My recent trip, to Kansas City and then Michigan, went reasonably well despite technological issues, and I got to two new counties in southeastern Nebraska, and all the remaining counties in Iowa (10) and Michigan (20). The trip home went nothing like I'd planned it -- not really a surprise there -- so I didn't get to any new counties in Kentucky or Tennessee.
Who cares. Since I very much enjoy driving my little convertible on such winding mountain roads as abound in both those states, I'm sure I'll be going to those places soon enough.
Meanwhile, here's the updated situation. I've now been to all the counties in 37 states, shown in green on the map below. The states in yellow are those where there are only "a few" counties left to visit, which I arbitrarily define as ten or less. The number of remaining counties to go to is shown in red.
The grey states, Georgia and Oregon, are those with more than ten counties left to visit. And then there's Alaska, which doesn't have counties. I've decided that any step taken in that state is good enough: One and Done.
This last trip was the first I've ever made with county-counting as the express objective, and the last. The only remaining areas where there are enough to tempt me to go for that purpose are (1) the state of Georgia, with its surfeit of tiny little counties, and (2) the Northwest. But doing the Northwest all at once would be an exceedingly long and no doubt dull wander, while doing Georgia in a single trip would be just plain tedious; so I won't attempt it. Best to collect those counties as I pass through on the way to places more interesting.
The dearth of counties left to visit for the first time has prompted me to change my goal to visiting all the car museums in the country. There are hundreds of them, and they're nicely scattered across the country, often in small towns. They are the new excuse to wander, not really the objective. You know the old saying, "It's not the destination, it's the journey"? That applies here.
At the same time, I will not get all worked up about it. On my last trip, at one point in the planning I counted 17 car museums among my planned stops. (That number included, I think, five in Hickory Corner, Michigan, because I didn't understand the set-up there; there are actually 19 separate buildings, but some of them are operated by various car clubs and, I suppose, count as separate museums. Since I went to all the ones I'd planned to see, and several others, over two days, I'm counting it as five museums.) I actually went to 13 of the ones I'd planned. The rest I skipped because their hours of operation didn't fit my schedule. (A lot of them are only open a few days a week.) I did get pissed off when I showed up at one museum -- the first, as it happens -- and they had changed their hours within the last few weeks. Well, it happens. I got more pissed off when I drove half a day out of my best route to see a museum that doesn't deserve that name. Even so, I enjoy car museums, even most of the mediocre ones. And since they come and go like cellphone plans, I'll never run out of new places to go. Will I.
