Roadtripping to North Dakota

A few weeks ago, I did a solo roadtrip, spending two weeks driving a curving path from Nashville, TN to Bismarck, ND to go to every state I’d never been to. This was a deeply satisfying and rewarding experience – I got to drink deeply of solitude and nature and freedom, got to practice living on the road, and hit 50 states just before my father and brother, who were at 48 and 49 respectively and didn’t know I was doing this. Here I’ll sketch my journey and conclude with a few things I’m taking away from the endeavor.

The route

I had eight states to knock off: Georgia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and North Dakota. I’d been picking off stragglers for years, leaving myself a big mostly-contiguous chunk in the midwest ripe for a high-value roadtrip. I viewed this as a more extreme version of how, when playing Tetris, one tends to carefully preserve a vertical gap for a long piece and then knocks out four rows at once.

The one fixed pin of this trip – and the reason I did it when I did – was an engagement party one weekend in Nashville, so I decided to plan a long layover in Atlanta on my way there and then drive everywhere else. The final route looks like a path you’d only travel if you were trying to drive through a very specific sequence of states:¹

Some logistics

I lived out of a 2024 Hyundai Elantra for these two weeks. I’d actually rented the cheapest car available, but when I got to the lot, the rental agent told me he “wouldn’t do me dirty like that” and instead gave me a stupidly nice brand new car that, thanks to automated lanekeeping, basically drives itself on the highway.

I stayed in a few Airbnbs and a motel, but I greatly preferred my nights in the woods. As it turns out, dispersed camping is allowed in national forests (which are nicely visualized on this wonderful map), and it’s somehow quite freeing to drive into a big wild forest and get to camp basically anywhere, picking an arbitrary dirt road and pitching camp too deep in the woods to be likely to see another soul.

I set out from Nashville on the morning of March 17th. I’ll flash some scenes from the trip. Mouse over the photos for vignettes!

In Atlanta, I took public transit into the city and rested in Centennial Park. The air was warm. I chatted briefly with a few homeless folks but mostly kept to myself.

To check off Kentucky, I went to Mammoth Caves with a friend of friends from the engagement party. He turned out to be a mathematician, and we knocked some math puzzles back and forth as we walked around the largest cave in the world.

This ridiculous Bass Pro Shops pyramid stands in Memphis. Like the greater pyramids of Egypt, this structure sports four triangular sides, various anti-robbery mechanisms, and an assortment of dead animals, and is similarly anthropologically fascinating. Instead of mummies, however, this modern pyramid only contains old people.

Ironically, I found myself unintentionally on the path of totality of the 2024 solar eclipse just a few weeks too early, and I’d drive far away and then do a whole second roadtrip back to the path from California.

Kansas was expansive, calm, and flat. As I drove north from Arkanasas, I could see the land change, quickly turning from rocky forested hills to flat Southern forest to open plains, all in the span of an hour or two.

This Kansas town had a classic middle-America look that'd seem at home in the 1950's to me. I slept in Kansas City, Missouri that evening.

I stayed a few days with Matthew Schallenkamp, a friend and coworker, in Sioux Falls, SD, working on a coding project and seeing the town. Remarkably for a city of a quarter million people, Sioux Falls has a huge set of rapids rolling through the middle of town.

Matthew joined me on a trip west to Devils Tower. What a weird formation.

In Nashville, I athletically somersaulted onto a mechanical bull.

I spent two nights in the Arkansas Ozarks. It’s beautiful hill country.

To me, Oklahoma consists of Tiger King, some associations with panhandles, and this hybrid gas station/casino.

I stopped for lunch by a pond.

Nebraska allegedly has some cool buttes and bluffs off on its western side (actually, all the plains states seem to get cooler as you go west), but I skirted its eastern border, following the Missouri River and camping on the shore.

I love the Badlands. They’re so cool. I hadn’t been since I was a child, and I hadn’t remembered that these wonderful formations are just dirt, not rock. They’re so fragile — one determined person with a shovel could probably really change the view! In line with this, it’s a pretty geologically young place, with erosion starting only some 500k years ago.

I sent this picture to my brother and father after I told them I had some news. Yes, they were mad, and it was great.

Some lessons

This trip afforded me ample time for reflection and coincided with a more extended personal journey I’ve been on for the past year in which I’ve been figuring out how to live as an adult in ways feel good. I learned a number of things about roadtripping, including that

• it’s very useful to run a tight ship logistically, taking care of problems as soon as they arise and keeping gear quite organized. I never had any major logistical problems, which is unusual for me, and it’s because I gave problems my attention when they were still small.
• Talking to strangers is a great joy of travel, and a good way to quickly get the feel of a place. Unplanned conversations were highlights of the trip. (See Why I Talk To Strangers.)
• Driving on snow is way harder than I expected.
• The land is big, but it’s fathomably big. Taking a plane from coast to coast gives little sense of how much land there is since you really have no physical feeling of how fast you’re traveling. Driving across the heartlands gave me a real sense of how big the land is: if I drive for an hour or two or three, the character of the land will differ – hills turn to forest, forest turns to grassland, grassland to plains, to prairie, to badlands – and if I go for ten or twenty of these changes I’ll go from one side of the country to the other. America feels like a much more tangible thing to me now.

And, even more valuable, some broader life lessons and realizations:

• A career has to be fun to be fulfilling. No matter how important I feel science is, and how convinced I am that I could make a valuable contribution, it’s not worth doing if it’s not fun.
• Various realizations about software engineering thanks to Matthew, including that it’s a skill I simply don’t have but could develop.
• I’m kinda lonely! This particularly solitary endeavor clarified for me that most of my endeavors are actually solitary, and I want more collaboration and closeness with the people around me.
• Nature is good medicine, and I need more of it in my life.