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In October, I embarked on a trip to New Mexico, passing through Nebraska and Colorado on the way there. I passed through Lubbock, Texas, and through Oklahoma on the way home. Each day looked like this:
I now have completed the entire length of US Route 34, I-27, and I-44. I-25 is completed south of Douglas, Wyoming, and US82 is completed west of Wichita Falls, Texas. I entered a lot of new counties and saw a lot of amazing things! New Mexico is a beautiful state! Don't miss out! I have always loved Colorado, but now New Mexico is another state I have found to be lovely. Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and Cloudcroft each had their own unique beauty. And I can easily see why Georgia O'Keeffe feel in love with the beauty of the Abiquiu area in north-central New Mexico. The drive on US 84 north from Santa Fe is an unforgettable one.
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In April, I took a trip across Pennsylvania, the Delmarva Peninsula, and the Carolinas before coming home through eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. Here is what I did:
Now, I'm about to embark on another trip to the Carolinas! I'm not in love with the Carolinas or anything; it's just how the cookie crumbled, I guess. This trip will look like this:
The odd thing about this impending trip is that it's not focused on routesnapping at all. I will probably get some random photos for the website, but they will be new and improved replacements to existing photos. I couldn't predict the list of routes that might get new photos; we will just have to wait and see! Here is a list of trips I took before this website really got going.
I don't know about doing long writeups of all of these different trips. But I will try to keep up when I go on future trips! A big trip is coming in April, so I will be sure to write a reflection about is here when the trip is complete! On June 19, I took a long day trip to clinch Illinois Routes 108 and 96, and to ride the Kampsville ferry! The Kampsville ferry is a free ferry maintained by IDOT, for getting cars across one of the lowest and largest stretches of the Illinois River. See more photos on my pages for Illinois Routes 94, 96, 108, and 5, among others. I also got a new photo for US136 in Iowa, since I poked my nose into Keokuk to see the southern end of US Route 218!
Every winter (and pandemic), I like to do some impromptu Illinois highway clinching. As winter conditions are unpredictable and often problematic to travel, I don't plan winter road trips until a couple days in advance, when I can have faith in the weather forecast for the upcoming weekend. As the weather forecast for this upcoming weekend looks absolutely fabulous for February, I'll be embarking on a trip to southern Illinois and western Kentucky this weekend! I'll be completing my clinches for more than ten Illinois state highways. Some of these clinches will be finishing a piece of the highway that I'm missing; some will be full drives from one end to the other! Stay tuned in the next couple weeks; I'll have some new photos for everyone.
Life has been a whirlwind this month, but I wanted to quickly mention on this blog that I completed a trip to Ohio from October 7th to the 12th. It started with a meetup with friends in Columbus, and it continued with an extensive scouring of the highways of northeastern Ohio. I bit off much more than I should have been chewing with northeastern Ohio; the high density of routes gave rise to a lot of stopping and a longer time elapsed than I anticipated each day. I exhausted myself trying to spend three days on northeastern Ohio; I should have added a fourth day. Nevertheless, I did get a route shield photo for every route I set out for. I have one last trip to northwestern Ohio and the Lake Erie islands, and my Ohio route image collection will be complete!
On September 4, I flew home from a 10-day trip to Colorado involving all four national parks within that state. That means 4 new pages are coming to the national parks section of the site. It also means I got some new signs for the national collection. It isn't a whole big slew of new signs and pages for the site, but it's something! The trip overall consisted of a flight to Colorado Springs, renting a car, and driving in a big circle around central and southern Colorado. Look for new pages for a few US highways that pass through Colorado, and of course, pages for the 4 new national parks!
I don't know why I act like the new state with full coverage coming to the site is some kind of Michigan. If you've watched the Instagram or the update blog, it's becoming very apparent that the new state is Michigan! This post is late, but three weeks ago, I took a trip all around the state of Michigan, reaching the Keweenaw Peninsula, Drummond Island, and Alpena! This trip included both peninsulas of Michigan, which is a dead giveaway that I used the majestic Mackinac Bridge at one point. The point of this trip across Michigan is to finish "routesnapping" the state; this is to say, that I finished my collection of route marker photos. I now have a photo of one example of every marked state, US, and Interstate route in Michigan. I have also now entered every single county in the state of Michigan, thanks to a couple detours I took on the way home from Alpena. County clinching is now completed in Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan, and state-level routesnapping is now completed in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan. For context, when the routesnapping is completed for a state, that's when I decide to add that state to the website.
