I thought I was the one going on an adventure. Then your emails started arriving, and I realized the adventure had already been happening — in living rooms and minivans and camper vans and cruise ships and, apparently, at least one sinking expedition vessel in the Drake Passage — long before I packed a single bag.
Since I shared my quest to visit all 50 states before America's 250th birthday on July 4th, I've heard from hundreds of you. State-counters and road-trippers. Expats writing from Sweden. Jesuit priests from Omaha. Proud Fairbanksans. An 87-year-old still dreaming about five northwest states. Three-generation families who've made the full 50 a kind of inheritance. You're exactly who I always believed our community to be: people who think that showing up somewhere — really showing up, eyes open, taking the back roads — matters.
The people already doing this
Some of you have systems so good I want to steal them. Anthony Castora and his wife draw a state quarter from a hat every New Year's Eve, right before the Times Square ball drops. They've been doing it for 16 years. Every January, his students and coworkers wait to find out where the Castoras are headed next.
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Start Your News DetoxThen there's David Raum. He wasn't even that excited about visiting Hawaii — until the expedition ship he'd booked to Antarctica hit an iceberg and sank. Everyone survived. The airline vouchers needed using. Hawaii became his 50th state entirely by accident. He's 81 now, just back from two months in Mexico, and still going. That's the kind of person I want to be when I grow up.
After walking parts of the Trail of Tears, I wrote a guide about it in case you want to walk it too. After time in Arkansas, I'm heading to Oklahoma, Kansas, and then Wisconsin.
Your tips have made this so much better. You've sent me covered bridges and crater fields, a gravity-wave observatory on a nuclear site in Washington, a funicular railway in Dubuque, a barn shaped like a teapot, and — more than once, from more than one of you — the sandhill cranes along the Platte River in Nebraska in March. I'm now convinced I cannot miss them. (Will the cranes still be there in early April?) Keep the tips coming. I'm taking notes on every single one.
If you're on a quest to finish your 50 states — or have already finished them — tell me about that. We'd love to hear your stories.
