The forecast app on my phone flipped this week. Where it used to say rain, it now says snow possible above 6,000 feet, and that is my annual cue — earlier than most people’s — to rebuild the winter kit that lives behind the driver’s seat of whatever I’m driving. Mid-October sounds paranoid if you … Read more
There’s a moment on US-385, somewhere south of Marathon, Texas, when the last radio station collapses into static and the road ahead just… keeps going. No billboard, no gas station, no cell bars. Just asphalt stitched across a desert that looks genuinely empty until you learn how to read it. That’s the drive into Big … Read more
By the last week of October, most of the country’s leaf-chasing apparatus has packed up and gone home. New England is brown. Michigan’s Tunnel of Trees has dropped its curtain. The aspen ladders of Colorado are bare sticks above twelve thousand feet. And that is precisely when I load the truck and point it toward … 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
Some drives earn their keep with mileage. The loop out of Stuart, Florida — across the St. Lucie River, over the Sewall’s Point peninsula, up the spine of Hutchinson Island, and back to the mainland at Jensen Beach — barely covers a dozen miles of actual road. You could finish it in half an hour … Read more
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
There is a moment on every good road trip when the plan dissolves and the detour takes over. Mine happened on Highway 13 in eastern Michigan, somewhere north of Bay City, when a billboard the size of a barn announced CHEESE in letters visible from what felt like another county. I was headed toward Lake … Read more
The turn off the highway comes faster than you expect. One minute you’re sandwiched between semi trucks on the corridor down Florida’s east coast, and the next you’re rolling through White City, just inland of Fort Pierce, where the roadside turns green and heavy and the air picks up something faintly sweet. Follow it far … Read more
Every cross-country driver eventually has to deal with St. Louis. You can skirt it on the outer ring, sure, but if your route puts you anywhere near the middle of the country, odds are you’ll thread the needle where the Mississippi bends west and the Gateway Arch rises out of the riverfront like a silver … 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