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.