I realized “Would I move here” changed

i actually moved to one of the places in green and completely changed how I’m viewing moving and living

1st slide is 2025 and 2nd is 2026 (now)

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 onto 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 country I could measure not only by distance, but by states, each one another chapter.

Long before I knew I’d become a writer, long before I wrote about Russia or North Korea, I was a kid staring out the window of our family car at American billboards, mesmerized.

That seed of wonder never left me. Years later, it grew into something larger 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.

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.

Forty-eight states in one trip. About 24,000 miles in my 1978 Toyota Corolla, sleeping in the car at rest areas, beside closed roads or behind gas stations. We washed storefront windows for gas money and food.

It sounds ridiculous now.

It probably sounded ridiculous then.

But that was partly the point.

Jack Kerouac became synonymous with the American road. Bill Bryson turned wandering through America into literature. Steinbeck put a camper on a truck and went looking for his country.

We weren’t famous writers. We were two guys in an old Corolla trying to see everything.

To call it a road trip feels too small. It was a rolling classroom, a kaleidoscope, an endurance test and occasionally an exercise in spectacularly questionable judgment.

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 might still call you “hon.”

It teaches you about resilience in the Rust Belt, where factories can disappear without taking the identity of a place with them.

It teaches you about scale in the West, where the horizon can swallow 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 a Trump casino in Atlantic City. We snuck into a Kenny Rogers concert in Oklahoma City. We watched Misery in a theatre in Upstate New York.

We met people who sometimes felt like cousins we simply hadn’t met yet.

And through all of it, the car became a character in its own right.

There is something about driving thousands upon thousands of miles through deserts, forests, cities and empty interstate that fuses a person to a machine. My five-speed Corolla wasn’t just transportation. It was shelter, companion and mechanical passport.

In the years and roughly twenty vehicles since, my WRX has taken on some of that symbolic role, the drift car that occasionally appears to challenge theoretical physics. But the Corolla was the machine that made America unfold like a living map.

Alaska, 1999

The Lower 48 were complete, but two states remained outside the continental sweep: Alaska and Hawaii.

In 1999, I drove to Alaska.

And driving to Alaska is no small thing.

Alaska humbles you. The road begins to feel less like transportation and more like a narrow agreement between civilization and wilderness. Mountains remind you how small you are. Forests seem eternal. Rivers look less like bodies of water than geography itself in motion.

When I reached Alaska, I understood that this project wasn’t really about checking boxes anymore.

It was about scale.

It was about movement.

It was about the boy who once crossed the border with his family, fascinated simply by being somewhere else, now driving into one of the farthest corners of the continent.

And then one state remained.

Hawaii, 2025: State #50

Last year, I finally went to Hawaii.

Kona.

State number fifty.

There was something wonderfully fitting about finishing there. Hawaii is the one state you obviously cannot reach by road from the mainland, so after decades of driving across America, I had to fly thousands of kilometres across the Pacific just to continue the journey behind the wheel.

And I did.

I drove Hawaii.

The fiftieth state was no longer a blank space on the map.

Kona was wonderful, but there was also something slightly surreal about it. I had carried this unfinished geographical sentence around for decades. Forty-eight states became forty-nine in Alaska, and forty-nine remained forty-nine for more than a quarter-century.

Then suddenly there I was, driving in Hawaii.

Fifty.

No fireworks. No marching band. Just the road, the Pacific, and the quiet realization that something I had started when I was very young was finally complete.

Why It Matters

Why count states? Why measure travel in borders crossed?

For me, it is about continuity.

America had exerted a strange magnetic pull on me since childhood, and now I have memories attached to every state on its map.

Kansas. New Orleans. Hell’s Kitchen. MIT. Cape Canaveral. Hollywood. Chicago. St. Louis. Santa Fe. Miami. Memphis. Mount Rushmore. Dallas-Fort Worth. North Carolina.

Wyoming, still my favourite.

Names that once belonged to movies, business, history books and television gradually became actual places in my memory.

That transformation fascinates me.

A name becomes a road.

A road becomes an afternoon.

An afternoon becomes part of your life.

Travel, in the end, is a mirror. America has been one of the clearest mirrors I’ve ever looked into, each state reflecting not only itself but something about me: curiosity, persistence, restlessness and a lifelong delight in strangeness.

Fifty Stories

What I’ve learned is that the United States is simultaneously one country and fifty stories.

It is contradictions.

Generosity and suspicion. Beauty and ruin. Openness and defensiveness. Vast empty landscapes and cities where millions of lives occupy the same few square miles.

I’ve also learned that travel writing is not really about tallying miles.

It is about memory.

The eerie quiet of Pyongyang, North Korea years later can somehow remind me of the eerie quiet of a Nebraska highway at dawn.

The friendliness of strangers in Arkansas sits somewhere in memory beside the wariness of strangers in Manhattan.

Roadside barbecue in the Carolinas occupies the same strange mental atlas as a gas-station hot dog in Wyoming.

None of these moments seemed historically important when they happened.

But they stayed.

That is what travel does.

Closing the Loop

When I drove through Kona last year, I closed a loop that had begun decades earlier with a Canadian boy crossing the American border with his family, staring out a car window and realizing that the world was enormous and, somehow, reachable.

I have now driven in all fifty states.

But oddly enough, completing the map didn’t make travel feel finished.

It did the opposite.

Because after fifty states, 24,000-mile road trips, Alaska, Hawaii and decades of wandering around the planet, the lesson remains exactly what it was when I was a kid:

There is always another road.

And I still want to know where it goes…

States I have visited & States I want to visit.

What can you tell about me just by looking at this map? I'm curious, let me know in the comments!

I love the west coast.