Travel Excitement From Sharks To Grizzlies, With Travel Pro Angie Orth

We sit down with travel expert Angie Orth, host of Traveling with AAA and founder of AngieAway.com, to talk about the kind of travel that feels vivid and real: big bucket list wins, smart planning, and what to do when the “easy route” disappears overnight.

Angie takes us from a Maldives liveaboard dive retreat with whale sharks and tiger sharks to the moment war-related airspace closures strand travelers and force a costly, creative path home. Along the way, we dig into practical travel advice that actually matters, like staying flexible, knowing alternate flight routes, and budgeting for disruption so you can make decisions fast instead of panicking.

We also swap destination stories and grounded tips: Bahamas island hopping in Exuma with wildlife you would not expect, Egypt travel and why a guide can make culture shock feel like discovery, and a quick-hit Las Vegas trip built around the Sphere and great food. Plus, there is Costa Rica dental tourism, a brutal bullet ant bite, a Natchez Trace Parkway road trip warning about national park speeding tickets, Finger Lakes wine on a budget, Kauai hiking reality checks, and an Alaska finale featuring northern lights and grizzlies. 

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Angie Orth describes herself as a tour guide for global shenanigans, worldwide wanderlust, and misadventures near and far. 

Podcast host Lea Lane has traveled to over 100 countries, and has written nine books, including the award-winning Places I Remember  (Kirkus Reviews star rating, and  'one of the top 100 Indie books of  the year'). She has contributed to dozens of guidebooks and has written thousands of travel articles. Read her weekly essays on Substack.
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Our award-winning travel podcast, Places I Remember with Lea Lane, has produced over 130 travel episodes! New episodes drop on the first Tuesday of the month, on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. All episodes are also on her website: placesirememberlealane.com
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Travel vlogs of featured  podcasts-- with video and graphics -- now also drop on YouTube.  

Transcript

Welcome And What To Expect

Lea Lane 0:02

On this episode, we'll be sharing travel tips and travel tales with Angie Orth, host of Traveling with AAA and the founder of one of the longest-running travel sites, AngieAway.com. She'll be talking about her favorite journeys and destinations and offering us some of her favorite practical travel advice. Welcome, Angie, to Places I Remember.

Angie Orth 0:22

Thank you so much for having me, Lea. This is going to be really fun because I just like talking about travel. And I know you do too. So we're in the right field for us, aren't we?

Lea Lane 0:31

Right field. Now you describe yourself as a tour guide for global shenanigans, worldwide wanderlusts, and misadventures near and far. You're my kind of gal. Yeah. What do you mean by that?

Angie Orth 0:44

Well, you know as much as I try to avoid drama and I'm extremely prepared and I feel like I know all the tips and I have all the experience, somehow the drama finds me. The shenanigans find me always. And I try to avoid it, like I said. And yet, the moment I step out and go take another trip, I get stuck somewhere, or something crazy and unprecedented happens. So at this point, I pretty much just take it as it comes and expect it. But yeah, somehow it s things, crazy things do seem to follow.

Lea Lane 1:30

Now, when did you start traveling? I know you were in journalism PR and digital media.

Angie Orth 1:35

So the first big international trip I took was in 10th grade, 11th grade, with my history teacher and some kids from school. And we went to London and we did all the touristy things, and I was just about it. Like we went to Madame Tussaud's, and I thought that was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. And it was just the start

How Angie Built A Travel Life

Angie Orth 1:56

of me being able to see something beyond kind of my bubble, my hometown. And I was like, I want that. I want to be everywhere else all the time for the rest of my life. And I didn't know how to do it. I definitely had no idea what jobs were available. I just really, it was confusing. And so I kind of built my life leaning toward travel. And it was always me saving money to travel, finding ways to hack points and miles to travel. And so that it just was my kind of priority and like the string that connected everything in my life down to when I moved to New York and worked at a PR agency. I was on the travel team. So I was promoting travel to journalists all the time. And I did that for about five years at that agency. And eventually blogs were starting. No one was getting paid for it. It was a new medium. It was a new, like, what are we going to do with this? And so I started working with some bloggers. And eventually I have a blog. I write about travel. I know what I'm doing. I know what destinations want. I know what PR people want. Like I, because I've touched all those buckets, right? I said, I'm going to quit my job and go take a relaxing year around the world. And I'm just going to rest. I'm just going to like figure out what I want. And I did not rest because I turned it into a job. And eventually it's what I do now. And I turned it into a book and a blog and TV and so many things. So taking that risk was really great. But at the end of the day, it's just all about travel.

