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
The first time I fried a device overseas, I was twenty-three and sitting in a hostel in Florence with a hair dryer that had just made a sound like a bug zapper hitting a moth. The adapter I’d bought at an airport kiosk for twelve euros hadn’t converted the voltage — it had just changed … Read more
I’ll never forget my first real meteor shower. I was twelve, lying on a deflated air mattress in the back of my dad’s pickup truck, somewhere deep in the Oregon high desert. The sky was so thick with stars it looked like someone had spilled salt on black velvet. And then — a streak. Then … Read more
Anyone who has spent more than a few nights living out of a vehicle eventually confronts the same question: what do you do when nature calls and there is no plumbing anywhere around? It is the unglamorous side of off-grid travel that Instagram rarely covers, yet it can make or break a trip faster than … Read more
I learned the hard way that sunscreen alone doesn’t cut it. It was a 14-mile day on a section of the Arizona Trail, mid-June, and by mile 10 the back of my neck felt like a stovetop. I’d slathered on SPF 50 twice, but sweat and friction from my pack straps had stripped it down … Read more
The temperature display on my dashboard read 119°F when I pulled into a dispersed camping spot outside Tucson last July. I sat there for a full minute, engine idling, staring at that number while the steering wheel burned my palms. Three days earlier, I’d been in the mountains of Colorado sleeping under a quilt. Now … Read more
I’ve been carrying tripods on planes, trains, and rental cars for over a decade. And for most of that time, I hated every single one of them. Too heavy. Too flimsy. Too complicated. Or worst of all — the kind that looks like a real tripod but collapses the moment a coastal breeze picks up. … Read more
There’s a particular kind of panic that hits when your phone drops below 5% and you’re twelve miles into a hike with nothing but trees and questionable cell service around you. I know that panic intimately. It happened to me on the North Cascades loop last summer, and it’s exactly why I stopped treating portable … Read more
The roof of a campervan is the most contested real estate on the entire vehicle. Every square inch has to earn its keep. Solar panels need sun. Vent fans need clearance. Starlink dishes need an unobstructed view of the sky. And somehow, all of it has to coexist on a metal surface that might be … Read more
I pulled into Leadville, Colorado, at 10:152 feet above sea level, windows down, and my phone read 63 degrees. That was in the middle of July. Six hours earlier, I’d been sweating through my shirt in Denver at 97. The temperature drop didn’t make sense to my body — I’d driven straight uphill into what … Read more