Tag: Wild Horse Wind & Solar Facility

Synchronicity: Road Trip and a List

Definition of SYNCHRONICITY:

2: the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary

If this definition is too “woo-woo” for you, just think of synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence that allows us to think of two seemingly unrelated objects, concepts, or events in conjunction with each other. Any writer will tell you that putting two things together in this way is a valuable source of creative insight.

Which leads me to today’s post. Recently this article, According To Science, This Is The Perfect And Best Road Trip You Can Possibly Take, came up on Facebook. I didn’t think much of it until, shortly thereafter, this WordPress Daily Prompt, The Satisfaction of a List, landed in my inbox.

Here’s the map from the road trip article:

road trip map

Discovery News worked with Randy Olson, a doctoral student at Michigan State University, to plan a trip that visits landmarks on all of the 48 contiguous states in the U.S. A computer algorithm plotted a route that allows participants to jump on anywhere and continue to follow the loop until they arrive back at their starting point.

This road trip map appealed to me because traveling is one of the things my husband and I hope to do a lot of now, in the early years of our retirement.

My first reaction to this map is that it omits the entire western side of Washington State, which happens to be where I live. And while the Hanford nuclear dump site in eastern Washington might be interesting, it is hardly the best landmark in the state. It looks as if the computer algorithm chose Hanford simply because it needed something from Washington to include that wouldn’t go too far off the path it wanted to beat.

If you undertake this trip, I suggest you go a bit further west in Washington to see these sites, which I think greatly outrank Hanford in terms of sight-seeing status:

Those are my additions to the list. As for the map’s list, I use underlining to indicate sites I’ve already visited and red text to indicate places that are on my bucket list of sites in the U.S. that I hope to visit before my traveling days are over.

Here is the list of the landmarks you’d stop at in each state on this road trip:

  1. Grand Canyon, AZ
  2. Bryce Canyon National Park, UT
  3. Craters of the Moon National Monument, ID
  4. Yellowstone National Park, WY
  5. Pikes Peak, CO
  6. Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM
  7. The Alamo, TX
  8. The Platt Historic District, OK
  9. Toltec Mounds, AR
  10. Elvis Presley’s Graceland, TN
  11. Vicksburg National Military Park, MS
  12. French Quarter, New Orleans, LA
  13. USS Alabama, AL
  14. Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL
  15. Okefenokee Swamp Park, GA
  16. Fort Sumter National Monument, SC
  17. Lost World Caverns, WV
  18. Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center, NC
  19. Mount Vernon, VA
  20. White House, Washington, DC
  21. Colonial Annapolis Historic District, MD
  22. New Castle Historic District, Delaware
  23. Cape May Historic District, NJ
  24. Liberty Bell, PA
  25. Statue of Liberty, NY
  26. The Mark Twain House & Museum, CT
  27. The Breakers, RI
  28. USS Constitution, MA
  29. Acadia National Park, ME
  30. Mount Washington Hotel, NH
  31. Shelburne Farms, VT
  32. Fox Theater, Detroit, MI
  33. Spring Grove Cemetery, OH
  34. Mammoth Cave National Park, KY
  35. West Baden Springs Hotel, IN
  36. Abraham Lincoln’s Home, IL
  37. Gateway Arch, MO
  38. C. W. Parker Carousel Museum, KS
  39. Terrace Hill Governor’s Mansion, IA
  40. Taliesin, WI
  41. Fort Snelling, MN
  42. Ashfall Fossil Bed, NE
  43. Mount Rushmore, SD
  44. Fort Union Trading Post, ND
  45. Glacier National Park, MT
  46. Hanford Site, WA
  47. Columbia River Highway, OR
  48. San Francisco Cable Cars, CA
  49. San Andreas Fault, CA
  50. Hoover Dam, NV

How about you? How many of these places have you already been to? What suggestions do you have for additional stops in specific states? Give us the benefit of your home-state experience in the comments.

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