There is something quintessentially American about a good swimming hole. Pure, unplugged, communal—all these peaceful oases require are some good friends and perhaps a few beers. Here are some of the best stretches of freshwater the country has to offer. Bring your suit.

Johnson’s Shut-Ins

Middlebrook, Missouri

While this spilling over into small, gurgling falls could be mistaken for an open-air Turkish bath, it’s actually just a particularly rocky section of Missouri’s Black River. This natural water park, formed by ancient volcanic stone in the , is surrounded by a state park that’s perfect for camping, hiking, biking, and fishing.

Little River Falls

Gaylesville, Alabama

A beautiful drive through the Little River Canyon National Preserve takes you to this in the southern Appalachians. Spend the day enjoying a blessedly cool reprieve from the Alabama heat with the locals. After drying off, take in the view from , or kayak the on the namesake waterway when the water is right.

Havasu Falls

Supai, Arizona

You’ve likely seen photos of this , with its blue-green waters tumbling into a crystal-clear pool of red canyon rock. The colors alone are mesmerizing, but a picture doesn’t do it justice. What makes this place truly epic is its remoteness: It’s an eight-mile hike through the Havasupai Indian Reservation to reach the falls, an effort that makes soaking in the mystical waters all the more rewarding. Reservations for hiking and camping are required and sell out quickly, so .

The Blue Hole

Wimberley, Texas

This is is beloved by locals for its ample cypress tree cover and crystal waters fed by Cypress Creek. Oh, and the rope swing, reservable camping spots, and giant cowboy boot statue. The town of Wimberley (population 3,019) had to implement reservations as the swimming hole’s popularity has grown, but what the Blue Hole lacks in remoteness, it makes up for with nearby food and drink options, like the Hill Country cuisine at the , just a short walk away.

Madison Blue Springs

Lee, Florida

Northern Florida is home to some of the country’s finest springs, where manatees, turtles, birds, and alligators cruise the glassy, slow-moving waterways. , located in one of Florida’s newest state parks, sits in a limestone basin along the , surrounded by magnificent pines and hardwoods, all done up in hanging moss. Along with swimming, kayaking and are also popular.

Boulder Creek

Boulder, Colorado

When spring arrives in Boulder, residents head to . You’ll know it’s time—usually in April—when gas stations begin selling black inner tubes. Grab one or simply float on your own down this series of small rapids in the middle of town. People set up along the shore with grills, beers, and water guns. While parts of the waterway can feel like a party, the creek is long enough that you can easily secure your own, ruckus-free space. A that follows the stream makes for easy recon.

Cummins Falls

Cookeville, Tennessee

A feeds this down-home swimming hole in the 282-acre Cummins Falls State Park. Extra points are awarded for the lifted rock slabs where you can relax above the pools with water raining down like a natural shower. While locals have frequented these falls for more than a century, the closed-in, moss-dappled rock faces that rise like stacks of pancakes make it feel like some kind of never-never land.

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Discovering a new species deep in the jungles of Borneo or in the azure waters off the coast of Belize may seem like the exclusive realm of the adventurer-researcher, but a growing number of curious vacationers are doing just that. A dozen or so eco-tourism organizations are catering to citizen scientists wishing to head into the field alongside certified biologists or naturalists. While field experience isn’t necessary, these are no pleasure cruises: Travelers are expected to get their hands dirty making observations, collecting samples, and setting camera traps—or, on some trips, exploring remote zones for undiscovered flora and fauna. And while organizers promise adventure, they stress that their participants are more than just tourists bound to get in the way and instead actively contribute to the advancement of science. Here are some of the best trips on offer.

Taxon Expeditions

Founded last year by a Dutch scientist couple, focuses on finding unknown animals in regions untouched by science. During the company’s first-ever expedition in Borneo, participants found a new kind of slug and several water beetles, one of which was named Grouvellinus leonardodicaprioi, after the eco-friendly actor, says co-founder Menno Schilthuizen; the findings were recently published in ZooKeys, a peer-reviewed journal. Taxon’s second expedition will take place in northern Montenegro’s Durmitor National Park this July. Trips are typically around ten days in length and involve training in field biology, including on-site DNA analysis. $4,560 per person.

