The whole plane applauded when the Alaska Airlines crew member announced, "there's a woman in row 6 who is landing in her 50th state today, on the 4th of July."
Soon, I met a couple on the plane who went to their 50th state (in their case, Maine) for their 50th anniversary. Next, others on the plane invited me and my son to their holiday parties.
I've reached something that's aspirational to so many people -- only 2 percent of Americans get to all fifty states -- and it means a lot to me. But it's also turned some of my assumptions upside down.
Travel for me growing up was about going abroad. My father was a doctor who had built his life from nothing, and he wanted to give his daughter the things that had seemed impossibly far away to him as a boy: cathedrals, ruins, things far-flung in Europe, historic and elevated. I remember him standing proud at the airport gates, passports in hand, like he was handing me the whole world.
I have spent the rest of my life trying to earn that gift. As a journalist I've reported from places most people never see. As a traveler I've chased the unusual on purpose. I run marathons and rock climb, so discomfort in service of discovery is close to my favorite feeling. I was, in other words, exactly the kind of American my father raised me to be.
Here is a trend that describes a whole generation of us: passport prevalence. In 1990, the year of that first trip, roughly one in twenty Americans held a passport. Today it's close to one in two. In 2024, U.S. residents took a record 107.7 million trips abroad, nearly 54 million of them beyond Canada and Mexico. And the tilt is sharpest at the top: 91 percent of Americans earning above the median have been abroad, versus 66 percent below the median. We turned outward, all at once, in a single generation. It's a beautiful thing to want the wide world.
For me, it left a strange hole that I didn’t see until this past December. Atlas Obscura, the company I lead, launched a 50-state map where you log the states you've been to. I filled mine, expecting a proud number. I got 39. Thirty-nine, after a lifetime of chasing airports. I could find my way to Lisbon but hadn’t found my way to Idaho.
I am not alone in this, and we have the numbers. In a survey we ran this past fall with YouGov, 29 percent of Americans told us that visiting all 50 states has been a goal. Only 4 percent have reached 40 states. More than half have seen ten or fewer. The reasons people give are the honest ones: not enough time, too expensive. And the two states Americans most want to reach and haven't? Hawaii and Alaska. Hold onto that. I'll come back to it.
So I turned it into a quest: Visit my remaining eleven states before America's 250th birthday on July 4. And now that I’m standing here in my fiftieth state, I want to make the case for why you should launch your own quest. Not as a patriotic statement. The anniversary has gotten loud and polarized, and I'm not here for that fight. The case is simpler and older. Know your country. Whatever your politics, know the ground you're standing on. And the only way to know a place is to go there, in real life, and do something memorable.
Meet a person whose name you'll remember. Learn a piece of history that changes what you thought you knew. Eat the food where it's actually from. Stand in front of the art, and the nature, and let a place be stranger and bigger than the version in your head. That's the difference between a map you've colored in and a map you've lived.
Charles Kuralt spent 25 years driving America's back roads for CBS, and he had a line I think about constantly: that the interstate had made it possible to cross the whole country without seeing it. He also said that if you only read the papers you'd think the nation was on fire, but you don't get that impression on the back roads, where people quietly care about the place and wish it well. John Steinbeck understood it too. At 58, one of the greatest American novelists alive climbed into a camper truck he named Rocinante and drove off to rediscover a country he'd realized he no longer knew. If Steinbeck needed to go looking, the rest of us do too.
Here is some of what I found when I went looking.
In Sparta, Wisconsin, I walked through the mold graveyard behind a company called FAST, which makes the giant fiberglass statues you've passed a thousand times without thinking. The Big Boys. The dinosaurs. The enormous ice cream cones. Out back, the used molds sit in rows in a field, hollow and ghostly, the negative space of American roadside icons. It was creepy and beautiful and it stirred something I wasn't expecting. I was standing among the country's discarded imagination. Even the waste moved me. That's the thing nobody warns you about experiencing wonder. It doesn't only live in the postcard version. Sometimes it's in the back lot.
In Commerce, Oklahoma, I stood with my eleven-year-old son in front of a small white house where a father named Mutt Mantle engineered his son into a switch-hitter in a yard so small that clearing the house was a home run. That son was Mickey Mantle.
Then I drove us a few miles up the road to Picher, a town the EPA dissolved because years of mining left it too toxic to live in. My son asked if we could go faster, if we could leave. We stayed. I told him what I tell myself: that seeing a place means seeing all of it, including what's hard. Later I learned that Mutt Mantle worked those mines, and died at 40 of the disease their dust causes. Two places on the same map, a few minutes apart, connected by more than road. Most people who visit Mickey's house never drive to Picher. They were there. They missed it.