On top of this, a new trip to a non-Midwestern state awaits, and I'll get a few contributions to my national route collection there. More importantly, this new trip will provide loads of new content for the National Parks portion of the site. My day job is about to take up a lot of my time, so I don't have a lot of confidence that I'll be working on the site very much in the near future. But stay tuned for a complete set of content for the state of Michigan, and for several new National Parks to be added sometime in September or October! Now don't get carried away; I haven't traveled every inch of roadway in the state of Iowa. My quest as a roadgeek is to snap a photo of the route markers for every route in the state (state routes, federal routes, and Interstates). Well, as of this past weekend, I have done just that! I now have a shield gallery that includes every route in Iowa. It ended up consisting of 119 photos, though two represent routes that have been decommissioned since I started the collection. In other words, if you seek to routesnap Iowa like I have, you'll need to take 117 photos across the state. On this trip last weekend, I also clinched all the counties in Iowa! County clinching is a secondary goal for me, but I still completed the state of Iowa. It is only my second state where I've been to all the counties, after my home state of Illinois. I suppose it won't be any big surprise which state will have content added to the site, after all. But can you guess which state I'm adding after that?
A link to my completed Iowa shield gallery is here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskyCvBZy Welcome to the travel log! This is a journal where I reflect on past trips, signaling to all of you that I have completed some new travels that will generate new content for the site. I'll probably throw some interesting photos here that don't fit the bill of what's expected on the categorically-arranged pages of the site. I'll talk about things that have a bit more of a personal, emotional angle than the largely technical logistical explanations elsewhere on my site. Heck, it's a blog! You know what a blog is! This will be a good place to check for general announcements of updates. For specifics on the individual pages updated as time goes along, click here to see the "updates" page.
Before I get started with this blog, I want to provide a list of trips taken in the past. Since this page will end up essentially showing a chronological list of trips (from most recent to oldest), I figured I would kick off that list by providing a historical list of trips I've taken in the past. Past trips when I took pictures of route signs: St. Joseph, Missouri area: May 2014 Gulf Coast Trip I (Texas): October 2014 The I-80 corridor in Iowa: February 2015 Indiana and western Ohio I: February 2015 Northern California and Lake Tahoe: April 2015 The Northeast Trip: October 2015 Seattle: March 2016 Driving around Lake County, IL May 2016 Indiana and western Ohio II: June 2016 West Virginia and Ohio: October 2016 Southwest Wisconsin: October 2016 Gulf Coast II and Florida: October-Nov. 2016 Indiana and western Ohio II: February 2017 Southern Utah, Northern Arizona: April-May 2017 Eastern Iowa: July 2017 Southern Illinois I: July 2017 Northern Utah: August 2017 Indiana and western Ohio III: September 2017 Far northern CA and SW Oregon: October 2017 Phoenix and Prescott areas: November 2017 Northeast Wisconsin: December 2017 Traverse City, MI: March 2018 Southern Indiana: April 2018 Drive to the Pacific: August 2018 Southwest Ohio: October 2018 Southern Illinois II: November 2018 Gulf Coast III: January 2019 South-central Michigan: March 2019 North and South Carolina: July 2019 Northwest Iowa: September 2019 Maine and eastern Canada: Sept-Oct 2019 Mainly driving around in Illinois in 2020 Circling around Lake Michigan: August 2020 Southeast Ohio: March 2021 Michigan's Thumb: April 2021 Virginia and Interstate 68: April 2021 Western Iowa: October 2021 Southern California: October 2021 Eastern Wisconsin: January 2022 I-64 and I-65 in Indiana: February 2022 That brings us to the present day, in April 2022. I'm really excited to launch the website soon. I hope this website inspires people to travel. The photos might not be of top-notch quality, but that's all the more reason for people to seek out the real experience of the American road trip in person! The photos should be teasers that get people motivated to seek a perfect-resolution image that can only be perceived by the naked eye. See the world! Experience the ultimate expression of freedom by going anywhere and everywhere! |
AuthorThe author is Paul from paulacrossamerica.com ! Archives
November 2024
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