Hooray! With the completion of our trip to the Pacific Northwest, my wife and I have toured all 50 states of the US and all 10 provinces of Canada by our fifth anniversary (next week)!
Who, amongst North American SDMBers have seen a lot of our great continent? Any places that stick out?
Many for me, but here’s one from the most recent trip: Waking up in our Anchorage motel and seeing the mountains out our window. Then driving up the Glenn Highway, and down the Seward Highway. The only word that even remotely describes it is majestic. I’ve seen the Rockies (both American and Canadian) and the Cascades, and I thought they were awe-inspiring, but the Chugach range puts them to shame. It truly gave a sense of the “bigness” of Alaska.
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Congrats, my friend! I got my 50th state in 1995 – it was Idaho (yes friends, I am here to attest that there IS a North Dakota). The kids bought me a sticker which says “I’ve been everywhere!”
I love mountains, oceans, plains. I love the Great Lakes, and the rivers, and the thousand islands, and the deserts, and . . . well, I just love this country. It’s beautiful.
Congratulations cmkeller! A worthy achievement. I personally live on the West Coast and have toured there, but East of Nevada / Idaho / Montana / Arizona, I have only seen Chicago, New Orleans, Arkansas and New York City.
This reminds me of a funny story. A lady I worked with at a previous job, who had lived in California for many years, told me once that she had been to 49 states in the Union, and only had one left that she hoped to visit someday. “Which one?” I asked. “Oregon.” I was left with mouth agape. She had some logical reasons explaining how she missed that (bordering California!) state but my brain was too befuddled to comprehend it.
Congrats, cmkeller! That’s a lot of shoe leather, tire rubber, rubber chicken, etc., to endure. I get fed up just flying to Calgary from Victoria, a mere 2 hour trip…much prefer driving, actually, so you can get out and see neat things and stretch various body parts (and hit any used bookstore)!
Have you made it to any of the three Canadian Territories (Yukon, North-West Territories, or our newest addition, Nunavut)?
Let’s see, that’s 16. Granted, some of them I only passed through on road trips. I’m most anxious to get back to New Orleans. I also want to see more of Kentucky. When we passed through on our honeymoon, I had been sleeping awhile. When I woke up, I couldn’t believe the beauty I was seeing. Texas is my favorite. I feel so “at home” there. Maybe it’s because I have a lot of family there
BTW, cmkeller, how do you pronounce your first name? Just curious.
Heck, no. There’s so much still to see. It’s such an amazing world out there!
Arnold:
Oregon’s an easy miss. We “did Oregon” by seeing one museum in Portland.
Some states can fall between the cracks pretty easily. We did the bulk of our states/provinces in three massive (two week long) cross-continent trips, and there are a few states which we might have slipped by if we hadn’t planned ahead. Idaho and Nevada come to mind.
Rodd Hill:
Nope. I figured, I’m not going to bother traveling to American Samoa and Guam (for completeness’s sake), so no reason to include the Canadian territories in the goal, either. I don’t want to imagine what a flight to Iqaluit might cost, anyway.
Jeannie:
“Ch” is the hebrew/germanic gutteral sound. Think of it as in “Chutzpah” or “Ich bin ein berliner”
the “a” would be like “ah”, and the “im” is as it sounds (when it runs together, it may sound like there’s a “y” between the a and the i).
