There’s a moment on Minnesota’s Highway 61 — somewhere past Two Harbors, when the birch trees thin out and the lake opens up on your left like an inland sea — where you stop checking your phone. Not because you lost signal (though you will). Because there’s nothing on a screen that competes with 31,000 … Read more
There’s a moment on the Million Dollar Highway where your passenger goes quiet, your knuckles tighten on the steering wheel, and the road ahead seems to carve itself into the face of a cliff that drops hundreds of feet into nothing. I’ve driven a lot of roads in this country — the Blue Ridge, the … Read more
I never thought I’d be the person who travels with a blender. For years, my road trip nutrition strategy was whatever gas station protein bars I could grab between stops, supplemented by the occasional sad airport salad. But after three weeks crisscrossing the Southwest last summer — hiking in Zion, climbing around Sedona, sleeping in … Read more
There’s a stretch of highway in northern New Mexico where the sky does something unfair. It starts out the regular blue you get everywhere else in America, and then somewhere around Questa — elevation 7,400 feet — it deepens into a shade of turquoise that doesn’t quite look real. I had to pull over and … 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
I’ve been to twelve state fairs in the last three years. Not because I set out to collect them like passport stamps, but because somewhere between my second corn dog and my first deep-fried Oreos, I realized that nothing captures the strange, beautiful, deeply American summer experience quite like a state fair. My team and … Read more
I almost didn’t write this. My team had been pushing me to cover the usual suspects — Cape Cod, Nantucket, Bar Harbor — but after three weeks of researching overcrowded New England beach towns where you’ll pay $400 a night to hear your neighbor’s kids through thin motel walls, I needed something different. I pulled … Read more
The first time I got caught in a desert monsoon, I thought the world was ending. I was hiking outside Tucson in 108-degree heat when the sky turned the color of a bruised plum. Wind hit me so hard I staggered sideways. Ten minutes later, rain came in sheets so thick I couldn’t see the … Read more
I’m standing at the base of Mount Marathon in Seward, Alaska, watching people sprint up a mountain that most sane humans would prefer to climb slowly. It’s the Fourth of July, and this grueling 3.5-mile race — straight up 3,022 feet of scree, shale, and suffering, then straight back down — has been a Kenai … Read more
If you blink crossing the bridge from the mainland onto Pine Island, you’ll miss it. But that would be a mistake. Matlacha, Florida — pronounced “mat-la-SHAY” — occupies a sliver of land so narrow that the Gulf of Mexico laps at one side of the road while the back bay bleeds into the other. It … Read more