Most visitors experience Florida through a rental car window, shuttling between theme parks and beachfront hotels. But there’s an entirely different Florida that most travelers never see — one that unfolds at six knots along the Intracoastal Waterway, through mangrove tunnels, past barrier islands, and into sleepy waterfront towns where the fish is hours fresh … Read more
There’s a stretch of highway in northern New Mexico where the sky does something unfair. It starts out the regular blue you get everywhere else in America, and then somewhere around Questa — elevation 7,400 feet — it deepens into a shade of turquoise that doesn’t quite look real. I had to pull over and … Read more
Most travelers touch down at Southwest Florida International Airport, grab their rental car, and gun it straight for Sanibel Island or Fort Myers Beach without so much as a backward glance. It’s understandable — the Gulf Coast pulls hard when you’ve been dreaming about white sand and warm water through a long northern winter. But … Read more
Pine Island, Florida doesn’t try to impress you. There are no high-rise condos crowding the shoreline, no traffic lights backing up onto the interstate, no chain restaurants masquerading as local flavor. What exists here instead is something increasingly rare on Florida’s Gulf Coast: a working fishing community where the dockside bars serve grouper caught that … Read more
There’s a moment in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley when the light turns molten around 6:45 on a late September morning. The grass has gone amber, a thin crust of frost crackes under your boots, and somewhere in the timber a bull elk lets loose a sound that starts in his chest, climbs into a high trembling … Read more
I’ve stood in a lot of places that claim to have it all. Most of them are lying. But Olympic National Park? It might be the only spot in North America where you can walk through a temperate rainforest in the morning, stand on a glacier-carved ridge after lunch, and watch the sun melt into … Read more
Every year, somewhere around late September, my phone starts buzzing. Friends, coworkers, distant acquaintances — they all want the same thing. “When’s peak?” “Where should I go?” “Is it worth the drive?” After three consecutive Octobers spent running the full length of the Blue Ridge Parkway with my team, I’ve stopped guessing. I have a … Read more
Florida’s Atlantic coast holds a treasure that most guidebooks gloss over in their rush to push travelers toward Miami or Daytona. Jacksonville Beach sits quietly at the northeastern edge of the Sunshine State, where the St. Johns River meets the Atlantic Ocean, offering nearly 22 miles of wide, sandy shoreline that never feels suffocating the … Read more
There’s a stretch of late August that feels like someone handed you a VIP pass to the entire country. The families have gone home. The college kids are back on campus. And somehow — miraculously — the weather hasn’t gotten the memo that summer is ending. I stumbled into this window by accident three years … Read more
I’ve been to twelve state fairs in the last three years. Not because I set out to collect them like passport stamps, but because somewhere between my second corn dog and my first deep-fried Oreos, I realized that nothing captures the strange, beautiful, deeply American summer experience quite like a state fair. My team and … Read more