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​Hotdogs taste better when you order them from a roadside stand shaped like a giant barrel, as I learned when I stopped at the Root Beer Barrel in Douglas, Michigan. The stand, built in the 1950s, closed in the mid-1970s. It stood vacant for 25 years, its wooden...

I’ve long dreamed about watching grizzly bears snatch salmon swimming upstream to spawn, so my recent visit to Katmai National Park in Alaska ranks as one of the best days of my life. After taking a 30-minute bear education class at the park (“Do not cheer when a bear...

I love to taste the local flavors of the places I travel. I also love ice cream, so when I spent a few days in Anchorage last week, I beelined it – twice – to an ice cream shop that uses local plants to concoct its uniquely Alaskan scoops. The first time I stopped at...

You’ve probably seen photographs of the nuclear bombs that went off in the Marshall Islands in the 1940s and ‘50s – enormous, lint-colored, mushroom-shaped clouds rising like nightmares from the ocean, utterly surreal against the slender palm trees in the  foreground....