My Travel Experiences

Published on 11/29/2021

I have been very fortunate at my age to have been to 46 states now, with me just hitting Florida as that 46th last week. My family definitely isn’t rich, if you guys think that’s the reason why I have traveled so much. Many of the fun trips I have gotten to do have been because of my dad, as he works a job where he gets to travel a lot. That means he also builds up miles on flights, and that his company pays for some of the driving if we are doing that. Even just this year, I drove to college. I technically haven’t been on a plane with my parents since 2018! Which means all the trips since then were driving. So somehow I drove from CA to Florida without being in a plane. Now for me as someone who suffers from motion sickness, some of those 12 hour drive days were tough. Luckily last week we only had about a 7-8 hour drive from TN to FL. Since I’ve been to so many states, you might wonder, what do I count as having been to a state? Now, if I’ve only been to an airport of said state, I would not count that as visiting said state. Anything else normally is fine. My friends also have a rule that I kinda have been looking at acquiring as well, being you have to actually eat something in the state. There are a lot of “drive-by” states in the US that we don’t care too much about (sorry if you live in a drive-by state), but I have still been there because I have eaten there or stopped for gas. I should also mention the longest drive I have ever done in a day is 19 hours, from Colorado to CA. I have done this drive like 4? Times if I remember correctly. And by “I,” I mean my dad did most of the driving. The first time we did this drive was in 2011, I was only 10 years old and we were coming home from a long trip, and we were actually supposed to stop in a hotel in Nevada and take two days to come back, but when we got close we decided against it and just went all the way home instead. We didn’t plan for this, so we ended up getting home around 2am. The next few times we actually planned for it and left Colorado at around 4am (there’s an hour time difference so we would get home at midnight). With me being to so many states, that must mean I’ve been to a lot of countries too, right? Well, actually not exactly. I’ve only been to three countries. I have been to Canada, the US, and Australia. I’ve been to Canada twice, both times just to British Columbia, meaning we just took the same freeway all the way up through Oregon and Washington to get there. One memory I have from Canada is my brother and I on a whaler feeding a bald eagle with fish. We were very young, and our family loves boating, and our friends we were visiting up there had it and we saw the opportunity to feed the eagle and it was so cool to see him up close. As for Australia, we of course flew there because the only other way to get there would be an extremely long cruise. I gotta say, the 14 hour flight was worth it. We went in 2018, and it was a lot of fun! The flight there was tough because of my motion sickness, and when we actually got to Australia we took a cruise up the eastern seaboard of the country and I discovered my motion sickness wasn’t great for me on the ocean. The first night we were eating dinner and I just got super duper sea sick with a headache and so much worse. That was definitely something I had to adjust to, especially since that was my first and currently only cruise I’ve ever done. My favorite part of the cruise was a little band I was able to watch on the ship, they played a few nights and I even bought a CD! That was the last CD I’ve bought in general, and since then I’ve just ripped the songs to a computer, but it is funny how much I liked that band. They even took requests, so I sent them a request one night and the next day they played the song I requested! The other thing I’d like to mention from Australia is the McDonalds there was amazing as well (I still get emails from them lol).  They had this icee that was also a soda. I don’t even know the name for it, but it was so good I went there multiple times for it! So yes I recommend Australia if you ever want to go. A couple other things I should mention about flying, I have flown a few times, but the first time I ever flew on a plane I think I was about 5 or so years old, and it was just a one way trip because at the time my grandparents lived in Southern California, so we drove back up, but we flew down just for the actual experience. Also surprisingly enough, I’ve only been on first class once. I was 11, as this trip was right after my birthday in 2012, and it was also a 12am flight, which means I was basically asleep while they were giving out all the free food and stuff they normally do in first class. I blame the better seats for me falling asleep (no for real it was midnight and I was tired). But as you can see, I have a lot of travel experience in my years. I don’t know about you reading this, but I think travel is a wonderful part of life, especially if you live in the same state, city, and house, your entire life like me for the past 20 years until college. I could ramble much more on all the travel if I wanted to, but I will leave it here. If you have a question about a specific trip I did or a state I visited, and would like to see a blog post about it, let me know on my contact page!