Octoberfest!

Football is back, baseball is heading toward the playoffs, and the leaves are glowing with autumnal flame. All of these are highlights of the year, but if you need another reason for a celebratory road trip -- think Octoberfest, or Oktoberfest as it should be in proper German. Despite the name Oktoberfest actually starts in mid-September, and comes from a very long wedding party held 200 years ago in the beer-drinking capital of the world, the city of Munich in Bavaria. German-Americans have carried the traditions with them to our New World, as you can see from reading about the hundreds of seasonal beer festivals listed at the semi-official Oktoberfest website. One of the oldest and biggest festivals is held in La Crosse Wisconsin, which is also the home of the World's Largest Six Pack.

Along with the fall foliage in much of the country, Oktoberfest peaks this weekend, so get out there.

(Photo of the world's Largest Six Pack comes from page 228 of the latest edition of Road Trip USA, and was provided by City Brewery, makers of La Crosse Lager.)

Fall Colors

OK, so summer is officially over. Kids are back at school, baseball season is coming to an end, and gas prices (finally!) are starting to come back down from their summer highs. For those of you lucky enough to live in or near the woods, the leaves on the trees are getting ready to go out with a bang (just in time for hunting season, so take care).

In other words, it’s fall foliage season, which means it's time for scenic “leaf-peeping” drives along winding mountain roads. Over the next month or so, maples, ash and other deciduous trees all over the country will be enjoying one last burst of glory before succumbing to their winter's sleep. The best colors tend to be found in places like New England and Appalachia, but you can see fall colors in almost every state. For example, in Arizona, look for the reddening oaks and maples of the forests around Flagstaff, near the Grand Canyon off old Route 66. In California, from now through mid-November look out for the yellowing leaves of the quaking aspens, which stand out against the evergreen forests of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, high above one of my favorite roads, US-395. In Colorado, aspens and cottonwoods are turning out along the fabulous Million Dollar Highway.


No matter where you live or travel, there are a number of great web resources that will help you get an idea of where you might go to make the most of this intense natural spectacle. A good starting place is the US Forest Service Fall Color Updates pages. See your tax dollars at work!...

Another place to go is the Foliage Network , which posts up frequently updated reports of color intensity, like the one above. Pretty nifty, huh?

Full Moon Road Trips!

Almost all year long, magazines and newspapers get clogged full of "themed" travel stories -- offering advice on spring time drives, where to go for a long weekend, or a summer family vacation. Now, in what may well be a first for the much-abused genre of blogosphere travel writing, I am thrilled (well, pretty happy...) to share with you one of my favorite subsets of the road trip world: the full moon drive.

Looking out my window, I see a huge great "harvest" moon rising, and while others may have trouble sleeping (or even go baying at the silvery orb), the moonlight makes me want to hit the road. Though almost any road will do, some roads look better by moonlight than others. A wave-washed coastal drive may be magical, a cruise around a lakeshore can be the ultimate in romance, but for me nothing is more memorable than a full moon road trip I took some years ago along the famous "Loneliest Road in America", old US-50 across Nevada.

It's a fantastic road in almost any conditions (except perhaps during a wintery snowstorm), and I still get shivers thinking back to an all-night solo drive I took along the Loneliest Road from Lake Tahoe east toward the Utah Canyonlands -- the angular mountain ranges stood out like sawblades on the horizons, while in the foreground the moonlight sparkled on the sandy desert washes and endless sagebrush plains. All the way I tuned the radio to the spooky melange of America's most unusal radio station, KTNN AM 660 , where the DJ alternated Navajo chants with a psychedelic range of pop hits by Jimi Hendrix and the Who. You can hear the signal for miles (hundreds and thousands of miles, depending on conditions), and as chance would have it this weekend marks the annual Navajo Nation Fair in Window Rock AZ, which gives one more excuse for a spur-of-the-moment getaway.

Happy Trails,


jj