Hello, Mystic, Connecticut! With your clever, mysterious name and Hollywood movie pedigree, how could we resist your seaside charms? You don’t really want to base nationwide travel plans on EITHER a restaurant or a Hollywood movie, except sometimes you do exactly that. Mystic is home of Mystic Pizza, the restaurant that inspired the adorable story of three...
East Coast driving is stressful: bad roads, low bridges, insane drivers, toll booths, and more. The further we can stay away from adding packed traffic to our travels, the better to avoid this nonsense. 129 minutes to go 2.8 miles. WHAT?! Thus, leaving Delaware and heading to Connecticut, we took an extremely wide berth around the major metro areas of Philadelphia...
We were in Delaware for the first time on this trip. It’s not related to Hunter Biden’s criminal trial, which was happening just down the road while we were here. But before Delaware, we also had our first-ever visit to Maryland, where my brother Jeff and his wife Nicole joined us for the next month in their own RV. I now have three models to coerce into...
Shenandoah National Park Our bucket list has always included our country’s national parks, but it’s getting serious now: this is #43 of 51 in the lower 48 states. Hard to believe it’s been 11 years since we lost our national park virginity to Zion. Shenandoah is long and skinny, like Pete Davidson, or Abraham Lincoln during the worst days of the...
New River Gorge in West Virginia is this nation’s newest National Park, #63 to be exact, and preserved in order to protect the rugged New River below, as well as 70,000 acres of natural beauty and recreation. When built in 1977, it was the longest single-span arch bridge in the world at 3,030 feet long, but China has since built 4 bridges longer than this, so...
Our summer ’24 trail has brought us to “Trail Town USA,” also known as Damascus, Virginia, where seven — count ’em — renowned hiking trails intersect. Appalachian Trail Days Like the Pacific Crest Trail in the West, the Appalachian Trail (the “AT” to the cool kids) in the East runs north-South across the entire U.S...
We left Bardstown and all that bourbon, heading to Louisville and even more bourbon. Seriously, these people are bourbon batshit. But we were here for other things that start with B …. starting with a Beautiful Skyline! That’s the Belle of Louisville paddlewheeler in the front — you can cruise the Ohio River and go through the locks. What’s...
There’s no liquor with such a strong American identity as bourbon, and so here we are, doing our patriotic duty. Kentucky produces over 95% of the world’s bourbon, and the tiny town of Bardstown is the self-proclaimed Bourbon Capital of the World, with the highest concentration of distilleries in the state of Kentucky — 11 of ’em within 16...
Everyone knows that Nashville is the long-time capital of country music. It also seems to be the home of 90% of the bachelorette parties in the USA. Every three minutes, an open deck party bus or a pedal-powered mobile bar slides by, with drunk girls in shredded short-shorts and knee-high cowboys boots hootin’ and hollerin’ to the music, which is...
We left the tornado devastation of Sulphur, OK and drove as fast and far away as we could, meaning 325 miles to Petit Jean State Park in Arkansas. Soooo glad to be here, for sooooo many reasons. Its funny name has a romantic origin. Local legend has it that during the 18th century, the lovely Adrienne DuMont was refused the opportunity to travel with her French...