Future Travels

Our family has eight states remaining to meet our goal of traveling to all 50 states before Trevor's 18th birthday. These include: Arkansas and Oklahoma (where we should have been for Christmas and New Year's), North and South Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Obviously, these locations are our priority for travel in the near future. In fact, we're hoping to visit all of them in the next 5 months. But if the pandemic taught me anything, it's that any number of things can derail the best laid plans. 

A secondary goal of ours has been to visit all of the capital cities during our travels. There are five capital cities we haven't visited, despite having been to the state. These include: Springfield (Illinois), Albany (New York), Augusta (Maine), Richmond (Virginia), and Tallahassee (Florida). They're a much lower priority than the states we haven't visited, but they're on my radar. On this map, the states whose capital cities we've visited are in blue. States we haven't visited at all (and thus, haven't been to their capitals either) are in pink. We've visited the purple states, but not their capital cities. I marked the approximate location of the capital cities so that you can see how near (or, in most cases, how far) they are from the states we still need to visit.  

There's a third category of places to visit on my long-term to-do list: cities I've never visited that interest me for one reason or another. At the top of that list is Memphis, Tennessee. We were supposed to fly into Memphis on Christmas Day and I had planned three days packed with a ton of cool places I really want to visit. It was heartbreaking to cancel that trip, especially knowing that when we rebooked the trip we wouldn't have time to do Memphis, since our priority would be Arkansas and Oklahoma. Other cities in this category include: Knoxville, Tennessee; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Cincinnati, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and three in California - Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, and Catalina Island. I've added them to the map in yellow. 

But wait.. there's more! Steve wants to visit all 63 of the National Parks. He had been to a couple dozen before we met, plus there are another 9 we've been to together, the most recent of which is Congaree. I'm happy to visit most of the rest of them with him, but not the ones that involve tiny airplanes and no services (or even trails) once you get there. Nope. Also nope. 

As you can see, there are a lot of places on my travel bucket list. And, of course, that's just in the United States! I have so many more places I want to see. That may have to be another post for another day.