A Lifelong Road Trip

A reflection on traveling to all fifty states over the course of seventy years.

Engrossed in a salted caramel ice cream cone from Annie’s Ice Cream Shop, just a short stroll from the confluence of the powerful Talkeetna and Susitna Rivers in Talkeetna, Alaska, I practically ran into a women standing at the edge of an open-air market. When I looked up, I saw her shirt before I saw her face. It read something to the effect of: “50 before 50 – Fifty States in 50 Years.” I looked up and smiled. “Alaska is my fiftieth state,” I announced. “But it took me seventy years to get there,” I added.

She smiled back. “Congratulations! Enjoy your trip,” she said as she continued toward the furs, antler art, and Native Alaskan jewelry displayed in the various booths ahead of her.

Despite our brief connection, and even though I’d been telling people that our trip to Alaska was partly designed to rack up my fiftieth state, it was in that moment, standing on the main street in a town fabled to be the inspiration for the TV series, Northern Exposure, connecting with a fellow traveler, that I claimed my accomplishment.

Wendy and me in Talkeetna, Alaska

Originally the site of a Tanaina village, Talkeetna was established as a mining town and trading post in 1896. Alaska didn’t become a U.S. state for sixty-four more years—not until 1959, when I was already four years old. By that point, I don’t think that I’d ventured outside of my birth state of Michigan, but within the next year, I would travel from Michigan to Colorado by train through five new states: Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and finally Colorado—all states I’ve visited many times since. By the time I was seven, I’d traveled to at least fifteen states and lived in three of them, putting me well on track to reaching a goal of visiting all fifty states—a goal I would never even consider setting for many years to come.

How many states have you visited?

So how did it happen that I’ve had the opportunity to visit all fifty states, in most cases multiple times, in my seventy years? Here’s the condensed version.

When I was five, my mom married my dad, and we moved to Denver. He had recently taken a job as a traveling salesman for Daisy Air Rifles and had a territory that included Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota. We spent summers traveling with him, enjoying the splendor of the Rocky Mountains, visiting ghost towns, attending powwows, and learning about cowboy culture.

When I turned seven, he transferred to the home office, which, about the time we moved to Denver, had relocated from Plymouth, Michigan to Rogers, Arkansas. Mom couldn’t imagine living in the South, in Arkansas of all places, but somehow, we managed to adjust.

While in Arkansas, we traveled with Dad to Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, and Missouri. We also made annual pilgrimages back to Michigan to see family, revisiting Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. I added Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York to the list when we visited an uncle and his family in Upstate New York—their home in Watertown and camp in the Thousand Islands.

Between my sophomore and junior year of high school, I convinced my parents to send me to a Spanish language camp in Bemidji, Minnesota. Dad drove me there, passing through Missouri and Iowa, before entering a new state for me, Minnesota. Hard to imagine in these times, but after the month in Bemidji, I took a Greyhound bus all by myself back to Arkansas. It was my first solo adventure, and I fell in love with the freedom it offered.

As a sign of my teenage independence, I bought a pack of cigarettes from a machine at some deserted bus station along the route and smoked them all the way home. I must have smelled like an ashtray when my mom picked me up at the gas station in Rogers that doubled as a bus station, but she never said anything. She was just happy—and probably relieved—to have her sixteen-year-old daughter home.

That same summer, Dad took us to one of his favorite cities, New Orleans, so I added Louisiana to my growing list. The Mississippi River begins as a trickle flowing out of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota. That summer, I stood at both ends of the mighty river and imagined the route it traveled through ten states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and finally flows in the Gulf in Louisiana.

I continued to develop my comfort level with independent travel in my last two years of high school as I flew alone several times between Detroit, Michigan and Fayetteville, Arkansas, on visits home from the Catholic boarding school I attended in Michigan. In those days, the airline didn’t offer escorts for minors so even with plane changes in St. Louis, I was on my own.

When I won a month-long scholarship to a congressional seminar in Washington, DC, in my senior year of high school, I had no qualms about flying alone to DC and back to Detroit. A week after I returned to school, my entire class boarded a bus for a class trip to DC, so I got to ride through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, states I’d flown over but never visited on the ground.

After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1975, my brother moved to Pensacola, Florida. I visited him during a college break adding Florida to my list.

My first work conference, the 1977 National Drug Abuse Conference in San Francisco, introduced me to the beauty and wonder of California, a state I’ve visited many times in the years since.

In 1979, I moved to Boston for graduate school and once you’re in New England, it’s easy to explore not only Massachusetts, but Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island. Discovering New England became a passion and a pastime.

When I moved back to Michigan after grad school, I joined the annual migration of Michiganders down I75 to Florida for trips to Disney World. That added Kentucky and Georgia to my list.

On one of those excursions, I learned that my mother had taken ill in Arkansas, and I needed to go to be with her. To reach her from Florida, I drove across two states I’d never visited but have spent a lot of time in since in my work with the Living Legacy Project, Alabama and Mississippi.

