Due to some unforeseen financial issues, it had been two years since I had taken a travel vacation to add more checkoffs from my bucket lists and increase my perspective of my country and the world. Three years ago, I had completed my basic goal of having been within all 50 states in the United States, but as I noted in my last travel blog two years ago, this basic goal was flawed as it did not consider whether I had actually stopped and truly experienced a perspective of each state and had the advantage of taking photo images of an important location within each state. This was the reason that I flew to New Orleans two years ago to truly experience Louisiana beyond the previous drive-through experience I had back in 1975. What was unmentioned in my blog from two years ago was that Louisiana was just the start of the states that needed a true upgrade of my perspective. Going through the list, there were 10 other states, as well as Washington, DC, which needed to be revisited. Luckily, all these locations were closely connected, as they consisted of the six New England States and four Mid-Atlantic States, so my road trip this year was planned to cover the complete set of states to fulfil a more complete perspective of all 50 states and the nation’s capital.

Growing up down south in Florida, my parents mainly planned our yearly family vacation to be a drive up to upstate New York to visit my grandparents and other close family members. For most of these trips, the only stops were for gas, lunches, and a motel visit. For a couple of years, I was able to convince my father to make an extra short stop on the way home, which included one year to be a stop at Gettysburg NHP in Pennsylvania, but we had no camera to record the quick visit. We also drove through Maryland back and forth on these yearly vacation trips, but the drive was through the shortest section of the panhandle which took us around a half-hour to cross. My one time in Washington, DC was right after I graduated from sixth grade in 1969. I had been a patrol boy at my school in sixth grade, a service that was honored to all patrol boys in the city’s school system with a special trip to the nation’s capital in the following summer. I only have a few black-and-white shots from a single-use Kodak camera to represent the trip. In 1976, after my first year at UCLA, I flew back to my parents’ home in Florida for the summer and reconnected with my high school best friend to take a road trip up to New England. During this trip, we drove through Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut, before making a quick visit in Newport, Rhode Island, where we used a single-use color Kodak camera to take a few shots outside a few of the mansions. We drove on through Massachusetts and New Hampshire to head to Acadia National Park in Maine, only the second national park I had visited at that time, but the first where I was able to take a few photos on another single-use color Kodak camera. After enjoying a day in Acadia NP, we drove back into New Hampshire where my friend wanted to do some antiquing at a few yard sales. After he got a tip at one sale location, we drove over to Vermont where he found the antique he was looking for. After a few other minor stops, we headed back and completed the journey. Even though these young period trips allow me to claim that I had been in these 10 states, 1 national park, and the nation’s capital, eight states were basically just drive-throughs, and poor photos represented the two other states, a national park, and Washington, DC. My summer road trip this year was designed to elevate my perspective in these states, allowing me to properly claim that I have truly visited all 50 states in USA.

After a diligent research on the representative locations I wanted to visit within each state and prospective map directions to reach these locations, I determined my best and most fiscally sound plan was to use New York City’s La Guardia Airport as my start and end point. On a Sunday in mid-June, I was on my way to LaGuardia. After landing and departing the airport, I picked up my arranged rental car and drove out to my first hotel stay in Stamford, Connecticut, using the timing to avoid major New York City traffic. The next morning, I was off to my main location to represent Connecticut, the seaport town of Mystic. The town sits just within the small bay of Mystic Harbor and is split by Mystic River, which only extends a short distance within Connecticut. Once I reached Mystic, I was able to find a street parking space in a neighborhood on the east side of the river, and I walked back down to Main Street, which was the one small bridge connecting the east and west sides of the town along the river. It was amazing seeing the sailboats and small marinas along the river on both sides of the bridge, then checking out the stores along west Main Street, which included Mystic Pizza, the pizzeria that inspired the 1988 rom-com movie. I turned around and walked back over the bridge, just as a large sailboat was coming down the river toward the harbor. Lights started flashing and bars came down on both sides of the bridge, stopping the light traffic. A section of the bridge rose up, providing a pathway for the sailboat to float on through to the harbor area. After the boat sailed through, the bridge section lowered and cars were allowed through. It was an amazing event that I captured on my camera and gave me a wonderful perspective of Connecticut living.

Mystic Main Street Bridge – Marble House, Newport

I walked back to my rental car and drove on to Rhode Island. My goal was to revisit Newport and get a deeper perspective of the Oceanside beaches and historical mansions that I and my friend had visited in 1976. When I reached Newport, I started my journey around the Ocean Drive loop, stopping at a beachside park to take a photo of a memorial statue of a Revolutionary War hero and making a couple of other ocean side stops to take interesting beachside photos. At the east end of the loop, I came upon the area of historic mansions. I parked in a small lot and walked over to take a tour of the Marble House, a mansion built by William Vanderbilt for his wife around 1890. The Marble House is one of eight mansions currently protected by the Preservation Society of Newport County. On my 1976 road trip with my friend, I can only recall seeing a couple of these mansions from the outside, so enjoying the tour of the Marble House provided me with a better perspective of the Newport mansions and history. The photos I took were clearer and better than the poor Kodak shots I took on the road trip 48 years ago. After the tour, I drove on to the motel reservation I had made just across the border in Massachusetts. With two states upgraded in my perspective, this first day was a wonderful start to my journey.

To be continued…