Hello from sunny Miami, where it’s 90 degrees and 1,000,000% humidity. (Seamus’s fur is puffing up.) I’m spending the long weekend visiting my family and relaxing on the beach. May your Memorial Day weekend bring you lots of sunshine and sand!
Road Trips
Friday Photo: Hiking the Grand Canyon
This is what it looks like to hike down through the Grand Canyon. Rocks on one side, a sheer drop on the other, clouds below you, and a path that looks like it’s going to fade off into the enormous blue sky. The trails wind along the sides of the canyon in a snake...
Seeing the First Sunrise in the US (Or Not)
The top of Cadillac Mountain is the first place in the United States to see the sun rise during specific months of the year. I’m not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination, but I do love absolutes when traveling. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself as I stumbled around...
A Weekend Itinerary for Acadia National Park
Bar Harbor is great, but Acadia was the real reason we went to Maine. I love this national park because it offers a great mix of outdoor activities and self-driving tours (perfect for when it rains – more on that later). The views aren’t bad, either. Acadia is within the boundaries of the larger...
Summer in Review
In the history of time, has there ever been a person who complained that summer is just too long? “We really need to shorten these warm months. There’s just too much opportunity for the beach and the pool. The weather’s too nice and people are too relaxed.” No? Add me to the list of...
Dog Friendly Hikes in Acadia
As we’ve discussed many times, Seamus loves to travel. And also as we’ve discussed, he really doesn’t care for prolonged exercise. It’s not that he doesn’t try, it’s just that the world is a much larger place when your four little legs are under a foot tall. For this reason, we seek out loops, trails that...
The Beaches of Acadia National Park
If I showed you this photo out of context, where would you assume it was? Probably not Maine, right? I was surprised to see how many beaches were in Acadia National Park. Well, officially there’s only one: Sand Beach. (That name is some real, true, no-nonsense Maine straight-shooting.) The weather in this part of...
Bar Harbor, Maine
There’s one simple reason Bar Harbor has been an artistic haven for landscape painters and writers from the Hudson Valley School since the 1800s: it’s pretty. Making the trek back then was no small feat, and to be honest it still takes some dedication — nine hours’ drive from New York City. Since...
East Coast Road Trip Wrap-Up
For the past few years, I’ve been driving to northern Florida pretty regularly. (There’s one furry reason why.) I have a lot of family in Miami, so I did a similar road trip many times as a kid. It was plain tortorous at times – stuck in traffic without air conditioning in the middle of July, uphill...
Road Trip: Chattanooga, Tennessee
My uncle lived in a farmhouse outside of Chattanooga for a few years. He kept telling me that I’d love it, but he couldn’t tell me exactly why. Then my mom went to visit him, and she came back telling me that it was amazing, but couldn’t tell me exactly why. This trickled down...
Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama
Being a travel writer, I looked at Mobile, Alabama a little differently than the average visitor. It’s my job to view somewhere from all angles – not just its present, but its past and its potential future. Maybe it’s my journalism background (or maybe it’s just my stubbornness), but when people dismiss an entire...
Road Trip: A Tornado on the Mississippi Coast
I have never been in the middle of a serious tornado – for which I am endlessly grateful – yet I’ve come close on every major road trip in the past few years. This trip was no different. There was the time I very narrowly missed an 18-wheeler being tossed from its southbound lane...
Road Trip: Biloxi, Mississippi
When I arrived in Biloxi, Mississippi, the mid-afternoon sun started to give way to some ominous-looking clouds. The original plan was to explore the beach that afternoon and then visit nearby Gulfport the next morning. (That’s not exactly how it turned out, though.) As I mentioned, this was my first time in Mississippi. I...