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!