We awoke, packed, ate breakfast, and made it to Love Field well in advance of our 10:25a direct flight to Raleigh. It was a pretty uneventful trip — a little shopping in the airport, some Chick-fil-A to tide us over, that sort of thing. We landed a little after 2p and headed home, another great trip completed.
While we’d seen several states (particularly along the East Coast) here and there over the years, our quest to visit all fifty states really began in earnest in 2007 with our drive to visit relatives in New York and Maine. Following are the trips (and the states visited, * is first time in these trips):
2007: Virginia*, Maryland*, Delaware*, New Jersey*, New York*, Connecticut*, Rhode Island*, Massachusetts*, New Hampshire*, Maine*
2009: Tennessee*, Mississippi*, Arkansas*, Missouri*, Illinois*, Indiana*, Kentucky*, West Virginia*, Virginia
2010: Louisiana*; Colorado*, Wyoming*, Nebraska*, South Dakota*, Montana*, Idaho*, Utah*
2011: Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania*, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont*, New Jersey
2012: Louisiana, Washington*, Oregon*, California*, Nevada*
2013: Nevada, Utah, Arizona*, Colorado, New Mexico*, Texas*
2014: Louisiana
2015: Alaska*
2017: Louisiana; Illinois, Wisconsin*, Iowa*, Minnesota*, North Dakota*, Michigan*, Ohio*, Indiana; South Carolina*, Georgia*, Florida*
2018: Texas, Oklahoma*, Kansas*, Colorado, New Mexico
Remarkable that those trips hit 47 of the 49 states we have thus far. Granted, some of those we had visited before those trips, but not a huge number. That leaves only Alabama (which Michelle and I have visited, but not the kids) and of course North Carolina which I didn’t count as visiting since we live there. We’ll hopefully pick up Alabama this year for the kids then Hawaii next year for our 25th anniversary.
Following is the map of our trip (click to view full size, as with the other maps in the more recent blogs). Google says it was thirty-nine hours of driving and just over 2,400 miles. Obviously that’s off a little bit but not by much. Not our longest trip in distance nor time but, as with the Midwest last year, it managed to surprise (delightfully so) despite much of the itinerary not being as exciting on paper as some prior years.
We visited the National Weather Center, something I’ve wanted to do for years (my nickname is BigWeather, after all). We toured a salt mine six hundred feet below Kansas and saw movie memorabilia being preserved for future generations. Monument Rocks, Kansas looked like terrain we’d seen in South Dakota years before and seeing so much wildlife — turkeys, rabbits, deer — was unexpected. A wicked storm reminded us all of our mortality in Colby, Kansas, as did wildfires in Colorado. We spent the day on a steam train, getting a glimpse of travel over a hundred years ago. America’s largest sand dunes were found a thousand miles away from the nearest ocean. We pondered the possibility of life beyond our planet in Roswell then visited a truly alien environment in the spectacular caverns at Carlsbad. The Alamo and Spanish missions provided some historical context and we had the best brisket of our lives in Austin. Finally, we put a bow on the trip with a visit to the National Videogame Museum.
Route for June and July, 2018