A Canadian in All 50 States: A Reflective Odyssey
I grew up Canadian, and maybe that’s why the United States always shimmered for me with a kind of exotic allure. Not exotic like the spice markets of Marrakesh or the temples of Kyoto, but exotic because it was so close. It was across a river, a stretch of highway, a line on a map. We lived near the border, and for our family vacations we crossed into America the way some people cross a threshold into a dream. Every trip south felt like stepping into a vast stage set, where the cars were bigger, the soda cups endless, and even the motel signs seemed to hum with neon possibility.
For me, the U.S. wasn’t just geography—it epitomized travel. It was a land I could measure not by distance but by states, each one a new chapter. Long before I knew I’d be a writer, long before I put pen to page about Russia or North Korea, I was a kid peering out the window of our family car at American billboards, mesmerized.
That seed of wonder never left me. And years later, it grew into something bigger than a vacation. It became a personal odyssey: to drive, wander, and drift through all fifty states of the Union.
The Lower 48: A Long Road, A Long Dream
When people talk about traveling the U.S., they usually mean a handful of cities. Maybe a cross-country road trip. A taste of Route 66, a selfie with the Grand Canyon, a Broadway ticket stub. That’s good enough for most. But I wanted something else. I wanted the whole story—or at least as much of it as a person could see from behind the wheel.
So in one great sweep, a friend and I drove the lower 48 states. That’s right—48 states in one trip, without skipping, without cheating, without pretending that crossing the corner of a panhandle counted. We drove them. We lived them. 24,000 miles, sleeping in my 1978 Corolla in rest areas, closed roads, or behind gas stations. We washed storefront windows for gas money and food.
And here’s the kicker: we’re not talking in terms of famous travel writers. Jack Kerouac, the beat generation’s restless son, hitchhiked through 17 states. Bill Bryson, with all his wit and detail, managed 38. Both are celebrated as great American travel authors. And yet, quietly, without much fanfare, we did 48 in one fell swoop, every state in the continental U.S.
To say it was a road trip is too small. It was a rolling classroom, a kaleidoscope, a test of patience and of joy.
The Road Teaches You
On the road, America teaches you in its own accents.
It teaches you about hospitality in the South, where a stranger still calls you “hon.”
It teaches you about resilience in the Rust Belt, where the factories have shuttered but the people haven’t given up.
It teaches you about scale in the West, where the horizon swallows you whole and the mountains look painted by a God with an oversized brush.
We ate in diners with menus laminated against decades of spilled coffee. We ran across the helipad on top of Trump Casino in Atlantic City, we snuck into a Kenny Rogers concert in Oklahoma City, and we watched Misery in a theatre in Upstate New York. We met people who spoke like cousins we never knew we had.
And through it all, the car—my 5-speed—became a character in its own right. There’s something about driving across endless interstates, through deserts and forests, that fuses man to machine. My car was more than steel; it was a partner. In the years and some twenty vehicles since, my WRX has taken on that symbolic role, the drift-car that breaks theoretical physics, but on that great odyssey, whatever I was driving was simply the means to make America unfold like a living map.
Alaska, 1999
We finished the 48, but two remained—those outer states, dangling like commas: Alaska and Hawaii.
In 1999, I drove to Alaska. And driving there is no small thing. Alaska humbles you. It’s a place where the road narrows into something closer to survival than travel. It isn’t just distance—it’s remoteness. Mountains that remind you how small you are, forests that look eternal, rivers that are less like water and more like geography in motion.
When I reached Alaska, I knew this wasn’t about checking boxes. This was about honoring the scale of the planet and the audacity of human travel. It was about the boy who once crossed the border to buy an ice cream in America, now driving into the farthest reaches of its territory.
Hawaii: The Final State
And now, as I write this, Hawaii is next. It will be my 50th state. The final piece of the mosaic. Not the hardest to reach, but somehow the most symbolic. Because Hawaii isn’t a drive. It’s a flight, a crossing, a leap into the Pacific. It feels like the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence I began decades ago.
Why It Matters
Maybe you’re wondering: why does this matter? Why count states like coins, why measure travel in borders crossed?
For me, it’s about continuity. I am, to my knowledge, the only Canadian travel writer of the so-called “big five” who’s done all 50. Kerouac did 17. John Steinbeck, 27. William Least-Heat Moon, 28. Bryson, 38. The others stopped somewhere along the way. But I finished—because I never stopped feeling that magnetic pull America had for me as a child. To have memories of Kansas, New Orleans, Hell's Kitchen, MIT, Cape Canaveral, Hollywood, Wyoming (my #1 favorite), Chicago, St. Louis, Sante Fe, Miami, Memphis, Mt. Rushmore, Dallas-Fort Worth, North Carolina, all buzzword names in business, travel, film, and American nostalgia, these places have an identity to me.
Travel, in the end, is a mirror. And for me, America has been the clearest mirror I’ve ever peered into. Each state reflecting not just itself, but something about me—my curiosity, my persistence, my delight in strangeness.
A Travel-Literary Reflection
What I’ve learned is that the U.S. is not one country. It is 50 stories, bound together by highways and history. It is contradictions. It is generosity and suspicion, beauty and ruin, openness and defensiveness.
I’ve also learned that travel writing is not about tallying miles. It’s about memory. I remember:
- The eerie quiet of Pyongyang years later—but I measure it against the eerie quiet of a Nebraska highway at dawn.
- The friendliness of strangers in Arkansas against the wariness of strangers in Manhattan.
- The taste of roadside barbecue in the Carolinas against the plastic tang of a gas-station hot dog in Wyoming.
It all matters. It all lingers.
Closing the Loop
When I land in Hawaii tomorrow, I will not just be completing a personal odyssey. I will be closing a loop that began with a boy crossing a border with his family, wide-eyed at the idea that travel was just… right there.
And when I look back across those 50 states, I’ll remember not the map, not the mileage, not the achievement, but the continuance. The sense that travel is never done, that the world is always waiting for another border to cross, another road to drift down, another reflection to find.