17 trips across 11 states and regions — 13 visited and 4 on the calendar. Cities, coastlines, national parks, and ski towns.
November 21, 2026
Illinois, USA · The Loop & lakefront
Chicago is the great city of the American interior — the third-largest in the country, built where the Great Lakes meet the prairie and the rivers that carried commerce west. After…
December 28, 2026
California / Nevada, USA · Lake Tahoe
Ringing in the new year up in the Sierra — five nights at the lake from December 28 through January 2. Tahoe in winter is a different place from the summer lake: the surrounding pe…
April 10, 2027
District of Columbia, USA · The National Mall
Washington, D.C. was purpose-built to be a capital — a diamond of land ceded by Maryland and Virginia in 1790, laid out on a grand plan of diagonal avenues and open vistas by the F…
May 29, 2027
California, USA · Monterey Peninsula
The Monterey Peninsula is where California's history began: Monterey was the capital of Alta California under both Spain and Mexico, and California's first constitution was signed…
April 20, 2025
Lazio · Lombardy · Campania, Italy · Rome · Milan · the Amalfi Coast
Italy is where so much of the Western world was invented — Rome's empire, Latin, Roman law and roads, and then, a thousand years later, the Renaissance that remade art and science.…
April 1, 2024
Honshū, Japan · Tokyo · Kyoto · the golden route
Japan is an archipelago of 14,000 islands off the Pacific coast of Asia, home to 125 million people and one of the world's oldest continuous cultures — an unbroken imperial line tr…
June 1, 2023
Île-de-France · Loire Valley · Normandy, France · Paris · Versailles · the châteaux · Mont-Saint-Michel
France has shaped the Western world out of all proportion to its size — its revolution gave the modern age its ideals of liberty and equality, its language was the tongue of diplom…
September 1, 2022
Catalonia · Andalusia · Madrid, Spain · Barcelona · Madrid · the south
Spain sits at the crossroads of Europe and Africa, and its history shows it — Roman Hispania, then nearly eight centuries of Moorish rule that left the Alhambra and a golden age of…
June 1, 2025
Alaska, USA · Denali & the Interior
Alaska is America on a scale that's hard to take in — a fifth the size of the entire Lower 48, with the continent's highest mountains, biggest glaciers, and most wildlife, and fewe…
May 24, 2024
Arizona, USA · South Rim
The Grand Canyon is a mile deep, up to 18 miles across, and 277 river-miles long — carved by the Colorado River over the last five to six million years through rock nearly two bill…
July 3, 2023
California, USA · Lake Tahoe backcountry
Desolation Wilderness is 63,000 acres of glacier-scoured granite and alpine lakes just west of Lake Tahoe — one of the most heavily used wilderness areas in the country for its siz…
August 14, 2022
California, USA · Point Reyes National Seashore
Point Reyes is a rugged, triangular peninsula an hour north of San Francisco — and it's technically not part of the same continent as the mainland. It rides on the Pacific Plate, s…
July 8, 2022
California, USA · Ventana Wilderness & Highway 1
Big Sur is the 90-mile stretch of California coast where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise straight out of the Pacific — the most dramatic meeting of land and sea in the country. The…
December 23, 2019
California / Nevada, USA · North & West Shore
Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America and, at 1,645 feet, the second-deepest lake in the United States — deep enough that it never freezes. It formed in a fault ba…
August 2, 2018
Hawaii, USA · The Valley Isle
Maui is the second-largest of the Hawaiian Islands, born of two volcanoes whose lava flows joined into a single "valley isle." Polynesian voyagers reached it more than a thousand y…
March 1, 2017
California / Nevada, USA · Death Valley National Park
Death Valley is the hottest, driest, and lowest place in North America — it holds the world's highest reliably recorded air temperature, 134°F, set at Furnace Creek in 1913. It's a…
August 30, 2015
California, USA · Marin County
Mount Tamalpais — "Mt. Tam" — is the 2,571-ft peak that watches over the entire Bay Area from Marin, its silhouette said to resemble a sleeping maiden. The Coast Miwok lived in its…