The last airport tea I ever bought cost $6.25, and I never got to drink it hot. O’Hare, Terminal 3, a January delay stretching from forty minutes to four hours. I stood in a coffee line long enough to memorize the menu, paid airport money for what is legally just hot water and a paper … Read more
There is a particular kind of dread that arrives around 6 p.m. at a boondocking spot: you are filthy, the sun is dropping, and the only water in the van is exactly as cold as the mountain air outside. For my first two years of van life I solved this the way most people do … Read more
Twelve months ago, I did something mildly irresponsible with company money: I bought three of the cheapest hardshell luggage sets I could find, handed them to my research crew, and told them to travel like people who don’t care about their bags. Checked bags on budget carriers. Overstuffed shells dragged across cobblestone. One set even … 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
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
The last red-eye I took before figuring this out was a Newark-to-Lisbon ordeal that left me looking like I’d been air-dried in a dehydrator. I walked off the plane at 7 a.m., caught my reflection in the jet bridge window, and genuinely did not recognize the desiccated creature staring back. Ten hours in a pressurized … Read more
On November 11, 1926, a bureaucrat somewhere in Washington signed off on a number, and a legend got its name. Route 66 was commissioned that day — 2,448 miles of asphalt and gravel stitching Chicago to Los Angeles through eight states that had never before been connected quite like that. A hundred years later, almost … Read more
There is a particular kind of excitement that comes with hitching a used popup camper to your vehicle for the first time. Maybe you found a deal on Craigslist, or perhaps you are dusting off a camper that has been sitting in a driveway for two or three years. Either way, the moment you crank … Read more
When my team and I loaded up the SUV for a two-week camping circuit through Utah and Arizona last spring, I had a duffel bag full of power banks, a tangle of charging cables, and a nagging feeling it wasn’t going to be enough. Three days in, somewhere between Capitol Reef and a dirt road … Read more