There’s a specific week in late September when I stop pretending summer is coming back. The forecast app on my phone starts showing overnight lows in the thirties for the mountain towns I like to camp in, and I pull up the average first-frost date for my zip code the way other people check football … Read more
The first time I went apple picking as an adult, I got it completely wrong. It was the second weekend of October, I’d read exactly one blog post, and I showed up to a Hudson Valley orchard at eleven in the morning expecting Honeycrisp. What I got was a parking field the size of a … Read more
The envelope sat on my desk for two weeks before I opened it. Inside: every receipt from a twelve-day assignment across Portugal and Spain, saved out of a stubborn habit my team has ribbed me about for years. My editor and I spread them across the table one Friday afternoon with a calculator and a … Read more
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
There’s a moment on every trip when the vacation haze lifts and you realize you’re hungry, not for another restaurant, but for food that tastes like somewhere. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, that moment usually arrives somewhere along Pine Island Road, the four-lane ribbon that stitches Cape Coral to the mainland and eventually to the fishing … Read more
Every September, my inbox fills with the same question from friends who should know better: “Should I finally do Munich?” And every September I give the same answer. If what you actually want is steins, brass bands, pretzels the size of hubcaps, and a crowd that polkas like it means it, you don’t need a … 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
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 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
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