When I was a little girl, I spent a lot of time following my father around. He didn’t do extreme weather well, so the changing of the seasons to more tolerable temperatures meant that fall was a time we did a lot of exploring.

We took beach trips here or there, and we’d trek off to the mountains on occasion, but my very favorite trips were really to no place special at all. My dad is what you might call a history nut. His old Jeep Scrambler was filled with old maps and McDonald’s napkins with pen-scratched directions in his version of X-marks-the-spot destinations we’d sometimes set out to find on Sunday afternoons. For years I thought my dad actually came up with the term “bucket seat” as he was the one who rigged up the contraption of an upside-down bucket between his two-seater Jeep for me to sit on as I bumped along between him and my mom down gravel roads and forgotten highways. I know, I know...totally illegal and unsafe, but it was the ‘80s.

We trekked through old battlefields, Indian creek beds, caves, old ruins and anything left behind by our ancestors. My mother followed along with guide books and encyclopedias of artifacts, often running along after something he had dug up and tossed aside as worthless to later reveal as some hidden treasure. (Once he found a rusted blood letter from the Civil War!)

My point is that these trips we took likely never cost much more than a tank of gas, a bucket of chicken and some glass bottle Cokes from a gas station, but they were priceless days. This issue is full of fall adventures--some of them to Charleston, Chattanooga and beyond. Some of them simply consist of a trip to your own backyard. Whatever your destination this fall, I pray you will just enjoy the season, some laughs and some truly amazing weather.