The Worst Labor Day RV Drive, 60 National Parks Online Free, and a Dragonfly Summer

Good morning! It's Wednesday, August 26 — 60 national parks just went online for free, the worst afternoon of Labor Day weekend has already been identified, and California is having a dragonfly summer.

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— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

> The Park Service turned 110 yesterday, and Google's present is a lot more useful than it sounds. Sixty national parks are now online. Free, permanently, no account.

More than 150 curated exhibitions, 30 virtual tours, and over 500 miles of Street View, which means you can walk the overlook before you drive 900 miles to it.

Standing at a canyon in your kitchen isn't the same as standing at the canyon. Nobody's claiming it is. But it's a genuinely good way to work out which side of the park you want to camp on, whether the detour is worth a day, and whether the kid who just went back to school is going to care when you get there.

Then there's the part nobody saw coming. At Independence National Historical Park, they digitized 19 copies of the Declaration of Independence and more than 2,000 pages of documents, and handed the pile to an AI.

What it's supposed to do with them is the strangest sentence in this week's issue.

And if you've ever wondered who actually decides a place gets to be a national park, we broke that down here.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

> The worst hours of your Labor Day weekend are already on the calendar. AAA has domestic travel up 9 percent, and the traffic analysts have gone ahead and named Thursday afternoon the single ugliest block on the interstate this holiday, with another afternoon running a close second. Mornings are clear, with one exception. (More)

> California is having a dragonfly summer. Warm spring storms triggered a migration of wandering gliders, and swarms of a hundred at a time are turning up from Oakland's Lake Merritt to farm fields in Fresno County. This is the one swarm you actually want hovering over your campsite, for a reason that has nothing to do with how they look. (More)

> Check your South Florida winter route before you commit to it. Lightning-sparked fires have burned through the Everglades' central marshes, closing and then reopening Shark Valley inside four days. Florida is running far ahead of a normal fire year on the back of an 18-month drought, and the acreage is uglier than a four-day closure makes it sound. (More)

> Route 66 turns 100 in November, and CNN drove it in an RV. Chicago to Texas, a chunk of the 2,448 miles that cross eight states. If the Mother Road has been sitting on your list for a while, there's a good reason to move it up for 2026 and a good reason to think twice. (More)

> Heat is about to redraw where summer camping works. A new analysis projects the number of days with a heat index above 105 will multiply across the country by mid-century, and a sizable stretch of the Lower 48 is headed for readings that run off the end of the National Weather Service's chart. The map of where is the part worth two minutes. (More)

> The Yellowstone supervolcano is not the thing to worry about. The magma under the park is mostly solid, and the scientist who monitors it puts the odds of an eruption on any human timeline at about as close to zero as you can get. There is something else under there that's much more likely, though. (More)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

> Shop once, eat all week. Sunset built a run of camp meals entirely out of Trader Joe's ingredients, which handles the actual problem: a real grocery store is rarely near the campground, and day four is when the ideas run out. Build the list at home and the back half of the trip stops being sandwiches again. Our RV dinners by cooking setup sorts them by what you've actually got, two-burner or fire ring.

> Then the feet. Day-hikes from camp are where they get wrecked, and Travel + Leisure ran this year's boot picks past podiatrists instead of gear testers.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

> Insulated camp slippers — Puffer-jacket insulation with a real outsole, so the 6 a.m. walk to the water spigot doesn't have to happen in yesterday's hiking boots. For anyone camping into October, when the RV floor gets cold about three weeks before you're ready for it.

> Rechargeable clip-on shoe lights — Headlights for your Crocs, which sounds like a joke until the 2 a.m. walk to the bathhouse. For families and anyone boondocking without a single light pole, they leave both hands free and they charge off the same cable as everything else.

> Telescoping rotating roasting sticks — They extend to keep small people back from the coals, and the handle spins the marshmallow so it browns instead of catching fire on one side. For anybody who has watched a kid weld a s'more to a stick and then cry about it.

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

> Badlands, South Dakota
The park that looks like somebody dropped another planet onto the prairie. Striped rock spires coming straight up out of open grassland, with bison and bighorns wandering between them, and September nights that finally cool off. Two campgrounds, one of them with hookups. See the camping guide. Our first trip out west guide covers the parts nobody warns you about.

> Pennsylvania
The state you've probably driven through without realizing how much you missed. Turnpike at 65 with the radio on, out by dinner. Afar went looking for the wild version instead, and it turns out to involve considerably more whitewater than the turnpike lets on. See what's off the exit.

> Lodi, California
Sandhill cranes are about to get loud enough to make you wonder whether you parked next to an airport. Every fall thousands of them drop into the flooded fields outside Lodi, and they are prehistoric, deafening and completely unbothered by anyone watching. An hour from Sacramento, and the show is at dusk. See where to stand.

> Oregon
The state parks are quietly outperforming the national ones. GearJunkie's list runs from a beach with a shipwreck sitting in it to a dune field you can ride down, and Oregon runs enough of them with hookups that you can string a week together. See the list.

> Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Take the exit for the version of America that still has neon. The old signs, the drive-ins and the lunch counters are all still there, and Our State walked the retro version of it block by block. Worth stopping if you're running I-40 and tired of the same four chains. Take the tour.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

> Somebody's wildlife camera caught two baby raccoons doing what can only be described as full-contact wrestling.

> A goat has been living at a Love's Travel Stop in Marion, Indiana for about a week, and the police department has now confirmed that it does not answer to Billy the Kid or LeBron.

> Some animals appear to call each other by name, which is going to start an argument at the fire about whether your dog has one for you.

> Plano, Texas has a museum devoted entirely to Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil and every other thing somebody swears they saw from the side of a road.

> A children's book called Big Fat Bear Battle! The BEAR-ly True Tale of Alaska's Fat Bear Week came out yesterday, and it has two reporters named Goldie Fox and Moose McMahon covering Katmai's brown bears like a pay-per-view prizefight. Meet the contenders.

The Dump Station Hundreds of Texas brown tarantulas turn up on Big Bend's Lost Mine Trail, all of them male, all of them with a 12-centimeter legspan, all of them having spent eight to ten years underground waiting on a single walk.

The Odometer More than 1,200. That's how many letters people have mailed back to Petrified Forest National Park since 1934, each one confessing to pocketing a piece of the park and blaming everything that went wrong afterward on the rock.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

> Route 66 turns 100 in November, and the man who got it numbered arrived in Oklahoma in a covered wagon.

Cyrus Stevens Avery was born in Pennsylvania in 1871 and came to Indian Territory at twelve, behind a horse. By 1926 he was Oklahoma's state highway commissioner and sitting on the federal board that cut the country's roads into a numbered grid, and he pushed hard enough that the Chicago-to-Los-Angeles route came through Tulsa instead of somewhere else. Then he helped start the association that spent the next two decades getting it paved.

You can go stand where he did. The Cyrus Avery Centennial Plaza sits where Route 66 crosses the Arkansas River in Tulsa, and the bronze at the center of it is called East Meets West: an early automobile and a horse-drawn wagon crossing paths on the bridge.

His birthday is August 31. He'd have been 155 on Monday.

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