Not Flying Over Part 1 - Wisconsin

We began our journey at London City - not the most conventional starting point for a transatlantic flight but the origin of BA's flight 001, the number previously used for Concorde flights. With just 32 all Business Class seats the A318 stops at Shannon on the way out for refuelling (direct on the return), where you all disembark and walk through the airport to clear US immigration and customs. Back in the air after only 50 minutes you then arrive at JFK essentially as a domestic flight. Out of the airport very quickly in a taxi to La Guardia in time to catch a flight to Madison Wisconsin 6 hours earlier than the one we had booked (didn't dare book the earlier connection with only an hour and 40 minutes between including the change of airport!). So a really good start to the trip.

Having arrived and duly ticked the Wisconsin box, what did we make of it. Well for starters Madison doesn't seem very representative of the state in general. The state capital and second largest city has government and university as its two largest employers. It feels like a relatively cosmopolitan and young city (lots of students do that for a place) which is in marked contrast to our observation of an overwhelmingly series of monocultural farming communities, being one of the great prairie states. 

 And of course, birthplace and long-time home of Frank Lloyd Wright, the doyen of American architects, whose family home of Taliesin about 35 miles from Madison is a must-see. Madison has some history too -the State Capitol (a mini-version of the Capitol in Washington DC) would be worth a visit.

Fact - Wisconsin is a place to be if you want to be out of contact - 35% battery use by 'No mobile signal' during one day. 

Travelling to Prairie du Chien, a historic trading post on the Mississippi found us following the Wisconsin river through extensive farmland and hunting country - the magazine rack at a coffee stop being evidence of the major interests of the area.

Prairie du Chien (where we met members of the Rotary Club on their charity golf day) had significant French interest in its early days but is now a rather sprawling strip along the river banks whose historic heart has been rather drowned by a surfeit of modern low-rise monstrosities. 
 




Villa Louis, formerly home to the Dousman family, a rich trading and railroad entrepreneurial dynasty, is definitely worth a visit though.

The Quest for the full 50

After a while away, I decided to start the blog up again, in honour of our first Convention visit for 3 years.  And so without further ado - the quest for the full 50
   

It all started a few years ago, probably after taking one of these "How many have you been to" things on Facebook and we realised quite how many of the US states we had already been to and how (relatively) few we had left to visit to complete all 50.

We were helped by having already visited Alaska on a cruise in the early 00s and the opportunity arose to capture the other outlier, Hawaii en route to the 2014 Rotary International Convention in Sydney (actually that enabled us to go round the world using only day flights - see earlier blog posts). At the point we had 16 to go and we had intended to pick off the New England states later that year but a broken ankle put paid to that.  However we did pick up Maine on a cruise in 2015.

We then also realised there was a theme to the vast majority of states we hadn't yet visited - most are what is known in the US as 'flyover' states, the vast swathes of middle America that are bypassed by most. And then we started to plot routes to capture them and found the incredible distances that would be required to be covered if we did them all by road. And then how difficult it us to visit them by air - the 'hub and spoke' system means it's impossible to fly commercially from state to adjacent state directly and ludicrously expensive via the nearest hub. So we will be doing some by train, but that's in the future.

This year we've made a start on some of the flyover states as a precursor to joining 40,000 others at the Rotary International  Convention in Atlanta.