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Your Emails Are Fueling My Quest to See All 50 States
I have to be honest with you: I thought I was the one going on an adventure. But 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, which will be on July 4th this year, I’ve heard from hundreds of you, and I am genuinely moved. You are state-counters and road-trippers, expats writing from Sweden, Jesuit priests from Omaha, proud Fairbanksans, 87-year-olds still dreaming about five northwest states, and three-generation families who’ve made the full 50 a kind of inheritance. You are, in other words, exactly who I always believed our Atlas Obscura community to be: people who think that showing up somewhere — really showing up, eyes open, taking the back roads — matters.
Some of you have systems. 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, and every January, his students and coworkers wait breathlessly to find out where the Castoras are headed next. I love this so much I want to steal it.
And then there’s David Raum, who told me 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, and Hawaii became his 50th state entirely by accident. He’s 81 now, just back from two months in Mexico, and still going. I want to be David Raum when I grow up.
My trip continues, and after walking parts of The Trail of Tears, I wrote a guide about that, in case you, too, want to walk it. After an incredible time in Arkansas, next up, I will be sharing experiences from Oklahoma, Kansas, and then Wisconsin.
The travels are so much better with your tips. 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, which I’m now convinced I cannot miss. (Will the cranes still be there in early April?) Keep the tips coming. I’m taking notes on every single one.
And if you are on a quest to finish your 50 states – or have already finished them – tell me about that! We are opening our platform and our podcast to feature stories of 50 state quests, and would love to hear yours.
