Travel

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif.--He might be the most famous airman in the history of the U.S. Air Force, and he's a graduate of the Test Pilot School.

In 1947, Capt. Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier, hitting Mach 1.0 in a Bell X-1 rocket plane 42,000 feet above this Mojave Desert outpost. And today, to commemorate the import of the event that ushered in the supersonic era, the aircraft hangs from the ceiling in the entryway of the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Yeager … Read more

LAS VEGAS, Nev.--It may be the most valuable American car ever made. Sitting inside what looks from the outside mostly like a non-descript suburban warehouse, the vehicle fills a lot of people with lust.

Still a striking and shiny blue, the 1962 Shelby Cobra 427 is the very first of its kind. And it is such an important entry in the pantheon of American muscle cars that someone recently offered $25 million for it.

Welcome to Shelby American, a company whose rare cars are built to blow by just about any competition, yet are designed to be everyday drivable … Read more

MERCURY, Nev. -- From the side that faced away from the blast, you might never even have bothered to look at this concrete dome. But walk around the other side, and there's no question something extraordinary happened here.

Welcome to the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site. As part of Road Trip 2012, I've come to visit this 1,375-square-mile expanse of harsh desert and even harsher mountains that begins about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. Here, from 1951 through 1992, a total of 928 nuclear weapons exploded, many of them sending … Read more

TUCSON, Ariz.--It's summer in the Southwest, and there may not be a hotter border anywhere in the United States. For one thing, the mercury is easily over a hundred every day. And then there's the steady flow of organized smugglers trying to sneak themselves and their substantial cargo -- of migrants and/or drugs -- across Mexico's long desert frontier with Arizona.

There are nine U.S. Border Patrol sectors stretching across America's southwestern frontier. And back in 2000, the agency was snagging more than 2,000 people a day for crossing illegally into its … Read more

LOS ANGELES--I'm sitting across from a soldier named Garza, trying to get him to open up about why he got caught drinking and driving.

This is a serious offense in the military, and Garza could lose his rank, if not get kicked out of the Army altogether. And it's my job as his superior officer to try to understand that Garza -- who used to be among the best in his unit -- may be struggling with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

This, of course, is a simulation. I'm not in the military, and Garza doesn'… Read more

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -- It's hard to believe that a bunch of corrugated steel could be so famous. But when that bunch is nine letters that are 45 feet tall, and that combine to stretch 400 feet across, you get what is likely the world's most recognizable sign.

This is, of course, the Hollywood sign, a universal image representing the entertainment industry, and a monument that literally towers over Tinseltown.

But with its 90th anniversary coming up next spring, it may surprise some to learn that the sign has had its global status for only a fraction of its … Read more

BURBANK, Calif.--Back in the dark ages of modern 3D filmmaking -- meaning more than a year or two ago -- the process of aligning imagery coming from the two cameras required to shoot in 3D could be slow, methodical, and frustrating work. But one company thinks it has done away with those days forever.

At 3ality, an outfit here that is among the leaders in the nascent new era of 3D filmmaking -- as opposed to the horrible 3D films dating back a few decades -- there's no reason to labor over the optimization of such imagery after … Read more

SAN SIMEON, Calif.--To visit Hearst Castle, the private palace built by media magnate William Randolph Hearst along the Central California coast, was to enter a place completely out of any obvious time period.

Easily one of America's most notorious homes -- it was fictionalized as Xanadu in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane," Hearst Castle was first conceptualized in 1919 and was never finished. Work stopped when the media magnate left in 1947, four years before he died.

Packed with hundreds upon hundreds of priceless antiquities from throughout Western history, Hearst Castle was constructed before there were ever … Read more