The Characters

I suppose it makes sense to begin my narrative by introducing the main characters; after all, what is a story without the characters that drive it? Luckily, the list is short, as there only four of us in my family:

Myself
I suppose it makes the most sense to start with the protagonist. For me, this journey began when I was about six years old, and culminated just after my eighteenth birthday. Being only twenty years old as of this writing, an event which covers the course of twelve years of my life encapsulates more than half of my current existence, and nearly all of the part of my life which I have any concrete memories of. This journey is by far the most significant event in my life (except for perhaps one; however as that incident occurs much later and is closely tied to this narrative, it wouldn't do very well for me to spoil the ending for you all). I don't know what else there is to relate about myself, since I find myself to be an entirely uninteresting character (particularly compared to the rest of my family) and therefore I will turn to the more interesting and important in the cast of this drama.

Brother
Brother, as I will refer to him here in order to preserve some sense of anonymity (and also because he is so very shy that I doubt he would like it to be made known that I will be writing so much about him), is about three years younger than I am (two and a half, really, but who's counting?). I can describe him best as immature, semi-neurotic, and fairly socially inept. One thing, and in my opinion the only thing (though most people will probably disagree with that), that Brother and I have in common is that we are both intensely emotional. I don't mean that we are the sort of people who cry at every movie we ever watch and love to celebrate even the minutest of achievements; what I mean is that we both feel things very strongly. Maybe a better description would be that we are both passionate. It takes a lot for me to really care about someone, but once I do, it's a big deal (like, I-would-take-a-bullet-for-you big deal). Brother is the same way (as far as I can tell. But I'm almost positive that I know him better than anyone else in the world does, so I'm pretty confident when I say that). What makes us different is that Brother doesn't know how to handle his emotions. Somewhere along the line, his emotional development kind of stopped, and even though he's eighteen now he probably has the emotional capability of a twelve year old. Coupled with the fact that he probably has an IQ of about 175 (he hasn't been tested though, so it's probably higher), it means that Brother is a difficult person for people to like. The few who take the time to get to know him, however, are lucky, because Brother is one of the coolest people I know. He is probably one of my three favorite people in the universe (but nobody tell him that. If he knows that I secretly think he's totally awesome, it will ruin my big sister image).

Dad
Dad is the reason this journey existed. When he was a kid, his grandparents lived in Ohio. In the 1960s, the only way to get to Ohio from California was to drive. So one day my dad was thinking about the memories he had of his family of seven driving across the country to visit his grandparents in Ohio, he realized that he had been to a lot of states. That made Dad decide that he wanted to visit all fifty (I believe the inspiration came from a newspaper article, which was stapled to the wall of our garage for years, about a man who golfed fifty courses in fifty states in fifty days). I think Dad was probably also thinking about how great his family road trips used to be (because once you are removed from an event by a number of years, you forget how much you hated being crammed in the back of a station wagon for eight hours at a time, and all you remember is how much fun you had that one time your family stopped in Yellowstone for a day) and he wanted Brother and I to have the same experience (which I can totally understand, because when I have kids I'm going to take them to all the places my parents took me, and then some).

Mother
Mother is the reason Brother and I were included in Dad's journey. Mother could never let Dad have all the fun (when I was about three, Dad had to go on a business trip to The Netherlands, and Mother made him take her along, because there was no way that she was going to let Dad go gallivanting across Europe without her. They took Brother too, because he was only six months old and still breastfeeding. But they left me at home. Which I am neither going to forget nor forgive.). As soon as Mother heard that Dad wanted to visit every state, she had to be included in that, because it sounded like a cool idea. So Mother made Dad start with the states she had never been to, rather than the states he had never been to, because Mother didn't want Dad to get to all fifty states before her. (You may be wondering why Dad gets to be Dad but Mother is Mother. It isn't that I like Dad more or anything, it's just that on paper, Father sounds way too formal and Mom sounds way too childish.)

Traditions

Rules, no matter how much you may dislike them, are the fabric of our society. Traffic rules keep people from getting into accidents. The death penalty keeps you from killing your crazy neighbor who let their dog poop on your lawn again this morning. Similarly, once my family had made the explicit goal of visiting all fifty states, we needed to determine what, exactly, would constitute a visit. Obviously, it would not be enough to simply visit the airport in Dallas for half an hour and call that visiting Texas. All airports look the same, and there is no way that visiting an airport allows you to see the individual flavor of a state, which really was the point of the entire quest: to really see our country. Besides, if all we needed to do was stop off at the airport for half an hour, visiting every state would only take one summer, albeit on very expensive summer. So, we instituted criteria for visiting a state. In order to have actually visited a state, you must have fulfilled at least one of the following criteria:

 1. Visit a National Park

2. Buy gum AND use the bathroom (yes, you have to do both of these things. No, you cannot do one or the other.)

3. Eat lunch

4. Spend the night

Essentially, the requirement is that you contribute in some way to the economy of the state you are visiting. Obviously, there are other ways to contribute to the economy of a state, but these were the specific ones we came up with. Also, you are actually required to see something of the state.

We also had a few traditions that we kept through our journey.

 

 First, we had state chips. For each trip, we bought a bag of chips. Whenever we entered a state, we each ate one of the chips from the bag. As the trip progresses, the chips get more and more disgusting as they get staler and staler.

We always play the license plate game. It is surprisingly difficult to find all fifty plates, even in the span of a three week trip in which you drive from California to Iowa and back (traveling to 15 states, no less). Particularly difficult to find are Hawaii and Alaska (for obvious reasons) and also Delaware (for less obvious reasons). I believe (though I am sure my family will correct me if I am wrong) that we have found all fifty license plates twice out of something like ten years of playing this game.

The Story

When I was about seven, my dad had an idea. He wanted to revolutionize our family vacations and give them a purpose. So he decided: he wanted to visit all fifty states by the time he turned fifty. At the time, he was probably forty. This gave him about ten years in which to visit every single state in the union. At the time, we had visited seven states, as we had taken a trip to New England the year before. This left forty three states. The summer vacations that followed were a whirlwind of tourist traps, eight hour drives, national parks, iconic locales, and memories I will never forget. While my memories will never do the trips justice, I find that now, two years after the completion of our journey, that I am somewhat nostalgic for the quest. This goal of visiting all fifty states literally defined my life, and now that it is over I miss the anticipation, the idea of working towards something. That is why I decided to create this blog, to attempt to recall my journey from beginning to end, and see just how far I have come.