In the late 1980s, my brother, who’d moved from Pensacola to San Diego, transferred again, this time to Honolulu. I couldn’t pass up a trip to the beautiful state of Hawaii, so my partner Anne and I visited him on Oahu, took a brief excursion to Maui, and spent a week on Kauai.

All but four of the states that remained (and yes, I’d begun counting by this point), Arizona, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and North Carolina, were soon checked off by my annual participation in the Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly, which meets in a different city around the country each June, and which I attended for twenty-three of the twenty-four years between 1993 and 2017.

My work as a computer software trainer in the late 1990s and early 2000s took me to New Mexico and Idaho, and gave me the chance to revisit other states like Nevada and Louisiana that I’d visited only once or twice, but wanted to spend more time in.

By the early 2000s, I knew I had only two states left, South Carolina and Alaska. When presented with a job opportunity as a District Executive with the Unitarian Universalist Association in 2006, I was excited that it would require me to travel extensively though the Southeast, especially North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and the ever-elusive South Carolina.

For the next several years, I drove interstates and back roads throughout the Southeast, visited big cities and small towns from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee to the South Carolina Lowcountry, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to the Outer Banks of the North Carolina coast, and, in doing so, reclaimed the South as my home.

That left Alaska. I really didn’t think I would ever get there. I’d convinced myself that seeing the forty-eight contiguous states plus Hawaii (and Puerto Rico) was enough. But then an opportunity arose to visit a friend of Wendy’s who works at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. We had given up on going to Hawaii (a place I’d been, but Wendy hasn’t) after two failed attempts (one because of COVID and one for chemo), so Alaska seemed like an appropriate post-retirement adventure.

I dreaded the long flight and feared the hiking terrain might be too much for me to handle. But Wendy’s enthusiasm is contagious, and I allowed myself to get excited too. I’m very glad I did.

I’ll be writing more about Alaska in future posts but suffice it to say, I found Alaska to be breathtakingly beautiful, expansive, wild, and fascinating in myriad ways that delighted me and caught me by surprise.

Grewingk Glacier outside Homer, Alaska. This view reminded me of how I imagined the Misty Mountains in “Lord of the Rings.”

And now I can safely say that I’ve visited all fifty states, lived in seven of them, and stayed overnight in all of them at least once.

A t-shirt Wendy gave me after our Alaska trip celebrating the completion of my list.

So why does it matter?

I’ve asked myself that numerous times over the years. Many people don’t have the financial resources to travel. Many others have family or other responsibilities that prevent them from traveling. Still others have disabilities or illnesses that impact their freedom to travel. And some people prefer to stay home, never having developed the skills or temperament to travel. So why does it matter that some of us choose to travel?

The first time I can remember considering the question about how important travel was to me was not that many years after we moved to Arkansas. I’m guessing I was in the fifth grade, but it might have been earlier. A friend, recounting her own boring summer, commented on how much I’d traveled with my family. “I’ve never even left the state,” she lamented.

I’m sure I didn’t hide my shock. “You’ve never left the state?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Rogers, the town we lived in, is in Northwest Arkansas, just under eighteen miles south of the Missouri line and a little more than thirty miles east of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Those distances to the state borders were as engrained in me as the alphabet. They represented something much larger than the random statistics they seemed to describe. How was it possible that someone, even a twelve-year kid, hadn’t ever left the state when the borders were so close? The whole idea struck me as incomprehensible. Little did I know then that my travel experiences were far from the norm.

In my nascent imagination, those adjacent state borders symbolized a gateway to adventure, opportunity, and discovery. In fact, in every journey north, we had to pass through a tiny village named Gateway at the Arkansas/Missouri border. Every time we approached this portal to adventure, questions fueled my anticipation:

• What new thing will we see today?

• What experiences lie beyond the next curve in the road?

• Who will we meet?

• Where will we spend the night?

• What will we eat?

• What surprises are in store?

As a child, I couldn’t have been happier than when I was on the road. Travel powered my creativity and satiated my curiosity. As an older adult, I’m content to explore closer to home, but, at the same time, I rarely hesitate to embrace a road trip.

Each state in this magnificent country of ours (and despite its current political climate, it’s still a magnificent country) offers lessons in culture, history, and natural beauty. From the bayous of Louisiana to the South Carolina Sea Islands, from the Colorado Rockies to the rocky coastline of Maine, from the prairies of Nebraska to the deserts of Nevada, every state offers a PhD in anthropology, environmental science, history, cultural differences, linguistics, geology, economics, political science, and so much more. And it’s all there for the taking.

I believe that if everyone had the opportunity to travel, to meet people from different parts of the country and the world, to understand and appreciate their struggles and contributions, we would live in a much healthier, kinder, more compassionate world.

I’ve been lucky. I know that. But I’ll never stop advocating for people to find ways to travel to new places, step outside of their comfort zones, place themselves in other cultures, and experience the world through other people’s eyes. I can assure you that we will all be better for it.

I’d love to know how many states you’ve been to, and even more importantly, what role travel has played in who you are.

In hope and love,

Annette

Notes

If you’re interested in tracking your journey and connecting with others who are traveling to all fifty states, you might consider joining the All Fifty States Club.

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