Biosphere Expeditions

Formed in 1999 and a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the UN Environment Programme, this connects laymen with long-term scientific projects that have tangible ecological impacts. One example: gathering accurate population counts to help save 50 wolves from becoming legal hunting targets in Poland’s Bieszczady Mountains. Biosphere participants also collected field data that contributed to the creation of southern Africa’s Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, the world’s largest conservation zone. Starting at $1,733 per person.

Tamandua Expeditions

Founded by American naturalist and Paul Rosolie, Tamandua Expeditions takes you deep into the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, one of the most biodiverse areas on earth. Most trips occur in the Madre de Dios region on a remote tributary that takes two days to reach by riverboat. There is no electricity or luxury digs. Instead, conservation of this riverine ecosystem is front and center, and volunteers lend a hand by maintaining trails, setting camera traps, and rehabilitating howler monkeys, giant anteaters, ocelots, and other injured jungle critters. One of the organization’s ongoing projects involves checking anacondas to determine if there is a correlation between gold mining in the region and mercury accumulation in apex predators. Starting at $1,600 per person.

Earthwatch Institute

Environmental nonprofit , founded in 1971, describes its trips as “citizen science on steroids.” Travelers join researchers trekking across mountain ranges or the Arctic tundra, searching for evidence of glacial retreat or exploring how an active Nicaraguan volcano shapes the surrounding ecology. The scientific value of each participant is real. In 2016, for example, volunteers working alongside researchers in Belize discovered a new species of bonnethead shark. In 2001, volunteers unearthed a near-complete skeleton of a new dinosaur species in the Argentinean Andes. Now that is something to scrapbook. From $2,100 per person.

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Running is not writing, but writing is, in a metaphorical way, running. Both depend on distance: miles, pages. Putting feet to pavement or pen to page can both be slogs. It’s no surprise, then, that for several of our favorite authors, running is an essential part of the writing life. We reached out to eight of them to hear how the two practices complement one another.Ìę

Peter Hessler

Bio: on China; currently writing a book on Egypt.
Running Cred: Ran his first marathon at age 12.

“I think the endurance side of running, the training and mentality of it, actually translates quite well to writing
 Physically there’s a benefit, but also psychologically I think the mentality is somewhat similar, this sort of persistence-endurance.

“I always go into a piece of writing with a plan, an idea of what I want to do, but there are things that come to me as I’m working that I didn’t expect, and I have to be loose and relaxed enough to let those things in. I notice that when I run, my mind is in that place, this sort of very free-flowing, unstructured, unfocused place. For me, it’s part of the whole mental space that’s necessary to write.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Bio: , two of which were nominated for Pulitzers.
Running Cred: who can hardly go a day without putting feet to pavement.

“In running, the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms. Ideally, the runner who’s a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.

“The structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating, and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon.

“Both running and writing are highly addictive activities; both are, for me, inextricably bound up with consciousness. I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t running, and I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t writing.”

Haruki Murakami

Bio: .
Running Cred: A regular marathoner, his 2007 “kind of memoir,” , is an ode to the handsome parallels and natural symbiosis between running and writing.

“People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well.

“When I’m running, I don’t have to talk to anybody and don’t have to listen to anybody. This is a part of my day I can’t do without.”

Malcolm Gladwell

Bio: .
Running Cred: A self-described running obsessive who ranked nationally in high school in Ontario, Canada.

“I never run in the morning. I just think it’s a waste of the morning. The morning is the best writing time, the best thinking time. At the end of a long day, when you’re tired, I find running is the thing that brings you back to life. Something to look forward to as well.