Lea Lane 3:24

Right. I love the name of one of your podcasts. But Did You Die? Is that related to travel experience?

Angie Orth 3:30

Yes, it is. That very much has to do with my year abroad in 2011.

Lea Lane 3:35

Your book, Flirting with Disaster. You just love all this excitement. It's going to be fun to hear about some of your favorite destinations and some of your tips. So let's start. How about the Maldives?

Angie Orth 3:45

That was my most recent big trip. I went on a wander women retreat with a friend of mine who runs this amazing women's retreat company, and she chartered a live aboard dive boat, so scuba spa. So it's all scuba and all spa. Two of my very most favorite things. It was incredible. It was one of the best trips I've had in a long, long time. I went by myself solo, of course, meeting friends

Maldives Diving And Getting Stranded

Angie Orth 4:10

there, but every single day was one or two or three bucket lists. We hopped off the back of the boat one night and swam with four whale sharks in the dark in the Indian Ocean. And as I was doing it, I was like, this is absurd. Who gets to do this? Who's so lucky to have four whale sharks swimming up from the deep at night? It was just amazing. And then we did a tiger shark dive, which was top of my bucket list. I love sharks. It got my heart pumping a little more than the usual dive. Absolutely.

Lea Lane 4:39

But when you went home, what happened there?

Angie Orth 4:41

Yeah. So the day I was scheduled to fly home through Qatar is the day that the war started. All airspace was closed through the Middle East, which is the main way to get to and from the Maldives. So everybody in the Maldives was stranded. Nobody had anywhere to stay. It was sort of a big what do we do now? Nobody knows. Also, it's not a very cheap destination. Okay, so am I going to spend $1,000 a night for an indeterminate amount of time, or am I going to spend $5,000 to get on any flight I can get on to go home? So eventually I ended up spending an exorbitant amount of money to fly home the other direction because there was no going west. I could only go east. So Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai. Eventually I got home.

Lea Lane 5:24

That's what happens in travel. You never know. You have the wonderful experience, and then you have something like go with the flow. Yep. How about the Bahamas? Tell us about some of the more interesting islands you've been to.

Angie Orth 5:35

I love the Bahamas. That was one of my accounts that I represented when I worked in PR in New York. So I've been to over 700 islands in the Bahamas. Maybe 25, 26 of them are inhabited. And I've been to almost all of the inhabited ones, which most people, even in the Bahamas, never get to do all that. It's not exactly easy to get from island to island. It's not

Bahamas Island Hopping And Wildlife

Angie Orth 5:57

a super easy island hopping destination because it's really spread out. They're quite far apart and it covers a ton of ground. But I love Exuma. Exuma is a spectacular destination. It's the first place I ever took journalists on a press trip. And again, I'm sitting there on a boat. The pigs are swimming. There's iguanas, and I'm just like, this is the best job in the world. So fun. There's 365 islands in the Exuma Keys. So you can fly into the main one and then island hop or rent a boat, charter with a tour company, and just see so many animals. That's where you can go pet the friendly nurse sharks of Compass Key and swim with the pigs and Staniel Key. So it was absolutely wild.

Lea Lane 6:38

Close by Galapagos. People don't think of animals so much with the Bahamas, but they're like, it's definitely got Galapagos vibes. So how about Egypt? Tell us about your travel there.

Angie Orth 6:49

So that was one of the destinations on my round-the-world trip in 2011 that I mentioned. And of course, it was a couple months after the Arab Spring happened. And so it was a real test. My whole thing with that year was like, if I don't do it now, I might not get the chance to do it. You know, like I'm out here, I'm in the world, I'm untethered from work and I don't have a relationship. So this is my year to go do the crazy things.

Egypt After Arab Spring And Guides

Angie Orth 7:13

So I solo traveled most of the year. But for Egypt, especially after the Arab Spring, I was like, I feel like this will be a good time to hop on a group tour. And it was so much fun. It was busy. I want to say that I saw the sunrise and the sunset every day for 14 days. So it was really burning the candle at both ends. But Egypt had so much to offer, and I very much appreciated having a guide that could just tell me everything every day because it's a lot to absorb. 10,000 years of history.

Lea Lane 7:42

Egypt is one of those places where I would suggest a guide. There are yeah, the people are friendly, but they they come up to you with asking for bakshish. Yeah. One story I have, I was bothered by a lot of people. I was on my own. This was many years ago. Very lovely man came over dressed in a suit and he said, Let me help you with this. You know, go away, all you guys. Don't keep asking for for bakshish. And he took me to my hotel and I was so grateful. And then he said, Okay, he put out his palm, bakshish. But at least he got me through.

