“I’ve always hoped that I’d get to see in my lifetime a meteor shower like the 1966 Leonids which filled the skies with hundreds of shooting stars at a time going on for hours.”
The Perseids come in about two weeks, but I don’t know how much the full moon will impair your seeing them.
http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors
Nevada and Eastern Oregon are pretty much the only large swaths of the USA left (outside of central Montana, some of Nebraska, Southern Utah, and the Dakotas) where the new moon skies are black as ink, according to the 'dark' spots as shown on the Dark Sky Finder' site. I've been way way out in the great open empty parts of my state when there's no moonlight at all and it's like being locked in a closet to the point where it seems that you can't see your own hand in front of your face. There's 'dark' and then there's 'Nevada dark'.
That's the way to see the Milky Way in the summertime. I have Nikon 10-20x50mm binocs with a steadying foot rope attached for stargazing from a folding chair.