May 19, 2026 - Jun 3, 2026
Last updated: 6/13/26 10:00am PT
This was a driving trip to visit “The Final 5”, the five states we hadn’t already set foot in together. When we first started traveling, we didn’t think about going to all 50 states. We just started traveling, and because we always wanted to go someplace new, we ended up going to many different states. So we then started thinking that we should try to get to all 50. As more time passed, we changed our minds, thinking it’s not worth going someplace just to check a checkbox. But the Total Eclipse Trip of ’24 had us going to three states we didn’t think we’d ever visit. At that point we thought, why not hit them all? That left eight states unvisited, three of which we hit on the Hall of Fame Tour in ’25. Now in 2026, five were left, easy enough to finish in one trip.
We flew into and out of St. Louis, drove 2479 miles through Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky (and the southern tips of Indiana and Illinois).
We have now visited all 50 US states.
There are two states (North Dakota and Minnesota) where we didn’t see any sights, but we drove the entire width of both of those states (during our move from Chicago to Seattle). We slept in Fargo, ND and ate food in both states, so they count. We saw more miles of Minnesota and North Dakota than we saw in Kansas or Arkansas (or tiny Rhode Island or almost as tiny Delaware). We breathed the air and touched the ground. That should be criteria enough.