“I think it’s soft to run with music. It’s people who are running from their running. They’re trying to distract themselves while they’re running. That seems to me—what’s the point? If you don’t want to run, if the act of running is so terrifying to you that you need to blast music in your ears, then you should be doing something else.

“I free-associate [while running]. I suspect a lot of useful thinking is going on on a subconscious level. I do not run with music, so I am completely unencumbered when I run. And then I do a thing that I’ve done ever since I was a kid, which is—it’s sort of embarrassing to say; I go through periods without really realizing it—I pretend I’m some famous runner. I imitate someone running. I started it as a way to try and improve my form, if you think about how a really good runner runs. My favorite runner is . He has a very distinctive running style, sort of thrusts his chest out, with very high knee lift. When I’m running well, that’s one that flashes through my head. In reality I run nothing like it. This is all fantasy, you understand.”

Kay Ryan

Bio: and winner of the 2011 Pulitzer for poetry.
Running Cred: The 71-year-old for 40 years.

“I always run from my front door, always alone, and usually after I’ve finished writing for the morning.

“I normally separate my writing from everything else in my day. I write when I first wake up, after breakfast and reading the morning paper. Consciously thinking about what I’ll write is something I rarely do, although I may do some revising of poems in my head when I’m running.

“I once noticed that a tree had fallen across [my running] trail, and I knew it had fallen just recently because it wasn’t there on my run the day before. There was a sense of violence about it. So I wrote [a poem called] Deferred Silence.

“Both [running and writing] require patience and endurance and humility. Both can be hard and unpleasant at times. But of the two, writing is much harder. When you go out for a run, you never fail, but you often fail when you set out to write a poem, even if you try your hardest.”

Adam Hochschild

Bio: Author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestseller .
Running Cred: The 74-year-old writer has been running regularly for more than 50 years, often along beaches.

“Mind and body are connected in some fashion. You have to do something if you want to keep those mental juices flowing. You’ve got to get your blood circulating.

“It baffles me to walk past a gym, look through a glass window, and see 50 people running on machines. It bewilders me. Why aren’t they out on a street or park?”

Michael Meyer

Bio: of two nonfiction books on China who’s currently working on a third, .
Running Cred: Meyer started running late in life, in 2008, long after he had begun his writing career. It was just a way to get in shape after “living in a city where beer and noodles are the staple diet” (Beijing). But he took to it wholeheartedly. Meyer has since run several marathons. He now plans his years around them.

There is a meditative quality to running that can produce revelations for writers. Meyer sparked the idea for his upcoming book while on a run in London. He was going along the Thames, gawking at the foreignness of the cityscape, when it struck him to write a book on his own experience adjusting to a foreign country.Ìę

“When you start an assignment, everything feels very chaotic. It’s just one step at a time. The pieces fall into place. It’s the same thing with running. You just set a goal and little by little you achieve it.”

Nicholas Thompson

Bio: of Wired.
Running Cred: A marathoner who run-commutes most days.

“I do notice that a lot of the best thinking I get done, or ideas generation, or problem solving, happens when I’m running and trying to focus on stuff outside of my head.

“I remember vividly going on a run and coming up with the structure for the speech I gave at my wedding, which is actually a pretty important writing assignment! It was at East Rock in New Haven. I just remember running up and being like, ‘Oh! That’s the structure.’ And why it came to me running and not sitting, I don’t know. But I think probably for most things I’ve written or edited, there’s been a key insight that came while I was running.”

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One of the great benefits of extended travel is the time it affords for reading. People talk about beach reads, but for me it’s bus reads, bench reads, train reads, “Sorry sir your room will be ready in two hours” reads. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that “The great affair is to move.” I would add, “…and stop for a good read now and then.” 

The road was made for the word.

For many, travel has always been a bookworm’s hobby. Certainly it stands for me. And I do mean books: you will find no tablet in my backpack. Fellow travelers often gawk at this: how do I cope? The extra weight of books, to say nothing of the nuisance of finding them—madness! 

