Category: United States

Landing in New Orleans marked an exciting achievement: I had visited all 50 states! It’s been a fun project. Once I got down to the last ones, there were many that I had been either avoiding or ambivalent to for years that I found much more interesting than I’d expected. I’ll do a proper reflection soon.

Once I got down to my last 12 or so, I determined which one I was saving for last, and that was clearly Louisiana. New Orleans is a great city for a celebration. In fact, this weekend wasn’t just a celebration for the culmination of my goal – it was also my friend Angeli’s birthday!

We had a weekend full of food and drinks and sightseeing planned. New Orleans is a peak foodie city. There are tons of regional specialties, like po’ boys and gumbo and jambalaya and beignets, and we went to a pretty wide variety of restaurants, from incredibly fancy to hole in the wall. Some highlights were Jewel of the South, which was Angeli’s official birthday dinner and was more fine dining; Sun Chong, the Korean-Creole fusion restaurant with some inventive spins on the flavors, and of course, the beignets at Café du Monde, which were everything I had hoped for. In truth, though, we didn’t have a bad meal the entire time we were in the city.

It’s also got great nightlife. I loved the live music that was found at a lot of bars, especially on Frenchmen Street. We avoided Bourbon Street mostly, which seemed like a much more raucous vibe, but there are a lot of other options with good cocktails and more relaxed vibes.

Mostly, though, we walked around a lot. Explored the city. I will say, I was surprised at how small the French Quarter is relative to the total area of the city. In my mind, when I pictured New Orleans, it was most of the city, but there are a ton of other neighborhoods beyond it.

Something interesting we came across while we were there – the Keep IV Waste signs. We saw them everywhere. On buildings, on cars, on trash cans. As it turns out, there is an ongoing battle over waste management in New Orleans, and particularly in the French Quarter. From what I could glean based on a few articles I read, the county went through a search for a new waste management company and picked one, Henry Consulting. But before they could get started, there were some contractual issues to resolve. In the meantime, while Henry Consulting worked through all of that, the city put together an emergency contract for IV Waste to act as a stopgap. But IV Waste turned out to be amazing, making the city cleaner than it had ever been, and so when the emergency contract period was up, the city rallied behind IV Waste and asked the city to keep them in place over Henry Consulting. It’s a very interesting local drama. Do you know how good a waste management company has to be for citizens to go to bat for them like that?

In August of last year, it was the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I ended up watching a documentary about it, called When the Levees Broke, which was absolutely devastating but a very worthwhile watch. It left me with a lot of feelings, but the real takeaway from it was how incredibly resilient New Orleans is. I know people say that it isn’t what it used to be and that it probably never will be, but I think it’s incredible that it’s been rebuilt to the level that it is today. I remember when it happened, but I was young, and I wasn’t necessarily watching the news regularly and understanding the real effects on the people there. After seeing what happened to the city with fresh eyes, I am amazed at the city that stands there today.

We did venture out of New Orleans proper in order to visit the bayou. I was really excited for this tour! It was great to get out and see a bit more of Louisiana, and we got to see so many animals up close and personal.

It’s wild to get that close to alligators. I’ve grown up with a healthy amount of fear of them, since they are very much not native to anywhere I’ve ever lived, and so it’s not an animal that I was ever taught how to interact with safely. I don’t think I register as a snack for them now that I’m not a child, but as the original predator that hasn’t evolved in millions of years, they do still activate that primal instinct.

It was also strange to see all the alligator heads that you could buy at the gift shop. A little jarring, to be honest.

We also took a ghost tour of the city, which was interesting. The guide was great and very knowledgeable about the local history, telling us all kinds of dark stories about what had happened in the city over the years.

We also walked around the neighborhood of Treme, which is generally considered the oldest Black neighborhood in the United States. It was founded in the 1810s and has been a huge part of New Orleans’ cultural history. I found its colorful houses so charming!

We also walked in the downtown area, where there’s a nice walkway along the Mississippi River. No matter how many times I’ve crossed it, I’m always amazed by the scale of it. The transition between the French Quarter and the skyscrapers is strangely abrupt, going from one to the other in course of essentially a block.

