Fuel Road Trip Dreams with AMERICAN ROAD

In the Autumn 2026 issue of AMERICAN ROAD, Editor Thomas Repp explores the unexpected rewards of solitude along America's highways and backroads.

“A journey ends, but a journey doesn’t. A version of us remains out there—in there. On the surface, this sounds lonely, but I assure you, it’s not. We all live life behind the wheel of our own chassis, so to speak. So meeting ourselves is really the only way to travel."

Puttering around such philosophies inspired this issue of American Road. The stories herein are built from bits of hushed silence—routes to solitude with a few detours into desolation. We start with ‘US 50: The Long Road From Alone,’ which takes us across the Silver State on a highway that wrote its first legends with footprints and dust.

Sherlock Holmes was William Gillette, and William Gillette was Sherlock Holmes. Together, they built a magnificent castle in East Haddam, Connecticut, and lived there alone. We unravel the mysteries of that castle’s dead ends and secret stairs, hidden mirrors and cat statues in ‘Sherlock Holmes Slept Here!’ Then we take up our oars in ‘Vastly Superior’ and row twenty-four miles from civilization to chase the waves around Stannard Rock Light—the sentinel historically labeled ‘The Loneliest Place in North America.’

Our departments plumb other symbols of silence. We visit Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, where a bronze angel weeps black tears. We stand among the peeling, painted epitaphs at Tombstone’s Boothill, with Clantons and McLaurys sleeping in unrestful peace. We visit Trinity Site, where words are too big to remember. Finally, we find ourselves at Ponyhenge. The mystic ring of spring-rocker horses inhabits a field in central Massachusetts…

As it turns out, the middle of nowhere can take you somewhere you never expected to go.

Discover the Autumn 2026 issue of AMERICAN ROAD. Subscribe today and see where the road takes you next.