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
Las Vegas runs out of buildings about forty minutes after you leave it. The slot machines give way to Joshua trees, the radio gives way to static, and then the road tips down into Eldorado Canyon and there it is: Nelson, Nevada, population small enough that the welcome sign seems optimistic. We had loaded the … Read more
Every late September, my crew and I spread maps across the same scratched dining table and argue about October. This year the argument ended early. The vote was unanimous: Hocking Hills, the pocket of sandstone gorges an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio, that somehow still flies under the radar of leaf-season travelers who assume New … Read more
Somewhere around the second week of October, the American travel machine points itself at New England, lets the national parks empty out, and starts drafting gift guides. Death Valley National Park spends that same week quietly turning its lights back on. The Inn at Furnace Creek, dark through the worst of the heat, reopens for … Read more
There is a marble monument on a hillside in the Poconos holding the remains of a man who never once set foot in the town that carries his name. I stood in front of it last October, coffee going cold in my hand, while one of my researchers read aloud from a pamphlet she’d grabbed … Read more
There’s a number that should scare anyone planning a Salem trip this year more than any haunted house on Derby Street: October 31, 2026 falls on a Saturday. Combine that with a full month of Haunted Happenings programming — the festival runs October 1 through 31 this year — and you get the single most … 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
Three summers in a row, I drove Highway 1 through Big Sur and saw absolutely nothing. That’s not an exaggeration. The marine layer in July sits on that coast like a wet blanket someone forgot to take off — you get 400 feet of visibility, a gray Bixby Bridge, and a souvenir shop’s worth of … Read more