I have been active on YouTube for several years, posting an occasional rare video of my adventures, but until now I really haven’t developed that aspect of my travel expression. Last spring I started ramping up my documentation of my outdoor experiences on video and I am having a lot of fun with it. For one thing, video conveys a much richer dimension of my reality. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth ten thousand. You can hear my voice, see my mannerisms and get to know me a lot more than you could with a still photograph. It’s not always pretty, as I make a lot of mistakes and you get to see a much less polished “me”. It is more like a reality show, because you have to take the bad with the good. I can’t edit out my crooked teeth or my slow speech.
Anyway, the result is a richer expression of my travel experiences. I am able to share more about my adventures and throw in a bit of sage advice, some camping hacks that I have picked up along the way. And I am sharing my campfire cooking, something that is hard to do without video.
Milepost 10-6-15 Cedar Springs Michigan. Parked in our daughter’s yard.
Today Kaye and I are leaving for New England on a spontaneous quest to add 6 more states to our collection for a total of 49 – leaving only Hawaii unvisited. We really did not have this on our bucket list until coming home from the south last spring. We had added several new ones while wandering across the south during the winter from Louisiana east to Florida and then north along the Atlantic coast heading back home in the spring. At some point along there it occurred to us that we were actually unintentionally tallying an impressive inventory of states visited.
By the time we turned west from the eastern seaboard we decided to make it a thing, and we would have to be really intentional about Delaware or we would miss it entirely. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere else like most of the states we had visited. We were camping near Washington D. C. and decided to make a quick day trip to score Delaware.
Now we are heading off to New York to deliver a trailer load of custom-built rustic furniture that I assembled during the summer for a client that I had built stuff for a few years ago. And we have time to continue on to New England and visit the last six of the continental United States. Maybe we will even see some fall color.
Visiting all 50 states was not a thing for us until we realized we were well on our way to doing it just by chance. Just by being travelers all of our lives.
Actually, two of our three daughters have already visited all 50 and they got their impressive start while riding in the back seat as kids while we explored the country as a family with a van and a tent years ago (photo at top shows our stop at the Tetons in 1991).
Our kids – with some of their cousins – inside a giant redwood tree in northern California.
I am not sure what we will do about Hawaii. If it really is a thing for us, we will probably have to make it happen sometime. So is it a thing or not? I don’t know. If I have to choose, I might rather continue east and do Italy (one of my daughters is there with a friend right now). Time will tell.
Meantime, watch for a report from the coast of Maine in the next few days. See ya!
Postscript: We had mechanical trouble that prevented us from making the New England trip. Instead, we spent time in a service garage. We did get our shipment delivered to our client in New York, but our tour of the northeast will have to wait.
Where the Robert Meets the Road 