Angie Orth 8:13

It's definitely a different culture. And we just had Rick Steves on the podcast a few weeks ago, and we were talking about how culture shock is the point of travel. It's not something to worry about or be upset about or complain about. It's literally the point. And so when we go to places that are just so different, they're different countries have different takes on personal space, on so many things, on men versus women. On I was in Istanbul and I I had to move because they had me next to a man and I wasn't allowed to sit next to a man. So little things like that you just never think about, and every single day is full of that, depending on what country you go to. Every day is full of it. That is something to value and make note of.

Lea Lane 8:59

Be prepared a little bit if you do your research, it helps because then you would know. A guide would be useful, that kind of thing. Okay, let's go closer to home, Las Vegas. What have you seen there lately?

Angie Orth 9:09

I just got back from Vegas two days ago. I went with my husband and my brother to see No Doubts Residency at the Sphere. I had never been to the Sphere. This is my first time in Vegas since it opened. And we also went to see the Wizard of Oz concert. Incredible. So we saw the concert, which was amazing, totally cool way to experience a band that you've maybe seen before, but just

Las Vegas Sphere Shows And Food

Angie Orth 9:31

the graphics, it's so immersive, it's just so in your face, really fun, high energy. And then Wizard of Oz. We didn't plan to go to it. We got tickets kind of at the last minute, right? The movie. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's like a cut-down version. It's only 75 minutes, but there's interactive elements, there's stuff flying at you. The tornado moment in Kansas, I was just wow, the whole time. There's stuff flying all around you, the largest spherical structure in the world.

Lea Lane 9:59

Wow, I didn't know that. I know in Las Vegas there are lots of interesting things to do that maybe some of us won't think of automatically, like the mob museum. I don't know if you've been there.

Angie Orth 10:09

Yeah, it's on my list.

Lea Lane 10:10

That one's on my list. And uh also the neon museum where they put all the old neon signs, and there's you know, ziplining down the main streets and so forth. It isn't only uh shows and such.

Angie Orth 10:21

The hardest part I had was we really only had 48 full hours on the ground. Where do you even start? You know, so we did some new things, they did some old things, we ate great food. That was a big priority. We ate at the Caesars Buffet, Bacchanal, ridiculous. And then we ate at Jose Andres' Bizarre Meats at the Palazzo, and that was steaky, beefy goodness.

Lea Lane 10:42

You can go high, you can go low. There's lots and lots of wonderful food every level. Yeah, it really is. How about Costa Rica? What happened to you there?

Angie Orth 10:51

So my husband and I have gotten into going to Costa Rica for dental work because we discovered that we can have a week-long vacation and get dental work done for the same price as tourism, right? And it's great dental care too. You know, everything we've had done has held up and they've been so friendly. So yeah, we've seen all different areas. We've we've hiked, we've repelled down waterfalls, we went fishing

Costa Rica Dental Trips And Bullet Ant

Angie Orth 11:16

for rooster fish, which is not really my vibe, but my husband loves fishing, so we went and caught his bucket list fish. A rooster fish? The rooster fish, yes, very popular in Costa Rica, and it's just it's got big spines on it. So it's very, it's very dramatic fish. I was sick the entire day, so not really my favorite excursion, but he loved it. He had a great time. So one time we're hiking in the jungle near Arnall, near the volcano. We just finished propelling down all these waterfalls, and we're like hiking up literally the last hill to the parking lot. I can see the bus. So I'm climbing up. I put my hand on the rope to drag myself along. And my husband said he heard this chomp, and I thought I was bitten by a snake because of how painful it was. And there are snakes, of course, all in the jungle that you don't want to be bitten by. It turns out it was a bullet ant, which is a giant, horrible ant that can bite you and sting you at the same time. And it's known as the most painful animal sting in the world. And it was. I mean, I haven't been stung by everything, but I've, you know, waspies, other ants. This hurt so bad. I was immediately crying, but I also thought I was gonna die because I thought it was a snake. Once I asked the guide, Am I gonna die? And he's like, actually, no. As far as things to get bitten by in Costa Rica, it hurts the worst, but no lasting damage.

