US Route 20: The Longest Road in America

Good morning RVers! It's Wednesday, June 17 and we're covering the longest road in America, the World Cup day trips that skip the host-city hotel scramble, and the El Niño shift rewriting your July route.

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— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

3,254 Miles, One Road, Twelve States

There's a single road that runs from the Massachusetts coast to the Oregon one, and at 3,254 miles, US Route 20 is the longest in the country — older than the interstates, slower on purpose, and stitched through the middle of everything the interstates were built to skip. The easy way to picture it: I-90 is America's longest interstate, a 3,000-mile sprint from Boston to Seattle, and Route 20 is its scenic, toll-free twin — same coast-to-coast line at half the speed and twice the character. It clips the edge of Yellowstone, runs past the Idaho high desert, threads small-town main streets that still have a diner worth stopping for. You won't drive the whole thing this summer, and you don't have to. Think of it as the Route 66 of the north: pick it up wherever your trip already is, trade a day of highway for a day of Route 20, and the trip gets better for it. Maybe this is the summer you take things a little slower.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

Five Things to Bring Up at the Campfire

> Why did the deer cross the road? Trick question — it goes over it now. A wildlife overpass on a crash-prone California highway is already working ahead of schedule, with animals using the bridge before it's even finished. One less set of eyes to catch in your headlights on the dark stretch. (More)

> Attention passenger princesses in charge of the snack situation: Trader Joe's just dropped its summer stock-up list. Salt and vinegar was so last summer...Garlic Shrimp Chips is what you should be grabbing while you look for TJ the turtle and get your lollipop. And the best thing at Buc-ee's may not actually be the Beaver Nuggets, but you'll fight past a wall of them to find it. (More)

> Elon just made it a little cheaper to binge-watch Resident Alien in the middle of the desert. Starlink now rents its hardware to new users for $10 a month, about what a tank of propane costs, so boondockers can find out whether satellite internet earns a permanent spot in the RV before owning it. (More)

> Can I pet that dawg? (Hard no.) A four-foot Argentine lizard the size of a small dog is loose across 30 Georgia counties, and Southeast campers are the ones most likely to cross paths with one. It won't come for you, but it outnumbers coyotes and raids the nests of cuter living things, so the state wants your sighting reported to the hotline, not tagged in your TikTok selfie. (More)

> Last week you cried pumping diesel and blamed it on someone cutting onions. Good news for the next time you fill up Big Belinda: you may not need as many tissues. The whole RV industry is over this emotional-roller-coaster relationship with gas prices, one minute flush, the next broke. At least we're broke in beautiful places.

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

Do You Need to Rethink Your Summer Route?

NOAA made it official June 11: El Niño is back, and it splits the rest of summer in two. The Pacific Northwest and Mountain West run hotter, drier, and smokier into the late season, so a western route in July wants higher elevation, a daily look at the fire and air-quality maps, and enough slack in your reservations to move if the smoke does. The East Coast and Appalachians draw the wetter, stormier card, which means planning around the afternoon thunderstorm instead of against it. Wherever you're headed, check the forecast for the week you'll be there, not the week you booked it.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

When Your Dogs Are Barking

> OOFOS OOlala recovery sandals — The foam recovery sandal that turns wrecked, end-of-trail feet back into feet by morning, for the hiker who's on them all summer and wants the camp shoe to do the recovering. We bought the bargain look-alikes to find out if they'd do the same job — they don't, not the fit, not the cushion, not close. This is the rare one worth paying full price for, once. ~$60.

> Trixie 2-in-1 elevated dog house and bed — A raised, shaded cot the dog can call their own at camp. For the family whose co-pilot spends every stop hunting for shade and ends up panting under the picnic table or quietly evicting you from your own camp chair — this gives them a spot off the hot gravel that's actually theirs, then folds flat for the next site.