In some ways, Louisiana was an interesting choice for my last state because it is so unique. The French influence isn’t as strong anywhere else in the United States, and Louisiana does still have a fundamentally different legal system than the other states in the union. There was something nice about that. Even after going to 49 other states, there are still new things to discover!

New Orleans was a great spot for a long weekend, and an even better one to finish off my goal of going to all fifty states! I will be thinking about the food we had there for a long time.

Welcome to Mississippi, the penultimate state on my journey to 50 states! Phil and I flew to the Golden Triangle Regional Airport, which was a bit of a stressful journey because it was in the midst of the government shutdown and this was the weekend where they started cutting the numbers of flights that airports were allowed to run in an attempt to keep everything from coming to a screeching halt. I had to switch to an earlier flight to Atlanta to get there, and my flight home got cancelled and switched to a route that took me through Charlotte, but I did successfully make it to Mississippi and back.

A funny thing happens when you tell people that you’re almost done going to all 50 states. They inevitably ask which ones, and then weigh in on what they thing of those. I got a lot of people telling me that a certain state would be “nicer than you expect,” including West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Unfortunately, no one said that for Mississippi. Instead, in Arkansas, a man I met at a bar winced and told me, “maybe you should just drive through Mississippi really fast and count it that way.”

….ominous.

Here’s what I will say. I don’t think Starkville is the nicest town in America, and probably not even the nicest one in Mississippi (which is probably Oxford, from what I’ve heard). But the experience of going to a football game at Mississippi State was awesome. It was everything I wanted in a proper, Southern, college football experience. The stadium is intense and loud. The fans bring in cowbells and are capable of producing an absolutely deafening noise. They were playing Georgia, who was pretty unfazed (and ultimately won), but I can imagine it could be pretty intimidating as an opposing team. I had a great time.

After the game, we headed out of Mississippi and up to Memphis. Memphis, like Mississippi, has an interesting reputation. I’ve come across discussions online that make it sound like an active war zone. In fairness, it does have the highest crime rate in America, and while the next few positions are disputed across different lists based on how the various statistics are weighted, Memphis always seems to take the #1 spot. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got there.

I loved Memphis. As anyone could tell you, I love a misunderstood place. Personally, I didn’t feel unsafe there, even after Phil left and I was walking around downtown on my own. And I think the history and culture surrounding Memphis is top tier.

During my various travels across the South, I’ve been going to a lot of museums and monuments focused on Civil Rights. I think this one was the best one I’ve done. It was comprehensive, it felt as though all of the exhibits had been refreshed recently, and decidedly NOT fun fact, it is the site of MLK’s assassination. While that is a pretty bleak moment in history, they built a section where you could go into the hotel room and learn about the assassination, which was really well done.

Of course, the most important part of my impromptu walking tour of Memphis was the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid. You know I love a weird place, and this is one of the weirder ones out there. Depending on how you measure, it is the tenth-tallest pyramid in the world. It was built in 1991 as an arena, and used to host all kinds of events, including but not limited to basketball games, concerts, WWE, and high school graduations. After a attempt to turn it into an NBA arena ended in abject failure, it was taken over by Bass Pro Shops and developed into some sort of sporting goods fever dream. I didn’t go inside, but I was excited to see it in the context of the Memphis skyline.

I went to one other museum in Memphis, which was the Rock n’ Soul Museum. Memphis is inexorably linked with Elvis – I didn’t quite have enough time to do a proper tour of Graceland, although I certainly would have if I’d had one more day in Memphis. I spent a lot of time on the musical history when I visited Nashville, and it seemed only right to give Memphis similar consideration. My favorite part was the audio guide, which…. if you didn’t want to listen the explanations, you could go find a jukebox and have it play you some of the best and most significant music that was produced in Memphis, which was an awesome soundtrack to my visit.

One other quirky place to talk about in Memphis, which was the Peabody Hotel! Phil assured me that it was “the only place to stay in Memphis,” and as usual, was correct. The Peabody is historic. It opened in 1925 and it is best known for the tradition of the ducks.

