State number 49!
This one has been a long time coming. Somewhere around my 21st birthday, back from study abroad and starting to look into my future, the goal solidified. I’d been traveling since I was 6 months old, being comfortably held in my parents’ arms as I “walked” across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco for the first time. And we really hadn’t slowed down since then. We’d done a big East Coast trip when I was around 10, missing only West Virginia. We’d been skiing numerous times all over the Rockies, and we’d don a comprehensive west coast trip not long after we came back from our first Ireland trip. Over the years, we’d popped here and there, visiting national parks and landmarks, historical houses and waterfalls and oceans. We’d gone back and done West Virginia right because it seemed a shame that we’d done an entire circle around it but not stopped in, white water rafting sometime in my late teens.
But some time between returning from study abroad at the end of my sophomore year (thus completing a major life goal and needing a new one) and my last semester of college, I realized that I’d visited about 45 states.
I sat down with my mom, had her pull out all the pictures and christmas cards and napkins with trip summaries from over the years. We pieced together the trips, making a list, double checking, confirming where we had been to. And the list of places we hadn’t was… really achievable. Like, within a matter of years achievable.
Idaho. Texas. Oklahoma. Arkansas. Alaska. Hawaii.
Six states that I hadn’t been to.
Five years until I turned twenty-five.
I sensed a challenge. And I was ready to take it on.
It was doable. Realistically, it wasn’t even all that much of a rush. Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas could all be hit in one trip. We were already planning to head off west to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons in the next summer or two, and a diversion into Idaho wouldn’t take us more than two hours out of our way. This was something I could achieve. This was something I planned to achieve.
The first four states went off (fairly) without a hitch. We did Oklahoma and Texas on my spring break during my last semester of college, when I was student teaching. Student teaching was incredibly emotionally draining on me, and my mom decided knocking out a few states was the perfect way to bring up my spirits.
We also (technically) visited Arkansas on that trip. Our family rules for what counts as “visiting” a state is that you need to leave the airport, eat a meal, go to the bathroom, and see something touristy in the state. You can’t just drive through or stop in. But when trying to incorporate Arkansas into our Oklahoma/Texas trip, we were bounded by my school’s break. We had enough time to give Oklahoma and Texas the time they needed to see the things. But the parts of Arkansas that we’d be interested in visiting, Little Rock or the northwest, were too long a drive to reach in the short amount of time we had. I’d planned for a walk along some river after a quick meal, but driving through, and having done her research, my mom was concerned about the area, and we didn’t get to do that. We did a short walk around the lunch resturant, but I didn’t feel great about counting it, even though I was desperate to, and thus did.
My sister was still in school at that time and couldn’t come with us. So my mom took her on the same trip during the spring vacation of her senior year.
Then, we did our Yellowstone/Grand Tetons trip during the summer after my graduation. We did our stop-over into Idaho, saw a waterfall, did a small hike, and walked around a town for a bit. It definitely counted.
But here’s where we started to run into issues. I was 22. I still had three years, easy, to get to two states, and even stop back in Arkansas if I wanted. But through a series of random events, I ended up applying to a master’s degree program in Ireland as part of a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” strategy. It was a world class university, a place I’d dreamed about since I’d visited the first time, and I was convinced that I would in no way be a competitive applicant. But to my absolute shock and delight, I got in! I was going to do what essentially amounted to a gap year in Ireland. And I was going to get a degree out of it in something I absolutely LOVED!
So of course I was going to go. I couldn’t NOT go. This was a once in a lifetime experience. And I had three years. I’d just have to plan to get Alaska and Hawaii in in the two years after I returned. I could still do it before my 25th birthday. And I had technically done Arkansas, so it could count, just until I had the chance to go back and do it right. It was still easily managable.
I did the school, came home, and wrote my thesis in the Northwestern library over that summer. I submitted it in mid-August of 2018. I was twenty-three, had no direction in life, and still had time.
And then, in early-October of 2018, a month and a half after I’d finished my assignments and started the job search, my dad got diagnosed with brain cancer, and the next fifteen months (if we were lucky) of my life were pre-written. The priority was spending as much time with him as we were given.
(There was that one weird three week period where I decided to go to Bulgaria to check off a bucket-list item by doing an archaelogical dig. I 100% could have visited Alaska and/or Hawaii instead of Bulgaria during that time, but I think my family would’ve been more jealous about that than me sitting and digging in the dirt in the Balkans. And I was in a soul-sucking job, and my anxiety was a million times worse than it’s been in years, and… let’s just not judge my poor little sans-prefrontal cortex baby brain for the illogical decisions it made during a fifteen month trauma-state. Let’s just be glad I’ll have gotten to check TWO bucket-list items off of my list so young, rather than one!)
My dad died in December of 2019. Those two years I’d been banking on to do self-exploration and those selfish early-twenties things (like jet-setting off to Alaska and Hawaii), I’d instead spent remaking myself and we’d spent remaking our reality. But there was still time. Okay, maybe I couldn’t get to them before I turned 25. Big whoop! As long as I got to them by 25. As long as I could get both in by my next birthday, it would still count as achieving the goal, I’d just had to alter it slightly because of the context. I would just have to make it a priority
So I started planning. Nothing solid, just figuring out which trip would be better for which break.
I turned 25.
The week before I turned 25, the world shut down.
Hawaii was out of the question. Alaska was such a long flight to be on with strangers to then not have a safe place to hide away once I got there.
Once COVID hit, I had to drop the goal entirely. I turned to other things. I started visiting friends. I only did two trips before the vaccines were widely available, and then spent most of 2021 and 2022 continuing to stick to visiting friends rather than venturing off to new places when COVID regulations still effected many opening hours or reservation requirements well into 2022.
Luckily, I had two friends now who lived in Arkansas, so in the meantime I continued to work toward the goal by well and truly visiting Arkansas.
And then, finally, on the eve of my 29th birthday, with COVID regulations now well and truly eased, my family’s money stabile, and my sister’s schedule more flexible than it was during the last year when she lived in Baltimore, I finally decided to recommit to the goal. 50 states before I turn 30. Not the original goal, but still impressive. My PhD advisor has said that his parents in their seventies are working toward the same goal, though they’re not quite as far as me.
And today, we touch down in Alaska, state number 49.
It’s the second to last state for all of us, which is part of why it’s taken so long. I probably could’ve gotten both states in between Fall of 2022 and now. But with all of us so close, my mom insisted on visiting them together. We chose Alaska first because it made more sense to go during the summer.
We’ll be spending just about eight days here, taking buses and trains and boats, seeing the water and mountains and cities. It’s a short trip for such a big place, and we’ll barely scratch the surface. But once we’ve been here together, we can come back again separetely and each see more of what we want to see.
Just about two hours until our plane lands! I can’t wait to share our adventures with you!
WANDERING 