Light enough to travel

Over Columbus Day weekend in 2002, I traveled, by bus, from Washington D.C. to New Hampshire to campaign for Jeanne Shaheen. At some point during the trip, I realized that in that drive alone I'd visited seven new states. I was 22, had previously only visited 15 states and the day seemed exceptional. Heady from the excitement of all the novel New Englandy things around me, I abruptly decided to visit all 50 states before my 30th birthday. Now, six years later, I have just eight remaining states to visit in the next eighteen months.

In honor of the anniversary of that momentus day, I've decided to start blogging about the states, state by state. I've decided to work through them in their order of admission to the union, in part because: 1) it makes sense from a storytelling perspective (the story starts, in a way, in Delaware, and I expect that the last two states I'll visit will be Hawaii and Alaska); 2) I've yet to visit three of the four states that start with the letter, "A"; and 3) if I wrote them posts in the order that I visited them, I'd have to start with my home state of South Dakota and that's a post I want to delay.