Alex Mercer 
The thermometer at the trailhead read 38 degrees when I laced up last Saturday. By the time my crew and I reached the overlook two hours later, I’d stripped my shell, tied it around my waist, and was hiking in a long-sleeve top that still smelled like it came out of the drawer. Three weeks … Read more
There’s a moment every van owner knows. It’s 2 a.m., the temperature outside has dropped into the thirties, and you’re lying awake listening to the metal shell tick as it contracts — wondering why you spent nine months perfecting a kitchen and approximately zero thought on the bed. That was me last October, somewhere in … Read more
There is a moment on every good road trip when the plan dissolves and the detour takes over. Mine happened on Highway 13 in eastern Michigan, somewhere north of Bay City, when a billboard the size of a barn announced CHEESE in letters visible from what felt like another county. I was headed toward Lake … Read more
There’s a spreadsheet open on my desk right now with eleven rows in it, and every one of them is a suitcase. Not suitcases I own — suitcases I’m watching. Sometime around October 7 and 8, Amazon will run its fall Prime event, Prime Big Deal Days, and the weeks between now and then are … Read more
For eleven days in Alaska last month, my tripod and I fought a war I was losing. I’d set the timer, sprint into position on some glacial outwash plain, and capture exactly one frame of myself looking like a man interrupted mid-jog. My team’s photo editor reviewed the haul after day three and said what … Read more
Every October, the same thing happens. Somebody in the family insists on a leaf-peeping drive through New England, and somebody else ends up white-knuckling a rented crossover down the Kancamagus Highway at eleven miles an hour with a bus on the bumper, catching roughly four seconds of actual foliage through the windshield. I have been … Read more
The turn off the highway comes faster than you expect. One minute you’re sandwiched between semi trucks on the corridor down Florida’s east coast, and the next you’re rolling through White City, just inland of Fort Pierce, where the roadside turns green and heavy and the air picks up something faintly sweet. Follow it far … Read more
There is a moment, somewhere around 9:25 on the last Friday of September, when the crowd stops being a crowd. Twenty thousand people who have been drinking coffee and stamping warmth into their boots since dawn suddenly go quiet, all at once, because someone on a ridge three-quarters of a mile away has lifted a … Read more
The thermometer in my rental car read 38 degrees when I pulled into the Oconaluftee visitor center parking lot last October, and 74 by the time I found barbecue in Cherokee two hours later. That is not a complaint. That is just what September and October do in American mountain country, and every fall I … Read more
The seat was 14B, a window on the wrong side of the engine, and the man across the aisle had already decided his phone conversation outranked the rest of the cabin. That was a Tuesday in late August, somewhere over Ohio, and it was the flight that finally made me get serious about noise cancelling. … Read more