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

Four Off-the-Beaten-Path RV Trips

St. George, Utah — Most people treat St. George as the fuel-and-go between Zion and Bryce. Flip it and make it the base camp. Zion is an easy 40-minute day trip; Bryce is the longer reach at just over two hours, but from a home base that's a doable day instead of a second teardown-and-move. Add fourteen golf courses and genuine dark-sky stargazing and you've got a real base camp between two iconic parks, not a place you blow through at 70. For full hookups, Temple View RV Resort is the big-rig-friendly value pick right in town; want a pool and four pickleball courts instead, Desert Canyon RV Resort is also in St. George.

South Carolina's Olde English District — Working your way up the Eastern seaboard and tired of the obvious stops? Seven counties, 400 Revolutionary War battle sites, and one very historic lunch counter make this under-the-radar history run the eastern answer to the desert Southwest.

Revolution-era taverns — If your idea of a history stop comes with a cold one, you can still pull up a stool in the colonial taverns where the Revolution got argued out, Williamsburg to Newport.

World Cup day trips — With the tournament landing in US host cities this summer, the RV move isn't fighting downtown for a hotel room — it's basing outside town and taking the day trip out of every host city, where the sites are cheaper and the crowds thinner.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

The longest day of the year lands June 20, and a few places catch it better than the rest — Big Sur and Yosemite among them.

A Florida tattoo artist is on a mission to ink all 500-plus of the state's bird species onto actual humans, so if you've been waiting for a sign to get your first tattoo, consider it your (bird) calling.

Horseshoe crabs are spawning along the Delaware Bayshore right now, and under the right light the whole scene glows in the dark.

WATCH: Gordon Ramsay eats his way across the country in a feature-length America 250 special and, for once, seems more impressed than ready to yell.

You've driven all over America; now you can fly the whole thing from your browser, free.

The Dump Station Spielberg's new sci-fi Disclosure Day is set in small-town Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia, but two-thirds of it was actually shot across New Jersey and upstate New York standing in for the flatter Midwest, so an East Coast trip this summer can roll right through the real towns playing the heartland on screen.

The Odometer 213 — acres of Lake Superior shoreline the Park Service just added to the public map, a stretch of beach and a 90-foot waterfall included, enough to finally pull three miles of America's longest hiking trail off the road and onto the water's edge.

— OK BUT THE RV DOESN'T PAY FOR ITSELF —

Get Paid to Roam

Summer Store & Kitchen Crew — Taylor Park, CO — Taylor Park Trading Post sits at 9,400 feet on a mountain reservoir, 34 miles up the gravel from Gunnison, and it is staffing the whole summer through mid-September: cooks, store clerks, housekeeping, even the ATV-rental desk, at $15 to $20 an hour. Bring your own RV and they hand you a full-hookup site, so home is a short walk from the register.

Lakeside Site Host — Ellijay, GA — FIND Outdoors is looking for a site host at Harris Branch Beach on the North Georgia mountain lakes, the easygoing kind of post where you welcome campers and keep an eye on the place. It pays a $185 weekly stipend, and the real perk is the free full-hookup site that comes with it.

Part-Time Bookkeeper — Orr, MN — A nonprofit black bear sanctuary in far-northern Minnesota needs someone to keep its books at $20 an hour, part-time and flexible around the busy May-to-September season. It is the rare desk job where the mission is protecting wild bears, and the pay comes with all your meals plus a full-hookup site for your RV. The role is not posted on their job board yet, so email Steph at [email protected] to raise your hand.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

Almost Every Place You RV Is Named for Somebody

That sun-baked base camp for Zion and Bryce we mentioned earlier (St. George, UT) is named for George A. Smith, a Mormon apostle the pioneers called the "Potato Saint" — he'd talked scurvy-stricken settlers into eating raw, unpeeled potatoes for the vitamin C, and it worked. The families he organized to grow cotton in the desert in 1861 named the town for him, even though he never actually lived there. The cotton went about as well as that sounds. The golf courses came much later.