The Quest for 50

One man's quest to fill in all the parts of the map

First of all, not everything I write is going to be sad, and thank you for reading this if it has found you.

There is no good reason for wanting to have visited all 50 states in the United States. Yet, it is something that I really want to do. I’m getting close, but I’m also getting to a point where it may get harder to accomplish. And yet, I am going to set out my quest and where I’ve been. It has been a ride.

First of all, what do I mean by “visiting” a state. My brothers and I actually sat down one Christmas and hashed out a criteria that each of us had to meet to get credit. Your idea of “visiting” a place may differ from ours. The criteria are decidedly arbitrary.

We, in what I called the Concordat of Holland (Michigan, not the Netherlands) where this was agreed to. To get credit for visiting a state, you had to:

• be physically present in the state either by driving through the state,

• riding through the state on a train.

• visiting a state by airplane. However, you only received credit for a state visit by airplane if you physically left the airport grounds and went outside the terminal.

The last criterion took a long time to decided and there was a lot of give and take. We also mostly just did what Jim, the oldest brother, thought was the best idea. You could argue that sitting in a car or a train is not much different than changing planes, but these are the rules of engagement.

I’ve broken down the states I’ve visited by my level of engagement with the state. So, here we go. (And no, I could not get the numbers to line up perfectly and this bothers me a lot.)

States where I’ve lived

1. California - Aside from four weeks in Scotland in the summer of 1985, I have never been present in any state for more than a two week stretch.

States where I’ve stayed in another person’s home

2. Missouri - I’m pretty sure this was the first state outside of California I visited, although I was an infant at the time. But my mother grew up in Missouri. One of my brothers currently lives there also.

3. Illinois - My father grew up in Illinois and I distinctly remember staying at my grandfather’s home.

4. Colorado - One of my uncle’s owned a condo in Vail which we borrowed on a couple occasions and also I have a sister-in-law who lives in Denver.

5. Minnesota - I had a friend from my one year in grad school in Berkeley who invited me to visit in Minneapolis. My first visit there was in January. That was the first time time I discovered winter.

6. New York - I stayed at a friend’s apartment in midtown Manhattan in the mid 1980s. Later, I stayed at my brother and sister-in-law’s apartment in Ithaca.

7. Michigan - The Concordat of Holland required a trip to Michigan.

States where I’ve slept over in a commercial establishment of some type

8. Hawai’i - Favorite island is Kauai and I have not been there for nearly four weeks.

9. Alaska - I finagled a credit card bonus from Alaska Airlines to get a free flight to Juneau this past October and my wife and I crossed this state off our list. Juneau isn’t that far from the L.A. area. And it has a glacier.

10. Washington - I’ve been to Seattle a couple times. One time I flew to Bellingham on frequent flyer miles because I couldn’t fly to Canada, so I just got very close. I landed in Bellingham on the first day of spring and it was snowing. I checked into the hotel and told the front desk clerk that it was snowing outside. They were really excited and all ran out to look. So I guess snow is not common in that part of the world.

11. Oregon - I have stayed in Ashland, Portland, and the beach city of Neskowin, where we saw the total solar eclipse, although that wasn’t the complete purpose of the trip.

12. Nevada

13. Arizona

14. New Mexico - The Land of Enchantment is in the conversation for joining California in the first category.

15. Utah - I’ve stayed in Cedar City, where the local electronics store didn’t carry any supplies for a Macbook. And also the Whispering Sands Hotel in Hanksville. If you are ever in Hanksville, you are in for a treat! The hotel is amazingly nice for being in the middle of nowhere. We also stayed in a hotel in Monument Valley, which was across the Utah border, although I thought that I was staying in the Navajo Nation more than Utah.

16. Wisconsin

17. Indiana - My wife and I spent one night in Hammond because our flight into Chicago came in fairly late and we did not want to drive all the way to Michigan in the dark.

