In 1998, Barry Stiefel took off from work on Friday at 5pm and was back at his desk a little more than a week later on Monday at 8am, having visited every US state in the interim (48 by car, Hawaii and Alaska by air). I love the map…except for the jog to San Francisco, it looks pretty optimized.
— Kottke
My dad is a hard-core road tripper so reading Barry’s story made me think of him and some of the trips we’d been on. I don’t remember if we had been in Atlanta for Spring Comdex or BBS Con, but on the drive home he made a serious detour, and while I don’t remember our exact conversation I’m sure that it went something like this:
Father and Son drive past a road sign reading “Welcome to Alabama the Beautiful”
Me: Alabama? Have you gone senile, old man? Home is in Florida!
Dad: We’re driving through the last few counties I’ve missed in the South
Me: You suck, this car sucks, I’m a teenager and don’t you know that I have very important things to do back home and we could be halfway there by now if you weren’t so busy trying to ruin my life!
I haven’t gone back to Alabama since.
Anyways, that’s when I learned about my dad’s map. It’s an ugly old thing, yellowed with age, showing every US county. Pretty much all of the South, East, West, and North have been colored in red marker. There’s a good bit of Midwestern country unfilled except around the major East - West corridors. Alaska and Hawaii are also bare so far, but dad has had grand plans for an Alaskan road trip forever and I’m sure he’ll finally get there soon. When nothing but Hawaii is left we’ll learn just how devoted he is to filling in the whole thing — dad is not big on air travel.
Getting back to Barry’s story there were a couple of mentions of an “Extra Miler Club.” So I Google’d to figure out what they were about and it turns out that they are a group of ~300 lunatics with county maps just like my dad! As a teenager whenever I had a friend over for the first time I would dig around for the map, hold it up, and say Look how weird my dad is! And now I discover that there’s a club devoted to doing the exact same thing!
Only on the Internets!
Dad is soooo getting an Extra Miler Club membership for his birthday next month.
