Stories

In honor of Mother's Day and all the inspirational, kind and strong moms who keep things running smoothly (both at Backroads and in life!), we want to shine a spotlight on one of our favorite moms in our Backroads community. Meet Alison Iles, a former Trip Leader and mom of two champion mountain bik…

There are certain places on our trips that guests remember long after they’ve gone home. The Blackford Highland Games field is one of them.

This Earth Day, we’re taking a closer look at how sustainability shows up across Backroads, from how we operate behind the scenes to how we design our trips and how we give back to the communities where we live, work and explore. We don’t think of responsible travel as just one initiative. We are ta…

National parks are the places where many of us formed our fondest memories with family and friends. Go ahead: Close your eyes and recall your earliest or most impactful experiences in nature. Maybe it was watching the sun light up Yosemite’s granite walls, learning how to pitch a tent in the Great S…

I recently returned from my third Backroads trip. My latest trip, the Patagonia Lake District Multi-Adventure Tour, looked a little different from the others. Besides the obvious—my previous trips were both in Europe and this trip was to Argentina—my January 2026 trip was my first Backroads trip in…

This year, World Bicycle Relief is reaching an incredible milestone: one million Buffalo Bicycles delivered to people who need reliable transportation to reach school, health care, markets and opportunity. And for Backroads, it also marks ten years of supporting this work alongside our guests and st…

I’m on a small electric-powered wooden ferry boat, skimming quietly along Slovenia’s Lake Bohnij, the misty Julian Alps reflecting in the mirror-calm water. This is why I travel, I think, the landscape before me an answer to a question I didn’t realize I had.

As a Backroads Trip Leader and a musician, I’ve always believed you can learn just as much about a place through its music as through its landscapes. Music carries history in a way few other things can.

In the Galápagos, sustainability is a fundamental philosophy of local culture and policy, further emphasized by the islands’ remoteness and subsequent scarcity of certain resources. Santa Cruz Island is home to roughly 20,000 people—over half of the human population of the archipelago—with smaller a…

On our South Africa & Botswana Active Safari Trips, guests explore the rugged beauty of the Cederberg Wilderness, a region famed for its dramatic sandstone formations, ancient rock art and deep ecological significance. Through our Give Back Field Project program, Backroads proudly supports community…