With tablets, you customize your reading repertoire without bounds. Everything is available. Just type it in. But therein lies the problem. When the selection process falls to you, you often forfeit the best selector of all: chance.Ìę

Keeping to physical books has transformed my literary life. On the road I usually have two or three books on me. When I finish one I exchange it or sell it to a second hand shop. It becomes one of the routines of travel. Every once in a while you wash your clothes, get a haircut; every once in awhile you find a new book.Ìę

And  because I am severely limited in my selection, I have been forced to choose works which I would never have plucked from the Kindle universe simply because I had not known they existed. What a joy! In Mandalay I discovered . In MalĂ©, . In Siem Reap, . In Florence, . In Xiamen, . In Monterey, . In Kanchanaburi, . The list goes on. It literally requires a search—sifting through piles, blowing off dust. And with each one, like a favorite song first heard, I can vividly recall its provenance. , from which that Stevenson quote is pulled, was gifted to me by a British quaker and vintage . Memory always favors the printed word. And travel is nothing but a desire for discoveries.Ìę

Such finds often serve as a kind of a tonic to road weariness. Travel is often painted as a merry-go-round but much of it, particularly the solo long-term variety, is accompanied by bouts of fatigue and self-doubt: Is this really what I should be doing with my time, wandering alone? A good book found in a strange town is one answer which tends to reassure; I may have loathed Mandalay but at least it gave me . On a long trip, the little private pleasures sustain you. And what is more private than an enjoyable book? 

Another benefit of the physical world: in the same revealing way that a person’s bookshelf speaks volumes, you learn about a place when you see what is shelved in its bookstores. In Myanmar, for example, it does not take a detective to notice the wide availability of George Orwell volumes. You will not find a bookstore or seller—for the majority of books are peddled on the street, yellowed, warped and covered with plastic tarps during sudden rains—that does not possess the dystopian author. You might assume the reason to be that he based his first novel, , on his stint living there as a colonial police officer. That is one component but there is another, more revealing one.Ìę

Orwell, the Burmese will tell you, was able to illustrate Myanmar’s authoritarian nightmare with uncanny and lasting precision. What is 1984 and to a Burmese if not reflections in print of Ne Win, the socialist strongman who held the country in an Orwellian vice for 26 years? Until recently, these works were banned, punishable and distributed only in clandestine ways.ÌęThat is what a street-side bookseller in Hsipaw who goes by Mr. Books told me: pointing at copies of the late contrarian he said, “Before, if police see us selling these books, we get seven years in jail.” Today you see Orwell nearly as much as you do framed portraits of human rights champion and . Both cluttered the modest shop of Mr. Books, a greying democracy activist. So whereas tablet travelers, satisfied with their amorphous marketplace, might stroll by a bookstore without so much as a glance inside, I am joyfully ensconced there, looking, listening, learning.Ìę

Never once have I regretted lugging around books. What I have regretted carrying are things with screens: my laptop, my smartphone. They are professional necessities—always, I pay my way with freelance reporting. But not only are such items liabilities–they break, get stolen, require outlets—they are teleporters, taking you away from where you are, into the unplace of the Internet. At its best, travel is like meditation; grounding, existential, telling you where you are. The Internet and the devices which take you there are antithetical to that.Ìę

Books, like music, are transportive but in a different way: they take you inside yourself. And, most importantly, they do not allow you to reach out or for anyone else to butt in (“Hey where are you??”). They are, like travel, inherently inner experiences. No charging required.Ìę

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A widely available, dirt-cheap, eco-friendly superfood that has more protein density per bite than beef and is chock-full of vitamins and minerals? Look no farther than the crickets in your backyard.

That’s right. Those critters chirping away in your vegetable garden are more than suitable for human consumption, and with 16 to 21 grams of protein per 100 grams of cricket, the little brown bugs make for a great post- or pre-workout snack.

