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One thing that has always intrigued me was all the places your driveway leads you. Like most people, when I get to the end of my little strip of concrete I have to decide, do I turn left, or do I turn right. Most days I turn right, arriving half an hour later at work. I have made that trip thousands of times.
My driveway, and your driveway, can lead many more places, in fact it can lead to virtually every corner of the United States, and it all starts with how you decide to turn at the end of the driveway.
In 50 years of driving I figure I have driven around 750,000 miles, those miles and dozens of flights have taken me to all the corners of the country, until finally a few months ago I joined the 50 states club when the turn at the end of my driveway took me to Wisconsin.
The 50 states club is not really a club per se. Although it does have rules. The biggest, generally accepted rule is that airports do not count. You must step on the earth and breathe the air of the state. I have done this. Others believe that you must do something meaningful, or have a meal. Those people are just making it too complicated. My rule is simply that I visited the state and walked around a bit. I have spent 15 minutes in some states and 50 years in others.
As a child I camped up and down the eastern seaboard with my family, camping in a tent, on the ground. you almost become one with the states. As an adult, I have revisited most of the eastern states many times.
I have also driven to the west coast, twice. When you do this, you pass through what many call the fly over states, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and others. You haven't lived until you spend the night sleeping in your car at a Kansas rest stop or tried to get your car fixed at a New Mexico gas station.
Those two trips allowed me to knock out a lot of states at an early age. Work helped me fill in some others. I'm not sure I would have gone to Marshall, Minn., if I hadn't visited our sister newspaper, The Independent, there. Marshall is near the western edge of the state, so when I got there early, I took a side trip to South Dakota.
A different trip took me to the Minot Daily News. On the northern edge of North Dakota, Minot is home to a giant Air Force and missile base, built there to protect us from threats from the north. Minot is on the Great Plains, an area that is as flat as any I've seen. Odd to me was the fact that the city was sliced into two by a valley formed by the Souris River. Once you reach the top of the hill though, it is flat as far as you can see.
The trip to Minot got me thinking that I was pretty close to all the states. A later trip with my family took us to Colorado and Yellowstone to the north. While driving past Laramie, Wyo., we passed the same Motel 6 I had stayed at in 1982 when I had driven I-70 all the way across the country. Yellowstone sits in the corner of Wyoming next to Idaho and Montana. A short side trip into Montana gave us views of both a herd of bison crossing a river and a black bear crossing the highway.
I got the 49th state last summer when my family and I visited Alaska and got to see firsthand the magic that is the state.
I think my wife Lori and I have passed the love of travel down to our now adult children, who now do the lion’s share of planning on the adventures we take, and have traveled much farther than we have.
I'm up for any trip as long as I get to be with the people I care about. Just tell me what to pack and let me know which direction to turn when I get to the end of my driveway.
Art Smith is online manager of The Marietta Times and The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com