Though I am no longer traveling 100% of the time, I still occasionally get paid to go places and I am continuing to notch off new locations.  Years ago, I began keeping maps of information on these travels.  Since 2018 just ended, it seems like a good time to present them.

In 2018, I was in three new states and over 100 new counties thanks to trips to eastern Tennessee, Michigan and Oklahoma.  (The new states were Virginia, Ohio and Arkansas.) It’s interesting to pick out the longer distance road trips on this county-level map.  I-75 really sticks out in Georgia since their counties are so small.  There’s the preferred route between Wisconsin and Santa Fe through Kansas.  There’s the time I had to go from Utah to Portland, Oregon.  And our trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama, the week the war started in Iraq.  The string of counties in central Nebraska well off of I-80 was my trek to catch the total solar eclipse in the summer of 2017.

Keep in mind that I dug into my memories from as far back as age 10 to remember what routes we took on family vacations when I initially started this map.  Of course I was pretty much lead navigator by then already so I had an advantage.  My parents eschewed interstate highway travel for much of our Western vacations so I’ve seen a lot more of the Dakotas than your typical Midwestern kid whose family was in a rush to get to the mountains.

Since I’ve had a major road trip through Canada, I need a similar map for the land of hockey and Tim Hortons:

They don’t really have counties west of Lake Superior in Canada but this is close enough.  Here you can see my frequent fishing trips to Northwest Ontario as well as my 2016 drive from Anchorage to Madison.

I did sort of drop the ball on not writing about that Alaska Highway trip.  Maybe I’ll backfill someday as it was possibly a once-in-a-lifetime journey.  In fact, here’s a quick shot of Mt. Wrangell from a wide open straightaway on the Glenn Highway..