Traveling the Country

I recently ran across a kind of quiz on Facebook that suggested identifying the states you’d lived in and those you’d visited. I started adding my icons right away. I knew the states where I’d lived – where my dad was stationed when I was little and where I moved as an adult.

The traveling got a little more difficult.

My mom and me in New Mexico in 1966.

I knew we’d driven west when I was a year old, when we went from visiting family in Pensacola to my dad’s new duty station in Seattle (we lived in Kirkland). Years later, my mom and I drove out Interstate 10 to Los Angeles so I could go to a Star Wars convention, and then we took a little bit more northern route back, visiting Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, along with a few other points.

I remembered a trip we took when I was maybe in middle school to visit some of my parents’ old friends, but I had to call my mom to find out exactly where we went. She couldn’t remember some of the details, either, but we each pulled up a map of the U.S. on our computers and figured it out.

I had to rely on my mom more for some of the traveling we did out west when I was little. We had a tent and my mom’s parents came out with their trailer, and we went to a bunch of national parks. I’ve already shared the story about the bear. We ran into a little confusion with some of the bigger parks, like Yellowstone, that crosses state lines. Between the two of us, though, we think we have an accurate list, although it’s possible I’ve been to a state or two I can’t recall.

So here’s the list, and in the future I’ll try to work on something similar for European countries.

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Nebraska
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming