The train slides out of Grand Central on the Hudson Line, and forty minutes later the river opens up wide and gray-green on the left, the Palisades throwing early shadows across the water. By the time you step off at Tarrytown, the air smells like wood smoke and wet leaves, and every lamppost on Broadway … 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
Ask ten people when to visit Door County and eight of them will say July. That’s exactly the problem. In July, Wisconsin’s Thumb — that 75-mile peninsula pinched between Green Bay and Lake Michigan — belongs to everyone from Chicago, and the line at the fish boil stretches past the picnic tables. By the second … Read more
The first real cold front of September rolled through on a Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning the goldenrod field behind the farm stand looked like someone had shaken out a quilt full of embers. Monarchs — dozens of them, then hundreds — dropping out of the trees as the sun climbed, spiraling up on … Read more
Every August, something shifts in upstate New York. The humidity breaks just enough to remind you that summer doesn’t last forever, and the grapevines strung across the hillsides around Keuka, Seneca, and Cayuga lakes start heavy with fruit. I’ve timed visits to wine regions across three continents — Mendoza, the Douro Valley, Stellenbosch — and … 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
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