I have written numerous times before about my somewhat abortive quest to visit all 50 states.
I honestly thought I had a chance to make it. I have actually lived in 10 different states and during my years as a sportswriter I covered events in states I might never have seen otherwise. States like South Dakota, Idaho and Montana, to name just three.
In 2017, I added No. 46 when we were visiting relatives in Minnesota. I had been to that state before, spending four hours between flights in the Minneapolis airport, but this time we were staying in Alexandria, Minn., and I took an afternoon and drove up I-94, crossing over into Fargo, N.D.
I had actually figured North Dakota was one of the two least likely states I would visit. The just wasn’t anything there I wanted to see, other than the possibility of riding across the state on the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle.
I still haven’t done that, and I still haven’t been to Alaska (my least likely state) either. But I have been to Fargo.
It’s funny, though. I came of age in Northern Virginia, and in 1989 I was covering University of Nevada basketball. The team’s star was guard Darrell Owens, who grew up in Baltimore. On one of the road trips, we were in Moscow, Idaho, and I remember asking him if he had ever imagined playing ball in Idaho.
We had a good laugh over that.
I don’t know if I will get to 49 states by hitting Wisconsin, Arkansas and Mississippi. Running the table with Alaska has become highly unlikely, but that was always just sort of a gimmick anyway. There are plenty of places I would rather see in states I have already visited.
In Minnesota, for example. I’ve been to the Twin Cities and out to Alexandria, but when I was listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” a few minutes ago, it reminded me of how much I would love to see the big lake they call Gitche Gumee, also known as Lake Superior.
For that matter, I have only seen one of the five Great Lakes — Lake Erie in Ohio.
I’m not going to bore you with something I would like to see in all the states I’ve listed, but I’ll manage a few. Actually, as Little Feat sang in their song “Willin’,” I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah. I’ve even been standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, as Glenn Frey sang in “Take it Easy.”
But I haven’t seen the Grand Canyon on the Petrified Forest in Arizona, just as for all the wonderful things I saw in 20 years of living in California, I never saw the coast north of Marin County.
I lived in Colorado for two years, and save for a short incursion into Rocky Mountain National Park west of Estes Park, I never saw the Rocky Mountains up close.
I’ve never seen Key West or the Everglades in Florida or the Pearl Harbor Memorial in Hawaii. I’ve been to Baton Rouge but not to New Orleans in Louisiana, and in fact the only place I ever saw the mighty Mississippi River was around St. Louis.
I’ve been to Montana twice, but only to Missoula and Bozeman. I’d like to see much more of Big Sky Country. I would like to see Taos in New Mexico and the Catskills in New York, Beaufort in South Carolina and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. I spent a week in Nashville in 1984 but never made it to Music Row.
I saw a lot of Texas in 2010, including towns with names like Eden, Heaven and Happy. I drove on I-10 in west Texas, the only place I’ve ever seen in America with speed limit signs of 90 mph.
Finally, I would like to see Yellowstone in Wyoming. The only place in that state I have visited was Laramie for a college football game in 1987.
At age 73, much of my traveling days, at least by car, are finished. For all the places I’ve mentioned, there aren’t really any it would hurt me not to see. New Orleans pre-Katrina would have been a big deal, but there’s really not much else.
I suppose if I had to pick one, I really wound love to ride the Empire Builder.
That would be fun.