Sammy Tran articles

Not every family stopped at every one of these places, but certain restaurant names became fixtures of American car travel in the 1970s.

Across the United States, famous hiking trails pass places shaped by fatal falls, flash floods, eruptions, scary encounters, forced removals, and disasters.

On Christmas Eve 1971, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell nearly two miles from a disintegrating airplane into the Peruvian Amazon. She was still strapped into a row of seats when she plunged roughly 10,000 feet toward the rainforest below. Somehow, she survived the impact. Yet waking up alive turned out to be only the beginning of an ordeal that would last another 11 days.

America’s haunted-road-trip map is enormous. Old hotels, prisons, battlefields, and mining towns all come with stories of guests who supposedly never left.

Chris McCandless was a bright college graduate from a comfortable American family, with the kind of future that seemed wide open. Then, at 22, he gave away thousands of dollars, cut contact with his family, and disappeared onto the road under a new name. Two years later, hunters found him passed away inside an abandoned bus deep in the Alaskan wilderness. How did his life change so completely, and what actually happened during the final months that turned his strange journey into the story of the film Into the Wild?

Some states are almost unfairly good at making a first impression. You arrive for beaches, mountains, food, nightlife, or a perfect long weekend and immediately start wondering what it would take to stay. Then you look at housing, weather, distance, traffic, or the realities that tourists rarely have to deal with. There is no single national poll ranking these states, but their enormous visitor appeal and very real everyday tradeoffs make the vacation-versus-residency divide easy to understand.