50 States

It seemed like everyone had a state sticker map on the side of their rig, filling in slowly. We caved to peer pressure and bought one for our first Heritage Glen. It is the kind you peel and fill in one state at a time. Back then we were not chasing all fifty. We figured we would color in the states close to home or that we happened to visit and leave it at that, especially since every fifty-state map hits the same wall eventually. Hawaii. You cannot point the truck west and keep driving across the Pacific. Then came our first real cross-country run out to Yellowstone in 2014, and somewhere out past Iowa the map stopped being a decoration and started being a question. How many of these could we actually get? We drove home thinking, for the first time, maybe all of them.

From there it became a goal, with one stubborn rule. Setting foot in a state did not count, and driving through did not count. You had to spend the night there in the RV. It took more than a decade (thanks to the COVID delay), but as of last summer it is official. We have overnighted in all fifty states, Hawaii included. We have not written them all up here yet, not even close, and plenty of those stories still live in our hearts, minds, and camera rolls, instead of on the website. We will fix that over time, state by state, including the promised tale of how we finally pulled off Hawaii.