18. Ohio - I’ve been to BOTH Cleveland and Cincinnati. I’ll leave it at that.

19. Pennsyvlania - I stayed in Cranberry. Which seemed like a weird name for a city near Pittsburgh.

20. Connecticut

21. Rhode Island

22. Massachusetts

23. New Hampshire - I’ve stayed in Portsmouth (because it was the city where the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War was signed) and Manchester (in part because I had been to Manchester, England that year too and liked flying from two different Manchesters in one year.)

24. Vermont

25. Maine - I’ve stayed in Portland and Bar Harbor and some other city in the interior that I cannot remember. It could have been Bethel.

26. Virginia

27. Maryland - On one trip to visit Washington, DC, I stayed in suburban Maryland. This was in the early 1990s and I wanted to drive to Baltimore and I didn’t have a map. I went to a AAA office in Greenbelt, Maryland to get a map and ask for directions. Because using a map and asking directions was a thing you had to do. The guy at the AAA office said he didn’t know how to get to Baltimore and wondered why anyone would go there. I figured out how to do it by looking at the map. Judging by the traffic, plenty of people wanted to drive to Baltimore.

28. North Carolina

29. Georgia

30. Florida - I have been to Florida once. I stayed in West Palm Beach. Please don’t make me go back.

31. Louisiana - Unsurprisingly, we were in New Orleans. It was for our first anniversary. I was trying to recreate parts of my parents’ honeymoon. I think New Orleans was slightly more sedate when they were there in 1956.

States where I’ve been there long enough to eat a meal

32. South Carolina - Facing a long wait home at the Charlotte Airport for a flight, I opted to drive to nearby Fort Mill, South Carolina and we had lunch there. And just like that the Palmetto State was off the list.

33. Mississippi - On our anniversary trip to New Orleans, I was trying to go to other stops my parents made in 1956, which would have included Biloxi and Mobile, Alabama. Very bad traffic (which turned out to be a fatal accident) only allowed us to get to Biloxi and Gulfport, which seemed nice enough. We ate a Waffle House.

34. West Virgina - I’ve been to two cities in West Virginia: Harpers Ferry and Wheeling. So it looks like I do not want to go into the interior of the state, but it just worked out that way. I had lunch at the Harpers Ferry Historic Site.

35. Kentucky - If you fly to Cincinnati, your flight will land in Covington, Kentucky on the other side of the Ohio River. I had to take a cab across the Ohio to my hotel in Cincinnati. Later, though I went with some friends to a restaurant on a ship docked on the Kentucky side of the river.

States Where I Have Just Passed Through

36. Texas

37. Oklahoma

38. Kansas - These three states have the most dubious claims in my opinion. In 1971, my parents decided to take us to Illinois from Los Angeles via train, in one of the early years of Amtrak. The train only went to Kansas City. And the path of the train had to go through Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

39. New Jersey - I rode with a friend from New York to Washington and he wanted me to take the New Jersey Turnpike. I have also flown in and out of Newark Airport, necessating some quality time in the Garden State.

40. Delaware - My encounter with the First State on the same drive from New York to Washington. And there is a brief section of a turnpike in Delaware. I gave the state some money. And then I moved along. I still insist that Delaware is mostly a giant fiction that has been played on me for my entire life. I think getting Joe Biden elected President is just the people perpetuating this con on me being very dedicated to the job. There is also a chance that my knowledge of Delaware comes from some Inception-like scheme.

They fall into these categories.

The Yellowstone Park states:

I have not been to Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. In theory, a trip to Yellowstone National Park could knock off all three.

The Southern holdouts:

Tennessee (where I’ve changed planes once), Arkansas, and Alabama are the last states of the South where I have not visited. BUT… I plan to knock off all three in May, including overnight stays in Tennessee and Alabama.

The Plains:
North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa. I think these are going to be the last ones to visit. They are all fairly big, so it’s hard to get all of them covered in one trip. Nebraska and Iowa are easy to pair up. The Dakotas are easy to pair up. But that’s a lot of prairie to go through.

What would happen after I finally got to all 50 states? Would I feel better? Would there be a sense of accomplishment? Why do I care so much about this? These are all good questions that have no good answers from me. But I am presently booked on a flight back home to Burbank that will depart Birmingham, Alabama at 5:40 am and I will be wondering if I really have made the best choice in life.