The ducks were brought to the hotel sometime in the 1930s by the General Manager, after a hunting trip where he and some friends had taken along call ducks. When they got back, they left the ducks in the fountain, where they quickly became fixtures of the hotel. Later, a bellhop who had been a trainer at the circus decided to up the ante, and he trained the ducks to march into the hotel lobby in the morning and back up to the penthouse in the eventing, where they sleep. It’s so charming! It was very chaotic to go and watch in person, since it felt like the whole hotel was lining up to try to see the ducks, but I’m glad I got to see them.

All in all, a solid weekend. And the following weekend, I had a big celebration planned – I was heading to New Orleans for my 50th state!

At the beginning of this year, I decided that this would be the year that I finished visiting all 50 states. I had started the year with Alabama, and then put the project on pause through the summer because I refuse to go to the south in the overwhelming heat of July or August. But as it turned to fall, it was time to tackle my last three: Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana!

I have been specifically saving Louisiana for last. Once I got to my last ten or so, I looked at what I had left and picked that as the one that I was the most interested in, and the one that felt most like a celebration. And it ended up working out perfectly, because one of my friends decided to celebrate her birthday in New Orleans this November! It gave me a deadline, and so I set out to visit Arkansas and Mississippi before that weekend.

And as luck would have it, this dovetailed really well with a different travel goal that my friend Phil was working on! He has been working on going to a football game at all of the SEC stadiums, and so we decided to join forces for these penultimate states.

We flew into the Northwest Arkansas airport in Bentonville. This region of Arkansas has a lot of investment in it, because this is where Walmart is headquartered. The airport was modern and beautiful, and I was pretty impressed with Fayetteville as well.

I found Fayetteville quite charming. There were cute local cafés and restaurants, and boutique shops, and I went to the farmer’s market as well when it was running. It was a nice town.

On Saturday morning, we made our way through the University of Arkansas campus to watch the game! They were playing Auburn. The weather was not great, raining intermittently, but the game itself was good. Not a good ending, if you were an Arkansas fan, but Phil and I didn’t care about the result and the game was interesting up until the end.

The next day, we drove down to Little Rock to see a bit more of the state. The timing wasn’t ideal, unfortunately – it was during the government shutdown, so some of the things that I was interested in doing in Little Rock were closed because they’re run by the National Park Service.

It was still raining, this time much harder than it had been at the game. Phil and I walked from our hotel over to the Bill Clinton Presidential Library, which we thought would be open but apparently that is also impacted by a government shutdown. So instead we walked around the grounds for a bit and headed back to the hotel in defeat.

All in all, Fayetteville was much cooler than Little Rock, but I also don’t know that it was a fair view of Little Rock with the weather and the closures of the few tourist attractions they do have. I was impressed with Northwest Arkansas, though. Definitely worth the trip, and it put me one step closer to my goal!

Sometimes, advertising works. Like when my mom came across packages to go see The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere and spun up an entire vision of staying in the Vegas resorts that she had always wanted to try and making a proper weekend of it. So we did!

Landing in Vegas is an intense sensory overload. It was an overwhelming experience even at the airport, with the slot machines starting as soon as I got off the plane. My parents had me stop at a liquor store in the airport so that we could get wine, because of course there’s a whole liquor store adjacent to baggage claim. Then I got a ride to the hotel from the craziest taxi queue I’ve ever seen, with people wall-to-wall and five or six different lanes of where the cars could pull up.

We started in the Bellagio! While they’re famous for their fountain, they also have an indoor botanical garden that is apparently redecorated every season, and that was pretty spectacular. They have Chihuly glass on the ceilings and a sprawling mall with designer stores around every corner. I spent a lot of time thinking about just how much money was flowing through the casinos when walking around Vegas and taking in all the things that gambling has built.

I did a tiny bit of gambling myself, taking $50 to the roulette wheel and then doubling it and immediately cashing out. It was a little terrifying how fast each turn of the wheel went. We also went to a Cirque du Soleil show at the Bellagio, which had been on my bucket list for ages! It was such a cool experience – the performers’ level of talent was spectacular.

