Sean Cate is a freelance writer, sales strategist and semi-professional track and field athlete. Sean loves travelling to new places to compete and eat new foods! Sean is training to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics as a high jumper.
Image credits: Pexels There are 63 designated national parks in the United States, stretching across deserts, rainforests, volcanic craters, and ancient mountain ranges. Today, those 63 parks draw hundreds of millions of visitors a year to witness jaw-dropping natural wonders and unforgettable terrains. The challenge has never been whether a park is worth visiting. It’s
There’s a quiet code among Pacific Northwest hikers. You can sometimes spot it in the way a local pauses just a half-second too long before answering, “Where’s a good trail around here?” They’ll name something well-known, something with a trailhead sign and a busy parking lot. They won’t tell you about the other one. This
Image credits: Pexels There’s something quietly melancholy about flipping through an old travel journal from a decade ago, one where coffee rings stain the corners and a faded metro ticket from Rome has been taped to page twelve. The handwriting is hurried, the sentences are imperfect, and it captures something that no camera roll ever
Image credits: Unsplash There’s something oddly revealing about how you board a plane. Do you sprint to the gate with three minutes to spare, or are you already seated with your neck pillow on and a book open before boarding even begins? These small, specific habits tell a story that goes well beyond logistics. In
Image credits: Pexels There’s something almost theatrical about an airport. People from every corner of the world, all moving at different speeds, all dressed in completely different ways. Some arrive in pressed blazers. Others shuffle through security in oversized hoodies. A few actually coordinate their luggage with their outfit. None of it happens by accident.
Image credits: Unsplash Something has been shifting in California over the past few years, quietly, without headlines. While the state’s big coastal cities hold their grip on culture, tech jobs, and sunshine, a growing number of residents are looking east, toward the granite walls and high-altitude lakes of the Sierra Nevada. One town in particular
Image credits: Unsplash Something has shifted quietly but unmistakably in how Americans choose to move through the world. The flight app, once an obligatory first stop when planning a vacation, is being closed out in favor of something older, slower, and far more personal: the open road. Specifically, the two-lane kind, where diners appear without
There’s something quietly remarkable about sitting down at a diner counter where truckers, Dust Bowl migrants, and postwar families once did the same thing. Route 66, known as the “Mother Road,” was one of the original highways in the U.S. Highway System, established in 1926, stretching from Chicago to Santa Monica. By the 1950s, it
Image credits: Unsplash There’s a particular kind of frustration that ripples through an airport security line when it suddenly grinds to a halt. Fellow travelers crane their necks. Agents huddle around a conveyor belt. And almost always, somewhere in that frozen moment, there’s a pair of boots involved. For years, shoe removal itself was the
Image credits: Flickr Tucked into the canyon country of southern Utah, the small town of Escalante sits at an elevation of roughly 5,800 feet, surrounded by some of the most dramatic desert terrain in the American West. For most of its history, the town was a quiet waypoint between national parks, known more for its
Image credits: Pexels Most people treat packing as a logistical chore, something to get through before the real adventure starts. Zip it up, drag it to the door, done. But psychologists and travel researchers have spent years pointing out something quietly fascinating: the way you fill a suitcase tells a story that has very little
Image credits: Pexels Most towns along the old highways of America either grew into something unrecognizable or disappeared entirely once the interstates arrived. There’s a strange middle ground, though, a handful of places that got frozen somewhere between the two fates. One of them sits in the high desert of northern Arizona, and if you
