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.