Something that I was deeply impressed about in Vegas was the level of food and drinks that we had while we were there. On the strip, everyone staying there is a captive audience, trapped in these endless indoor malls where they’re essentially herded from their rooms to the casino and back again, with restaurant offerings basically steps from the slot machines. So they could easily be phoning it in with mediocre offerings, and yet they’re not. I had some incredible meals, and not a single one was bad.

We headed to the Venetian for the second part of the trip! There is something deeply uncanny about the Venetian. They’ve nailed the architecture so well, except you’re also aware that you’re walking around inside a mall with a fake ceiling that’s designed to look like the sky. The strangest moment was when we were getting gelato and the “sun” set. The street lamps turned on and the blue skies faded to black and we were still sitting inside the entire time.

The uncanny valley feeling of being a mall that is also Venice was also kind of amazing, though. Of the two, the Bellagio and the Venetian, I preferred the Venetian – the theming made it really fun to walk around and explore the different areas, and we felt as though the rooms were more modern as well. It still routed you through the casino, obviously, but it also felt as though you could get away from that a bit.

The room also had a view of the Sphere, which I loved! It’s so cool to see all the designs that they put on it. Especially its little smiley face. And the next day, we had the event we came to Vegas for: The Wizard of Oz!

It was so much fun. I think the idea of doing a movie like that in such an immersive theater was really cool, and the “4D” effects were impressive. In particular, the tornado sequence was incredible. It actually felt as though we were in a windstorm. The parts that felt a little clumsy were the integration of the older pieces of the movie with the new remastered and extended set design, but it wasn’t that noticeable and I think doing this with any newer movie would make that irrelevant. We were trying to come up with other movies that would be fun in this particular setting. Star Wars would be up there, and my personal preference would be Jurassic Park!

All in all, a good weekend. I am glad I’ve done a proper trip to Vegas and stayed at the famous hotels that I’ve always heard about, but I don’t think I would need to go back anytime soon. It’s great people watching, and I had a lot of fun, but it’s a place that’s best in small doses in my opinion.

For a long time, when I would try to name all 50 states, I would get to 49 and the one that I inevitably would have forgotten was Delaware. And then one of my best friends moved there! So not only did I have to remember that Delaware existed, but we would often meet halfway in Wilmington. It’s only about an hour from DC by Amtrak.

One of the quirky things about Delaware is that it is where almost every single US company is incorporated. Under their tax law, a company incorporated in Delaware can avoid paying state taxes. Not only are most companies incorporated there, but most companies also use the same registered address: 1209 North Orange Street. I know this because the company I work for uses that same registered address. I’ve filled it out on plenty of forms! 1209 North Orange Street is officially home to over 285,000 businesses. I cannot even fathom how much corporate mail they must get.

And yes, I am the kind of nerd who had to go see the address in person!

Wilmington has a charming little downtown. They are clearly trying to develop those public spaces, including both the Riverfront and Brandywine Park. As my friend is a mom, we spent a lot of our visits either at the Children’s Museum or at the Brandywine Zoo, both of which were pretty solid day trips for a toddler.

Brandywine Park was quite nice, and I do think the zoo punches above its weight considering how small Wilmington is and how many significantly larger cities there are nearby.

I don’t have as many photos from the Children’s Museum or the Riverfront, since I’m not posting any that include Emmy’s child, but I do leave you with one of the fun facts I learned from the Children’s Museum: Delaware’s state fish is the weakfish, which is a very funny name for a fish.

I wouldn’t have gone to Wilmington so many times if it wasn’t for Emmy, but it was always a nice day trip! And if you, like me, are interested in going to every state, there’s definitely enough there to spend a nice day or weekend there during a visit to the East Coast.

For Memorial Day weekend, Sam and I headed west! Now that I live on the East Coast, it’s so wild to me how long it takes to get to the Pacific. It’s a 5 or 6 hour flight just to get across the country. We took a redeye flight to San Francisco and then a short hop up to Medford, where we met up with some friends. Our friend Chelsea has been working her way through the US National Parks, and it’s been fun to tag along when we can.

