50 states in a week

Barry Stiefel visited all 50 states in a weeklong vacation in 1998. He left work on a Friday at 5PM and showed up for work at 8:30AM on the Monday after next. It might have been a route tailored for efficiency (including rental drop-off and roundtrip flights from CA – AK and CA – HI), but it’s a beautiful idea nonetheless.

For years I’d been hearing about Montana’s policy of no daytime speed limits and had planned to quickly cover a lot of ground.  I had planned to get in to Montana by Saturday evening, and then floor it all the way across, going one hundred miles an hour, the way God and highway engineers intended. Unfortunately, I got very delayed in Idaho, with two lane roads and slow traffic and one particular Idaho State Trooper.  By the time I got to Butte, Montana, at 9:00 PM, I was exhausted and decided to get a hotel room, figuring I could make up some miles the next day.  Unfortunately, I should have remembered that when you need to average 1,100 miles per day, it’s hard to “make up miles the next day”.  I grabbed a room at the Best Western.  Before going to my room, I asked the clerk in the hotel about how fast you can really go in Montana without getting a ticket, and she said “I go about 90, and my girlfriend, she always goes 100, and we never get pulled over”.  At this point I was starting to really like Montana.

There’s something romantic about going 100MPH through a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere. I probably couldn’t afford to eat a speeding ticket of that magnitude but I’d settle for ~85MPH.

I caught a 2:00 PM flight to Honolulu, Hawaii (#49), where I took a cab out to Waikiki Beach, where I realized that I had forgotten to bring my swimming trunks.  I dashed in to one of the ubiquitous local tourist stores and bought a pair of Hawaiian board shorts and a towel and changed in their storeroom.  I swam for an hour, bobbing in the warm water and watching the surfers.  I thought long and hard about moving there and just surfing all day.  Nothing soothes the tremors of road fever better than a soak in the warm, clear waters of the Pacific.  But I had a plane to catch!  I changed back in to my clothes in the tourist store, and then had dinner in a hotel.  I saw that they were shooting off fireworks down at the next beach.  It reminded me that it was the Fourth of July.

This trip is more of a grind than anything else, but I’ve been attracted to that sort of regimen for personal projects before, so I can still find some appeal in it. If I were to do this, I would take 14 days out of my life just be able to hit both coasts, sleep in motels, run around naked in the desert, meet some characters, and take amazing photographs.