In Alliance, Nebraska, I got up before dawn and drove to a remote field to stand alone inside Carhenge, a full-scale Stonehenge built out of 38 vintage American cars painted gray. A man named Jim Reinders built it in 1987 as a memorial to his father. I didn't know that until I was standing in it. And I thought of my own father, who once stood with me at the real Stonehenge in England and asked a question I've carried my whole life: who is the richer, the person who crossed the world to see it, or the person who came upon it with no longing and no plan? You have to seek Carhenge out. Alliance is not on the way to anywhere. It rewards the people who come looking.
And in Idaho, my 49th state, I hired a driver named Chris to take me out to a giant potato east of Boise. The road turned to dried mud and got worse, and we got lost together, two strangers solving a problem. That's the part I'll never forget. Chris, it turned out, has been to all 50 states – by accident. Layovers, a plane touching down, a state acquired. He told me, unprompted, that he was jealous of my quest, because he had no memories attached to any of his own. "I don't have memories of all those states like you do," he said. He'd lived in Idaho for years and had never once driven out to see the absurd landmark in his own backyard. You can arrive somewhere a hundred times and never once be there.
Which brings me here. To Alaska. State number fifty.
I did not come for the cruise-ship postcard. Fresh off the plane, my son and I drove out to Eklutna, up the Glenn Highway from Anchorage, to a graveyard behind a small Russian Orthodox church where more than a hundred spirit houses stand over the dead. They are the size of dollhouses, painted in colors that have marked each family for generations, a blend of Athabascan and Orthodox tradition going back centuries. And here is the part that stopped me: they are meant to fall apart. In Athabascan belief, what the Earth gives must be allowed to return, so no one repaints them, no one props them up. The memorial is designed to fade. A tradition built around letting go.
The sign at the entrance says Chin'an, Gu Ninyu, which means: "Thank you, you came here." (And isn't that the point --- coming here.)
We next went by a library on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus that, for years, would let you check out a dead animal the way you'd check out a book. Furs, skulls, a mounted owl. The only library of its kind in the country. I've wanted to do that since I visited a taxidermy shop in a Wyoming town called Hulett, where I first understood that wonder is often just someone saying, look at this. I drove the Seward Highway along Turnagain Arm, one of only about 60 places on Earth where the incoming tide stacks into a wall of water and comes up the channel all at once. Captain Cook named it in frustration, when it refused to be the passage he wanted. Turn Again.
And we ended up at a ribs bbq hosted by two Atlas Obscura readers who have been emailing with me throughout my quest, reminding me that when I come to Alaska, I'm welcome to come by. (Yes, my whole journey has been fueled by your emails -- your community tips.)
It was light all night here in Anchorage.
In the morning, I'm getting in a kayak and paddling out among glaciers. Ice older than every cathedral my father ever showed me. It turns out the far-flung, historic, elevated thing he wanted for me was here the whole time. It was always here.
As I close this quest out, I have to admit that it was not all easy, and I want to say so plainly. Eleven states in six months, in my free time, around a job that already keeps me on planes, as a mother of three. A health scare and emergency surgery pushed my Alaska arrival back three weeks. For a while I wondered if I'd finish in time for the 250th, or have to admit defeat at 49. Health gets in the way. Work gets in the way. Life gets in the way. I know.
So I made it work the way anyone can. I batched the states near each other to hold down the cost. I went to the parts that fit around everything else, rather than a grand best-of tour of each one. And nearly every place I stopped came off the Atlas Obscura map, which meant nearly all of them were free, or close to it. In the survey Atlas Obscura ran this past fall with YouGov, people who said they want to go to all the states said that having too little time and not enough much money were the two reasons for not finishing. Real reasons.
Wonder, however, isn't something you need to buy. It's something you can choose to feel, and that's the gift of an Atlas Obscura quest. The molds in that Wisconsin field would have read as junk to someone else. To me, they were magic. I finished these states because I didn't overthink it. I barely planned. I showed up, took out my companion for wonder — the Atlas Obscura app — and let it carry me somewhere I never would have chosen. That was the whole method.
So the question I'm leaving you with isn't the one we usually ask each other. It isn't, “Have you been there?” It's, “Do you remember it? Did you meet someone? Did you learn something true? Did you stay long enough to let the light change?”
I'm not the traveler I was in December. And hitting fifty of fifty isn’t an end for me, it’s the signal to kick off a new quest, to soak up more.
See you out there.