For this trip, we based ourselves near Klamath Falls. I wasn’t sure what to expect – the thing about small towns in America is that there is a huge variation on how well they’re doing, economically, and so sometimes you have the charming, Stars Hollow-style Main Street, the platonic ideal of a small town, and other times you have a version of that that’s been abandoned and left to rot for 40 years. In any case, Klamath Falls seems to be thriving because of its proximity to Crater Lake, and it seems to function as a bit of a hub for the hikers and tourists in the area. It’s very charming! There were a lot of nice local restaurants and bars, and we tried several while we were there. We ended up at the farmer’s market one of the mornings when we went into town for coffee as well.

Our top priority was to visit Crater Lake, so that was the first thing on our itinerary! As it turns out, late May is still winter season in Crater Lake, so we were a bit more limited in what we were able to do and see while we were there. I had been once before, a long time ago, and my parents and I were able to walk all the way down to the edge of the lake because we visited in late summer. On this trip, there was still a lot of snow, and so most of the roads around the crater were closed.

I’m glad to have gone in both seasons, because there are pros and cons to both. There’s obviously much more to do in the summer. I wish we had spikes or snowshoes for this one, because I would have happily walked along the trails if I wasn’t afraid of slipping all over the snowpack. But having the snow surrounding the lake was absolutely spectacular!

After we walked around for a bit, got our stamps, and had lunch, we had basically done everything that was possible to do at Crater Lake, so we headed back to Klamath Falls. We went to the Klamath County Museum, which was cute. It was in what appeared to be an old high school gymnasium, and you could still see the lines of the basketball court on the floor. It was fairly thorough considering how rural Klamath is, with a little bit of all of their local history and a section on the natural history of the area as well.

The next day, we crossed the border into California! It was less than an hour to Lava Beds National Monument. After the snow of Crater Lake, it was strange to be in that level of heat. Lava Beds has a lot of lava tubes and caves, including ice caves because of the way that they’re structured. Walking from the surface down into where the ice never melts was a wild experience.

We also went kayaking in Klamath Lake! I love kayaking, so it was nice to get on the water. It was a beautiful place to do it. There were mountain views all around.

Our final activity of the weekend was going for a wine tasting! Oregon has some fantastic wineries, mostly in Willamette Valley south of Portland, and we were excited to try some local wine. We found one close to Klamath that had great reviews and went for a tasting. I also did a tasting of olive oil and balsamic, which was a fun experience.

All in all, an excellent weekend! It’s harder to go all the way to the west coast for a weekend trip now, but this definitely made the long flight worth it. Oregon has so much natural beauty, and it was great to explore it with some of our friends!

This year, my book club decided to do a group trip! We decided on Mackinac Island, which I was thrilled about. I’ve always wanted to visit Mackinac Island, and it was the perfect destination to slow down and spend some time with my friends.

If you don’t know anything about Mackinac Island, what makes it so unique is that it has banned basically all cars except emergency vehicles on the island, so all of the transport is done by bike or horse-drawn carriage. It feels like stepping back in time, into a quaint, Main Street-style America, with general stores and fudge shops.

Getting there was a bit of an ordeal – Sam and I flew from BWI to Chicago, and then boarded our flight to Pellston. That flight got diverted to Traverse City, which was a new one for my own personal flight fuck-up bingo board, and then we sat on the tarmac for a while. They couldn’t let us get off the plane because we were a United plane at a Delta gate, and they told us that if they let us get off, they weren’t sure they could get us back on the plane without issue. I was just nervous because if we missed the last ferry, that was going to be a problem. But we did finally get back in the air, made the short trip up to Pellston, and then took a bus to the ferry terminal and a ferry to the island. It was a long day.

But it was all worth it to make it to the island! After checking it at our hotel, we headed to the iconic Pink Pony for our first dinner. This is one of the ones that Steph had discovered in her research and we were all excited to try. The food was good and the atmosphere was even better, with fun pink decorations throughout the restaurant.

The next morning, we rented bikes so we could cycle around Mackinac! It’s only about 8 miles, and it was the perfect way to see the whole island in a fairly short period of time. We made lots of stops so that we could take pictures. The only negative is that this time of year has a lot of black flies in Michigan, and it seemed as though every time we stopped, we would get swarmed. At times, I was biking while holding my hand over my face just to try to keep them away from my nose and mouth. Thankfully, they didn’t bite.

