I’ve clearly missed the memo on how capitalism works).
Experiment:
🌹 Snacking on Roses
I read that roses are edible, and since I found some unsprayed ones (I hope), I gave them a taste.
Surprisingly, they don’t taste like soap or your grandmother’s perfume. More like elegant lettuce, silky, delicate, quietly fragrant, and kind of addictive once you get past the weirdness of it.
I’ve tried them stirred into cherry yogurt (delightful), steeped as tea (gentle and floral), and tossed with apples, mint, and honey/lime glaze as a fruit salad.
You feel slightly magical doing it.
If you’re curious and want the botanical stamp of approval, here are helpful rose-eating guides from Science Direct and Herb Federation of New Zealand.
Let the scientists discuss phytochemicals, I’ll be over here snacking on flowers.
AI Shenanigans:
🎵 Did Claude Take Mushrooms?
I’ve been playing with AI music makers again, curious how much they’ve evolved. I used a free version of Suno, which composes music from a text prompt. All I asked was “Create an acoustic, ethereal song about a psychedelic experience.”
The result: nice voice and melody, meh lyrics.
Claude to the rescue. I asked it to write “lyrics without much rhyme about what it feels like to be on mushrooms” and it came back sounding like it took a heroic dose under a Bodhi tree. A few lines:
“This is not the first sky that's cracked open / Pouring liquid cosmos through my marrow”
“The quiet violence of return / Stitching consciousness to bone”
“Ten thousand doors / And all of them home”
Then I dropped the lyrics into Suno, repeated the prompt, and out came a fully AI-generated song that managed to actually… move me. Listen for yourself.
Travel:
🐾 Back at Best Friends (Pets + $5 buffet? Yes, Please!)
May has been a whirlwind, and I was craving some wide-open spaces and furry friends.
So here we are, back at the amazing Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah! It’s just about 40 minutes from Zion National Park, the days here smell like juniper, and the dogs enthusiastically exfoliate your shins in gratitude for cuddles and snacks.
Every lunch is still somehow just $5 (!) for a full vegan buffet (menu here), coffee, tea, and desserts, which feels borderline criminal.
We alternate between long walks, spooning four cuddly, fluffy pups, and reluctantly tearing ourselves away to hammer at our keyboards.
For a big dose of cuteness, here’s my blog post about Staying at Best Friends, and a few videos I made:
and a short from Pink Sand Dunes Park nearby:
Health:
🌞 Soak up the Morning Sun
Every time we come to Best Friends, I end up reviving the same health experiment: getting outside at sunrise to reset my circadian rhythm, hormonal system, and mental wellbeing (as per Dr Andrew Huberman). You’d think I’d be doing it year-round, the way I rave about it.
But something about this place, maybe the pups waking us up at dawn, maybe the red cliffs catching fire in the first light, makes it easy. This time around, our spot is the patio. We watch the sunrise with warm cappuccinos in hand - milk mustache optional.
The nature here is stunning. And, apparently, good for the body and mind. Win-win.
Money:
🛕 Free Mini-breaks, Courtesy of Your Airline
Turns out, layovers and stopovers might be some of the best travel deals around. A bunch of cities are basically begging you to leave the airport and go explore when you’re passing through with a specific airline. Sometimes with free tours, sometimes with free hotel stays (or both). Here's a little roundup of places letting you play tourist for free (or close to it):
Istanbul (with Turkish Airlines) – If your layover is between 6 and 24 hours, Turkish Airlines will whisk you into the city on a free guided tour. You can also get 1 to 3 free hotel nights!
And just like that, you turned a layover into a mini vacation.
Singapore (Changi Airport) – Got 5.5 to 24 hours to kill? Singapore offers several free 2.5-hour tours straight from Changi. You leave, you get to see some temples and the skyline, and you’re back in time for boarding.
Seoul (Incheon Airport) – Free transit tours for layovers between 4 and 24 hours. Think palaces, markets, temples, maybe a steaming bowl of something you can’t pronounce but love anyway.
Taipei (Taoyuan Airport) – If your layover falls between 7 and 24 hours, Taiwan tourism takes you on a free half-day tour. You do need to register in advance and spots go quickly, so don’t dawdle.
Abu Dhabi (Etihad Airways) – Etihad has a stopover program that gives you up to two nights in a hotel, on the house. You just have to make sure your flight qualifies.
Doha (Qatar Airways) – If your transit in Doha is between 12 and 96 hours, you can get a discounted hotel stay from 1 to 4 nights, starting at $14 a night.
Reykjavik (Icelandair) – Icelandair will let you add a stopover of up to 7 days in Iceland at no extra cost if you’re flying between North America and Europe.
Lisbon or Porto (TAP Air Portugal) – Free stopovers in Lisbon or Porto for up to 10 days. Possibly worth rerouting your trip just for the custard tarts.
Not bad for a trip you were already taking, right? All you have to do is stop... strategically.
Watch:
🕸 Sucked into the “Spider-Verse”
I don’t usually rush to watch animated movies. Nothing against them, I just tend to go for things that feature actual humans with pores. But Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse? Total exception.
The hubby insisted I’d at least give them a shot, and I’m glad I finally did. They’re funny, emotional, gorgeously chaotic, and somehow manage to make infinite universes feel weirdly intimate. 10/10 would multiverse again!
Read:
📚 John Baxter - “The Most Beautiful Walk in the World”
Here’s another recommendation from Mark (the hubby): The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris (Goodreads, Libby, Amazon) is a memoir-meets-stroll through literary Paris, filled with anecdotes, baguettes, and ghostly Hemingways. A bit of a love letter to walking with nowhere to be.
Mind Hack:
⏳ Count the Peanuts
A tiny human recently joined my extended family, so I loved this bit from Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator. He talks about how having kids changed the way he understands time. Not as a blur, but as a series of finite, countable things:
You only get 52 weekends with your 2-year-old.
If the real magic of Christmas lasts from age 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child’s eyes light up with that kind of wonder 8 times.
It’s impossible to grasp how little time we really have, until you count it like you count tangible things. “8” is not much of anything: 8 peanuts, 8 dinners, a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
It’s not a guilt trip. Just a gentle reminder to spend your finite stack of weekends and other lovely things on something (or someone) that makes you happy. Even if it’s just a lopsided pillow fort and a second cup of cocoa.
Just Because:
🔥 Four Elements Walk into a Game
Here’s a totally ridiculous browser game you didn’t know you needed: Infinite Craft. You start with just four elements - Water, Fire, Earth, and Wind - and mash them together to create new things. Lava, Ocean, Volcano... fine. But then it’s midnight and things escalate to Chicken Alien Monks and Chuck Norris Vampires, or you’re tossing Abominable Pooh into a Black Hole Tractor Beam.
It’s chaotic, clever, and completely useless in the best way. Perfect for when you want to feel like a god, a poet, and a confused child all at once.
So there you have it. Flowers were eaten, virtual universes collapsed, time got counted like peanuts, and, somehow, we all survived. That’s gotta count for something.
Be Mappy,
Mags
