Well I went to school with someone whose son Ethan Connor once held the world record for the youngest person to visit all 50 States in the USA but I think someone from Canada recently did it at a younger age so has anyone here actually done it? Are there some interesting pieces of information in relation to it such as how long it takes and how much it costs and things like this?
160 hours by car, or 18 hours by F-22 fighter.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/113/
SR 71 would be faster than a fighter but they are all retired now. It could go Mach 3.2 , F 22 top speed is Mach 2.2
Even flying commercial flights, I can’t imagine this would take more than 7 days. No optimization at all just looking for “major” cities and ~20 hours to connect them by driving
Day 1: Portland Maine - NH - VT - MA - RI- CT- NY NJ PA DE MD WV VA NC SC GA - Jacksonville FL = 22 h driving by Google maps
Day 2: New Orleans, LA - MS AL TN KY IN OH MI IN IL WI IA - Winona MN = 22 h
Day 3: Fargo ND - SD NE IA, MO KS AR OK TX NM Pueblo CO
Day 4: UT NV AZ CA
Day 5: WY MT ID OR WA
Day 6: AK
Day 7: HI
This isn’t even a challenge. I bet 4 days is possible with some optimizaiton. <72 hours with private plane and sleeping en route.
Yes, in the linked article Monroe considers the SR-71 and says it would take about 8 hours. Then he moves to satellites and just considers how many orbits one would take to overfly each state, and finds that it can be done in five passes.
A former coworker of mine upon retirement bought an RV and set off on mission to spend one night each in all 48 contiguous states. Which he (and his wife) accomplished in about three months having driven just under 10,000 miles.
This was back in the days when you went to the AAA office sat down with an advisor who worked out the route with you. You walked out with a bunch of maps with the routes marked out with an orange highlighter. He had a boxful of maps.
so far 61 years and I’ve only made it to 49. 
Are you just after the record, or do you actually want to see something of each state besides the inside of an airport and/or a chunk of interstate highway?
Because that’s going to make quite a difference.
This map made the rounds a few years ago.
There used to be something that would have made it possible and relatively cheap to hit every state within thirty days. Greyhound used to offer a 30-day bus pass that allowed you to ride on any of their buses within a time period of thirty days. You just showed the pass to the ticket agent at the station where you got on the next bus and were handed a ticket for your ride on that bus. I did this at least twice back about four decades ago. It wasn’t very expensive. Unfortunately it no longer exists.
If you rule out physical contact with the state and allow traveling over the state to count as a visit, the sky’s the limit. Why stop with a plane or a satellite? Why not just chart your trip around the states on the moon. From there you’re far enough away from Earth that you can look down and “visit” the entire United States simultaneously.
I still need to visit Oklahoma and North Dakota. I’d appreciate any suggestions on how to combine the Horn Canna Festival (in Carnegie, OK) and a trip to the N.D. badlands in one reasonably short excursion.
Note: by some standards, just being in an airport doesn’t qualify as having visited the state. Going across by train, car or bus (even if you don’t get out of the train/vehicle) is considered alright. :dubious:
In the early 1980s, George Thorogood played 50 states in 50 days.
It took us over 20 years to do it. I don’t remember the overall cost.
But we got off the interstates and actually saw stuff, a lot of stuff, just didn’t drive through. We spent weeks in one state at a time, going back to some states several times.
I have a map in my scrapbook with a United States map with all the counties shaded that we’d been to.
One time I spent weeks calculating on the counties we’ve been to and their voter rolls.
If I got 51% of the vote in every county I’ve been to, while getting 0% of the vote for every county I have not been to, I would win both the popular and electoral vote in a landslide, winning all but 4 states. While I’ve been to those 4 states I was not in enough counties to add up enough voters to win the state in a Presidential election.
Hell yeah, I’m bragging! :D:cool:
Just because you can look down and see something does not mean you’re directly over it. As it happens, the only states the Moon ever gets directly above are Florida, Texas, and Hawaii.
ninja’d me
At the age of 12, my family took a one-month camping vacation from Boston to California. Twice in college, a friend and I took camping trips to the west coast. I then realized, I’d been in 45 states. It took another 25 years go get to the final five. Three of the final five were intentional plane changes on business flights so that I could scratch them off my bucket list.
Beside merely touching down in each United State, try stopping in each state capitol. For one brownie point, which state capitol(s) cannot be flown into commercially?
That’s easy: none. Capitols (spelled with an O) are buildings and you can’t fly into those. Now the question about capitals (spelled with an A) is harder. How close to an airport does it have to be to count as flying to? Salem OR, for example, doesn’t have commercial service to its airport, but it’s maybe 70 miles or so to PDX. Does that count as flying to Salem or not? Similar distances for Olympia/Sea-Tac and Topeka/KC International.
Drew Carey did that before he was famous. Would take what he called a “whore bath” (pits and crotch) in the restrooms and sleep all night on the bus because he had no money for hotels