Lea Lane 12:41

So I was bit by ants once in Bali at a very interesting time. I was at a cremation ceremony, and I'm standing in the back, and they give you a sarong to put around your waist, standing there very respectfully while this lovely uh ceremony was going on. I was very quiet. All of a sudden, these fire ants started crawling up my legs, and I tried to be quiet and not do anything to not upset the ceremony. However, after a while I couldn't stop, so I started hopping around and jumping, and I looked like I was dancing, and everybody thought I was doing something, you know, crazy woman turned and watched me as I'm suffering there, and I didn't know what to do. It was just one of the most awful things because it hurt and I didn't want to disrupt anything. So that was my aunt story, and it wasn't a good one either, but it was a cultural experience, I will say.

Angie Orth 13:38

Very on-brand. I like that. What a time to be attacked by ants.

Lea Lane 13:42

It is how about again, let's come closer in Tennessee. There's some road trips that are very interesting. I know you've taken one of them.

Angie Orth 13:51

Yes, yes, yes. So there is a road trip, it's called the Natchez Chase Parkway, and it is one of America's oldest travel corridors. So the Native Americans used to use it. It was a trade route at some point. Lewis and Clark were on it at one point. In fact, Meriwether Lewis is buried along it. So it's 440

Natchez Trace Parkway Road Trip Tips

Angie Orth 14:09

miles from Natchez, Mississippi, up to almost Nashville, Tennessee. And it doesn't actually take that long to do, but if you just spend an hour or two or three a day driving, you can really absorb a lot of history. It's part of the National Park Service. So here's my tip there don't speed because national park speeding tickets are much more expensive than your regular speeding tickets. So don't speed on the parkway.

Lea Lane 14:35

Good to know. I know there are many wonderful road trips in the south. I've taken a couple. One is on in Mississippi. You follow the civil rights trail along in the southern part of Mississippi and the cotton area, and also the blues. There's a wonderful.

Angie Orth 14:50

That's a great trail.

Lea Lane 14:52

And in Virginia and Tennessee, there's the Crooked Road. It's all musical related. People who are making fiddles and they're musicians, and it's just a wonderful area of bluegrass. It's a fascinating trip to do. It's beautiful as well. It goes along the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but I'm on the Crooked Road in Virginia. Now I'm in the Finger Lakes district of New York right now, and I know you've been there too, and I love it. It's very special. Tell us about it.

Angie Orth 15:20

Well, what I love about the Finger Lakes, it's a budget-friendly place to do wine tasting and winery hopping when you compare it to the more popular wine regions in California. You're going to spend a fortune hopping around in Napa, but it's much more budget-friendly in Finger Lakes. So if you've already done some of the top ones, but you're still thinking, okay, the U.S. actually has a lot of more hidden

Finger Lakes Wine And Waterfalls

Angie Orth 15:43

wine regions. Finger Lakes is such a good one. So many cute places to stay. There's so many lakes. There's the Corning Museum of Glass that is wonderful. You can make your own glass sculptures there with no experience. Um, it's just a really nice place, and the food is so good because it's an agricultural region that's farm to table everything, and it's amazing.

Lea Lane 16:05

Charming towns. You feel like you're back in the 1950s or some time that isn't you know full of needles and chains, and it's just there's waterfalls all over here. It's an area that the ice age came through and left these gorges. So I would recommend going to Watkins Glen, which is 19 waterfalls in one area, it's magical. Stunning is Letchworth State Park, which has major waterfalls on the Genesee River. Western New York is filled with these great, great waterfalls. So I highly recommend it as you do as a special place. And if you like wine, I think the wine's really good here. It's gotten much, much better over the years.

Angie Orth 16:40

It's what sold me on Riesling. And now, if I find a Fingerlakes Riesling on a menu anywhere, I have to get it. Once you drink it from the winery at the winery, it becomes your little special wine.

Lea Lane 16:52

And let's go to Hawaii.

Angie Orth 16:54

So I've been to Kauai in particular lots of times because my uncle lives there. So every four years, I would go starting after I graduated from college, I would go visit him and just explore. And one year I took my brother and we stayed for six weeks. We just lived and we just went to the beach every day. And it was the most wonderful existence. I love that island. It's the garden island, it's the least developed of all the Hawaiian islands,

Kauai Beauty And A Risky Hike

Angie Orth 17:20

and it's just so jungly and waterfalls are everywhere, and there are just rainbows everywhere you look. It's spectacular. The one thing I don't ever want to do again is the Hanakapi Falls hike. It's a part, it's just a snippet of the even bigger, even more difficult Kalalau trail hike, which I am absolutely never trying. That one is overnight. You got to bring in all your stuff. I'm not that girl. But I have done the Hanukkah Falls hike several times. I swear it gets harder every time, probably because I'm getting older. So everything's getting harder when it comes to physical stuff. You hike four miles, two miles down the coast, two miles into this spectacular waterfall, and you can swim in the bottom of it. And it's just magical because there's not that many people there. And it's slippery, it's very rocky. This is not just a walk. This is up, down, up, down, huge drops that you absolutely do not want to slip and fall. So definitely one to be cautious of.

Lea Lane 18:16

What a good tip to think about that when you're planning a hike, whether it's medium, hard, or simple, yes. Getting types of shoes and whether you want to start it. I think a lot of people I know hike and don't realize it's harder than they expected. So good tip. Well, the name of the podcast is Places I Remember, and we usually feature one travel story. You've given us several, but how about a favorite of yours?

Angie Orth 18:41

A favorite of mine is Alaska. My husband and I went in September, which was just the end of tourist season. The weather was still nice and the moose were still out, and the bears were still out. So we really got a taste of everything and just no summer crowds. I loved it so much. We chased the northern lights. We landed in Fairbanks. We stayed at the most incredible hotel,

Alaska Northern Lights And Bears

Angie Orth 19:04

the Borealis Base Camp, which has the domes that you lay in your bed and you watch the Northern Lights at night. And we spent three nights there and did not see anything. It was cloudy, but the hotel was spectacular and the food was great, and we did so many other things. And then the next night, when we drove down to Denali, we got a phone call from the front desk that was like, the lights are out. So we drove to an empty parking lot and stood outside and looked at the lights. It was amazing. So worth it. Not overhyped.

Lea Lane 19:31

Fairbanks is one of the greatest places to see the northern lights. There's something about the ozone or something there. I know that that's a little area where you can almost always depend on it if it isn't all altogether cloudy. They're purple. Did you get purple ones as well as green? I think it depends on the atmosphere.

Angie Orth 19:49

Yeah. We took a plane from Anchorage to Lake Clark National Park, which you cannot drive to. You can only get in by plane, landed on the lake, and then drove around in a pontoon boat all day looking for grizzly bears. And we saw 22. And they were just eating salmon and being huge and not caring that we were there at all. Oh, it was so magical. And I'm pretty sure it was freezing, but I didn't even know because I was just so pumped. My whole camera roll is bears. You like bears and sharks, and I love that. I don't have the gene where you should be afraid of predators. I'm just like, look at all these great predators. Let's go visit the alligators and the crocodiles. Like I love big animals. So we saw tons of moose. We saw caribou. I mean, we saw everything you could want to see. And we drove around Denali National Park because it was the end of tourist season, the buses weren't running. So this is this very limited window when you can drive yourself up to a certain point. And so we just had free reign to drive around Denali all day. And it was, I can't even begin to say how wonderful Denali is. I think about it every day. It's just Alaska in general. I just can't even complain about anything. It was so spectacular. We landed on a glacier in Denali, which was insane. You're just up there. It's so quiet, it's so clean. There's just snow. I'm from Florida. So snow to me is always a miraculous, exciting thing. Are you? Yeah, nobody gets more excited about snow than a Floridian. So I'm just cheesing it up, throwing snow in the air, having the best time. But just all together, that was one of our most favorite trips. And I think about going back to Alaska and Hawaii probably every day. I'm never not looking for flight deals and figuring out how to use my miles to just sneak over there.

Lea Lane 21:44

And they're just lovely little towns. I remember there's a little town Talkitna. And uh I met the mayor, this was way back in 2016. I met the mayor of Talkina, and the mayor is an Orange Manx cat. When I met him, he was at 19, and he had been mayor since 1997. It was a write-in vote, and his uh ideas were a nap and no drama, and he was a very successful mayor. But this is charming, it's one of the ideas of Alaska's. You get charm as well, you get small towns, you get this kind of thing where you can have a cat as the mayor.

Angie Orth 22:19

Yes, it's so charming and quirky. And I love that platform actually, naps and no drama, you said like yes. I love that.

Lea Lane 22:27

It worked anyway. It was great fun sharing your stories. Thanks again, Angie Orth, host of Traveling with Triple A and founder of AngieAway.com. Keep on enjoying the world and letting us know about it. And I hope to see you somewhere in the world having fun.

Angie Orth 22:44

Thank you so much for having me. This has been a blast from the past, and now I have to go look at flights again.