After a post-biking lunch, we headed up to Mackinac Fort! I loved the views from the hill. We watched a couple demonstrations on old-timey weapons and explored the museum exhibits about Mackinac’s history.

Of the various demonstrations we saw, my favorite was the blacksmith! He talked to us about the techniques used as well as what it’s like being a blacksmith in the modern era. He mentioned that doing something like this, where he gets to talk about the history and older techniques, is the only way he gets to make certain types of objects – something like a handmade hammer, for example, is prohibitively expensive compared to one made at a factory, and there’s no specific reason why handmade would be better. So this experience has been great for him to actually get to make some of the things he’s always wanted to try.

One of the mornings, we went up to Arch Rock. That area also had a visitor center, with more of a focus of the geography of Mackinac and some old photos of the early inhabitants of Mackinac at the rock.

Mackinac was charming, and there is plenty to keep you occupied as a tourist. Lots of museums with exhibits on their history, natural sites to visit, and cute boutique shops. That said, for me, my favorite parts of the experience were the aspects that showed more of what it would be like to live there. One of the days, we walked inland, outside of where the tourists stayed and into the part of town where primarily locals and summer workers lived. It was so interesting to get a small look at what it takes to run a place that is seemingly set in the past. The play between traditional and modernity – the horse-drawn cart pulling Amazon packages, the police bike parking, the Starbucks sandwiched between fudge shops that gets its ingredients by ferry and horses and bikes. Part of me wants to get a job there for a summer or something, just to experience the daily rhythms of life there for a few months.

It was an amazing trip. Mackinac is truly special and unique, and I was so happy to spend some time there with people that I’ve been friends with for almost a decade. I would definitely recommend it if you’re looking for a summer lake destination!

I’m very close to visiting all 50 states in the US! After my visit to Alabama in January, I was left with only three more, which is a goal I’d like to finish by the end of 2025. Right now, as the weather gets warmer, I’m putting it on pause, since I’m not interested in visiting the South in the middle of the summer, but I have tentative plans for state #50 so I’ll have to plan the other two as we get into fall.

For Alabama, I ended up choosing Birmingham for my visit. Montgomery was a close second – both cities have fascinating history in the Civil Rights era, but it seemed as though Birmingham would have more to see from a visitor’s perspective and better options for restaurants and bars. I’m sure I’ll make it to Montgomery at some point, but I had a nice weekend in Birmingham!

Birmingham’s story is one of a city rising out of the ashes. The path to civil rights in Alabama was not an easy one, and Birmingham once had the nickname of “Bombingham” for the 50 dynamite bombings that took place over about 20 years, from 1947 to 1965. The most famous is the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which has been rebuilt and stands across from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

The Civil Rights Institute is absolutely what drew me to Birmingham, and it didn’t disappoint. It did a great job covering the history of Birmingham and the broader Civil Rights movement, from sit-ins to the desegregation of buses to the Freedom Riders movement. The section on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in particular was so well done, both on the events that happened leading up to it and the investigation that was done after the fact.

The park outside also had a set of sculptures and memorials related to the Civil Rights movement. I found the one where it feels as though you’re walking in between the snarling and barking dogs to be particularly interesting.

Downtown Birmingham maintains a lot of its historical charm, but then some parts of the city felt absolutely abandoned. It probably didn’t help that I was there in January. Still, the areas that were thriving seemed great, and I hope that same energy can sweep over the rest of the city.

After I’d visited all the other things I wanted to visit, like the historical sites and museums, I ended up stumbling upon a very cute indie movie theater! It’s called Sidewalk Film Center + Cinema, and I’m a little obsessed with it. Such cool vibes. If it was in the city where I lived, I would go there all the time. I went to see Nosferatu, which was a good one to see on the big screen. The photos below are from the bathroom, which stayed on theme.

Overall, Birmingham was a good weekend! Pleasant and interesting, with good food options and with plenty of options to fill a couple days. I’ll be heading back to the South a few times this year to finish my last few states, so it’s been nice to get a chance to learn about the Civil Rights history from the locations where it all happened.