Alex Mercer 
On November 11, 1926, a bureaucrat somewhere in Washington signed off on a number, and a legend got its name. Route 66 was commissioned that day — 2,448 miles of asphalt and gravel stitching Chicago to Los Angeles through eight states that had never before been connected quite like that. A hundred years later, almost … Read more
Some numbers refuse to compute until you’re standing in front of them. Nine million gallons of water an hour is one of those numbers. That’s how much pours out of Mammoth Spring, the second-largest spring in the Ozarks, every sixty minutes — enough to fill the Spring River, stock it with impatient rainbow trout, keep … Read more
Every October, something quietly absurd happens about forty miles south of Rochester. A river that spent ten thousand years carving a 600-foot canyon through western New York gets framed by a few million maple, oak, and birch trees that all decide to ignite at the same time — and somehow, most of the country still … Read more
The first hard freeze of last October caught me in the Sawtooth Valley with a water bottle frozen solid on the shelf above my head and frost furring the inside of my own windshield. Not the outside — the inside. Every breath I’d exhaled overnight had condensed on the cold glass and crystallized. I scraped … Read more
Every August, without fail, my inbox starts filling up with the same question from friends and readers: when should I book my fall trip? And every August, I give the same answer — wait for the forecast. This year we didn’t have to wait long. The Old Farmer’s Almanac just released its 2026 fall foliage … Read more
There’s a moment on every flight where the wheels leave the pavement and the whole world rearranges itself. The road trip you planned in two dimensions becomes a map you’re living inside of, and the $100 hamburger — the pilot’s beloved excuse for flying somewhere just to eat — stops being an aviation inside joke … Read more
I smelled Hot Springs before I saw it. Rolling into town on a September evening, the windows down and the Ouachita Mountains turning the color of bruised plums behind me, there was sulfur in the air — faint, mineral, not unpleasant once you stop thinking about it. My itinerary had this stop penciled in as … Read more
There is a specific kind of panic that hits when you unzip a garment bag in a hotel room ninety minutes before a wedding and find your blazer wrinkled like a raisin. I experienced it in full last June, standing in a Courtyard Marriott outside Asheville with my dress shirt looking like it had lost … Read more
The sizer at Gate B14 in Denver has a way of settling arguments. The Frontier agent didn’t raise her voice, didn’t threaten, didn’t even sigh. She just pointed at the welded steel box bolted to the counter, the one stamped 14″ x 18″ x 8″, and waited. My nominally compliant duffel went in wheels-first and … Read more
There’s a moment on the Cabot Trail, somewhere between the 40th and 50th lookoff of the day, when you stop reaching for your camera. Not because the views get worse — because your arms give out. This is the road Nova Scotians have been quietly bragging about for a century, a 185-mile loop around the … Read more