He Knew He Was Right

I'm enjoying watching a few friends near the completion of their National Park quests. Earlier this year, while traveling through the three Florida National Parks, it was likewise enjoyable but also encouraging talking to fellow travelers pursuing their own such journeys: a father and son were hitting their 40th, and one woman was at her penultimate with plans to finish in September. That's all great stuff to me.  These quests also lead to questions from interested observers. "What's the first  #NationalPark  you'll be visiting when this is over?", "What's your favorite National Park?", "What are your top 3/5/10?" These are some of the questions I see posted and get asked. With 44/62 seen, I don't know if it's fair to assemble such a list, but here's how I ranked the top 32 I've visited. Yeah, if I redid it, many spots could flip, but the top 4 or so are pretty well locked in, until one of the 18 I'm missing changes ...

Atop the Tri-State Peak in Cumberland Gap, where Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia meet Well, let's just cut to the chase. Five more state lines were traversed in 2021 and since I previously posted here. Two were crossed on my trip down to the Smokies in May, one when I went to the Cumberland Gap NHS and made it to the Tri-State Peak, and a second when I took a detour south to knock off NC–GA. Two more were crossed when I pushed a September road trip a bit farther north than prudence might dictate, but I did score AR–MO (an old near miss) and MO–OK. Finally, I got the AZ–CA monkey off my back in November, crossing that one on I-10 plus I-8 for good measure. Here's the list as of this January 9, 2022 posting (with the up-to-date list and details toward the end of this post): Alabama Florida Alabama Georgia Alabama Mississippi   ✅ Alabama Tennessee   ✅ Arizona California   ✅ Arizona Colorado   ✅🥾 Arizona New Mexico   ✅🥾 Arizona Nevada   ✅ Arizona  Utah ...

When I posted this at the beginning of 2020, the pandemic hadn't cut into any travel plans and I hadn't really identified paths to getting to the last bunch of state border crossings I needed. However, after crossing a few more in the last year, being close but not too close to a few others I was missing, and especially talking to more folks interested in this idea, well, the quest has gained some traction. One of the things that remains both fun and frustrating about this venture is how recently it came into my consciousness. Decades of road tripping led me so close to some of these state borders I'm still missing. If I had any inkling this would be something I'd end up pursuing, at least another half dozen crossings would have been completed. But it's also a reason to go back to some of these areas, which works well with other travel goals. After all, I keep finding more things to do in many states—NPS sites, ballparks, breweries, etc.—so I know I'll be plann...

Since my last post focused on all of the interstate borders, I figure it would make sense for my next one to focus squarely within the borders of my Empire State. Actually, that post is worth a revisit, since I've crossed a few state lines since then, but like many of us I've been focusing on more local travel and that national one can wait for now. I'm sure there's a more direct way to share a Google map in Blogger, but this quick screen-grab upload should suffice. Even before the pandemic, the idea of spending time in each of New York's 62 counties had struck me. At the time of posting this, I'm up to 55 of them. Drive throughs don't count; only those where I've seen or done something like visited a National Park Service site, a New York State Park, attended a sporting event, etc, count for my purposes. My first attempt at keeping tabs of my New York travels was with a simple outline view of the counties, where I put a checkmark in each one as I recall...