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
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
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
There’s a spreadsheet open on my desk right now with eleven rows in it, and every one of them is a suitcase. Not suitcases I own — suitcases I’m watching. Sometime around October 7 and 8, Amazon will run its fall Prime event, Prime Big Deal Days, and the weeks between now and then are … Read more
Every October, the same thing happens. Somebody in the family insists on a leaf-peeping drive through New England, and somebody else ends up white-knuckling a rented crossover down the Kancamagus Highway at eleven miles an hour with a bus on the bumper, catching roughly four seconds of actual foliage through the windshield. I have been … Read more
There is a moment, somewhere around 9:25 on the last Friday of September, when the crowd stops being a crowd. Twenty thousand people who have been drinking coffee and stamping warmth into their boots since dawn suddenly go quiet, all at once, because someone on a ridge three-quarters of a mile away has lifted a … 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 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
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