Here’s a number that stopped me cold while planning our first cruise last winter: 37.2 million. That’s how many people sailed in 2025, a record according to CLIA’s State of the Cruise Industry report, up from 34.6 million the year before. The trade group projects 42 million of us a year by 2028, spread across … Read more
The first time fall genuinely ambushed me, I was a mile below a Blue Ridge overlook with twenty minutes of usable light left and a headlamp that had been in my pack, untouched, since spring. It clicked on at quarter power, blinked its little death pulse twice, and quit somewhere around the second switchback. I … Read more
There is a specific sound a knee makes when it decides it is done cooperating, and I heard mine make it last October, about 400 vertical feet above the parking lot at the bottom of a gorge trail. Wet maple leaves had glued themselves to granite slabs. My shoes were fine. My balance was fine. … Read more
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
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
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
The bugle started as a whistle somewhere back in the timber, thin and almost electronic, like a kazoo played through a pipe organ. Then it broke open into a ragged scream that rolled across the sagebrush and hit me square in the chest. I was standing on the shoulder of a gravel road in the … Read more
When I started planning my second campervan build, I did what every earnest DIYer does: I taped butcher paper across the garage wall and drew the layout I’d been imagining for two years. Bed platform here. Garage storage there. A kitchen galley with just enough counter for a camp stove and a cutting board. My … Read more
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