Reopenings and Road Trips

Welcome. California officially reopened on Tuesday. In New York, restaurants and movie theaters are no longer required to space patrons six feet apart. The European Union is expected to open to American tourists on Friday. As regulations change rapidly, questions about travel abound: What are the testing and vaccination requirements for domestic and international travel? What sort of paperwork is required? Here’s what to know before you go.

The road beckons. If you’re inclined to heed its call, perhaps you’ll drive U.S. 1 the length of Maine (beware the $34 lobster roll) or take a barn-quilt tour of the Midwest. You could go birding in the Arizona desert (August is high season for hummingbirds) or pay a visit to Northern California’s redwoods. The journalism professor Ron Stodghill, inspired by Stacey Abrams’s work, drove from Missouri to the Golden Isles of southeastern Georgia to, as he writes, “hang out in some of its less-frequented coastal areas (and yes, away from a wave of newly, often reckless, unmasked crowds) and confront some of my own lingering ghosts in the state where my paternal grandparents were born.”