Trains, Planes, Automobiles and Bicycles

A Milestone

A trip into the Deep South in mid-January marked a milestone of sorts for me.  As I passed through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana I was able to add three more states to the long list I have been able to visit in my lifetime.  When I crossed into Louisiana, it was state number 47.  I had not planned such an exploit earlier in my life, but my curiosity to see and learn more about the geography of the United States nudged me toward the achievement.  Though these southern states are not the most exciting ones geographically, this trip was still an interesting one.

How I Reached 47 States

Many readers may wonder what state is number 48?  I thought it would be fun to pass along a brief history of my six decades of travel and see how many readers could figure out which state has eluded me.

• Early on, my family, like so many folks living close to the East Coast traveled to the Jersey and Maryland shores.  Those years also included treks to our nation’s capital and New York City.
• My Aunt Bernadette invited me on a trip across the country in a motor home in 1973.  We visited the Gateway to the West in Saint Louis and followed a southern route to the Grand Canyon and on to Las Vegas (which is one of my least favorite cities).  We also traveled through Rocky Mountain National Park.
• Our family took the Auto Train to Florida the next summer, hitting all the East Coast states south of us.
• My epic cross-country bike trip was the summer after college graduation in 1978.  I took the Greyhound bus (not the most comfortable of rides) to Astoria, Oregon and rode my bike back to Altoona.  We followed the Columbia River and then went through the Northern Rockies, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park.  We followed US 20 much of the way across the Great Plains and into Chicago before riding on to Altoona.
• Bike racing trips took me to New England and Wisconsin during the summers from 1979 to 1983.
• A 1983 Geology class with Edinboro University took me across the United States to study the geology of the states which make up the “Four Corners.”
• Trips to several national conferences took me to Seattle, Washington in 2002 and San Francisco in 2005.  I took the train on both trips, making my first forays into those two West Coast states and several others in between.
• A decade ago, our family traveled north to visit the hometown of Civil War General Joshua Chamberlain and search for my younger son’s favorite animal, the moose.
• Which brings us to this most recent trip to the Deep South as I checked off states 45, 46 and 47.
  

What’s your guess?

It doesn’t seem possible through all that gallivanting that it was possible to miss one of the contiguous states, but I did indeed pass one up. So get out your thinking cap, a good atlas, the Amtrak national map and figure out what state I missed through all that traveling. I’ll give one more hint: I missed the state by just a few miles on one of the trips mentioned above.

E-mail me with your guess and I’ll recognize you in a future Earth Matters column as a geographic whiz if you can guess the right state.  Since I’m sure a few people will get the right answer, we’ll also add a tie-breaker.  What trip was it that I narrowly missed touching down in that last state?  Successful entrants will get a chance on a raffle to win a copy of my soon-to-be published book, Winding Roads, which chronicles the 1978 cross-country bike trip.