It’s a “no-brainer,” says , an entomologist with the Audubon Nature Institute. Crickets provide more than enough protein to fuel the rest of your day. “And they contain a good, but not excessive, amount of fat and carbohydrate,” he adds.

A hundred grams of cricket contains only about 5 grams of fat and 121 calories. For comparision, a hundred grams of beef has close to 300 calories and 20 grams of fat. Although a hundred grams of ground beef has more protein (26 grams) than the equivalent amount of cricket, the nutritional quality of bovine protein is lower.

The little fat crickets do have is the good kind, unlike the cholesterol-raising fat found in beef and pork. Brooklyn-based Exo and San Francisco company Bitty Foods were quick to hop on these insects’ fitness-boosting potential early on. Both businesses offer cricket-flour energy bars in non-insect-evoking flavors like cashew-ginger and cacao nut. A uniquely low-impact and convenient form of cultivating high-protein food, cricket farms can fit in a bedroom closet or garage and require minimal effort and investment.

Sure, you can buy crickets at a store, but the ones you’ll find weren’t raised for human consumption. Store-bought crickets are usually given artificial feed, which isn’t produced with the human digestive system in mind. Farming your own herd gives you a degree of quality control you won’t find in the local pet store. And if crickets become a regular part of your diet, breeding them yourself will be cost-efficient.

For those of you who can get past our culture’s bug-munching taboos, what follows is a guide for starting and maintaining your own cricket farm.

Step One: Preparation

Get a high-sided, 14-gallon bin—this will hold 500 crickets, which are more than enough for starting out. Make sure the bin’s walls are smooth (so the crickets can’t hop over them and escape), and check that there’s proper ventilation (so the insects can breathe). Because they’ll need a constant source of water, provide a water tray that’s shallow enough that they can’t drown, or .

Step Two: Starting Out

You can purchase your crickets in bulk at a pet store or . They’ll cost about a dime each. Put them in the bin and make sure they’re kept at a regular temperature of about 86 degrees.

Feed the adults plants like cucumber, morning glory, and pumpkin. What you feed them can affect how they taste, so feel free to experiment. Robert Nathan Allen of , an Austin-based nonprofit dedicated to inspiring more insect-eating, explains: “Feed them mint, and they’ll taste minty; feed them apple and cinnamon, and they’ll taste like apple and cinnamon.” Make sure there are no pesticides in what you give your crickets (the chemicals would kill them), and check their food regularly for mold as well.

Step Three: Breeding

Get a small tray and fill it a few inches with clean topsoil: this is where the females will lay their eggs. The environment must be kept moist, so spray it every day. Once they’ve been laid, you’ll be able to see the eggs—they resemble little grains of saffron rice poking out of the soil. Next, remove the tray and keep it incubated in a hot, humid climate (90 percent relative humidity), until the babies hatch (within 7 to 10 days). Be aware that the eggs won’t hatch if they aren’t kept warm. You can use a heat lamp or a heating pad for this—and make sure to spray the soil with water every day.

The babies, which will be about the size of a pinhead, need to be kept in a separate container until they’re big enough for the main farm. Feed them high-protein foods like tofu and chicken, and they’ll grow quickly. In about a month, they’ll reach full size; a few weeks later, they’ll be ready to breed.

According to Andrew Brentano, cofounder of , a company focused on building the world’s first open-source edible-bug-farming kit, there are five basics for successfully cultivating crickets:

• clean food and water
• sufficiently fresh air flow
• a consistent temperature of 86 degrees
• 90 percent relative humidity for the first week or two of life, followed by less than 50 percent humidity
• enough space so the growing crickets can spread out and exist comfortably

Once you’ve mastered these steps (which won’t take long), simply keep the system in rotation. Before you know it, you’ll be a full-fledged cricket farmer. Harvest your crop, then boil it in rolling water and sautĂ© with some salt, basil, and olive oil for a tasty snack that’s loaded with protein and good fats.

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