…a beautiful day! What an evening last night. Jeanie, her friend John, and myself loaded up and headed to Cape Henlopen State Park. Of course on the way there Jeanie didn’t let me get by without an interview on video. She’ll be adding it to her video collection of different artists and so forth. So John asked the questions while I gave the synopsis of my trip. So we arrived at the park, headed up the tower, then back down the tower to grab rice, then back up, and down again. …

Angela pulls through in desperate times. Here’s a challenging task for you. Drive a few hundred miles away from home to a town you’ve never been to and start making cold calls to try and find a host family for the night. Not an easy thing to do. And while I was making tons of calls myself (you’d be surprised who says ‘yes’ and who says ‘no’), my dear friend Angela helped me out and went on a limb to find a host for me. …

On December 7th, 1787 Delaware was admitted as the first state. It’d be interesting to go back to that time and hear what they thought of the actual size of the state. As the country got older and moved west the states got bigger. After admitting Delaware into the union there was only one state to every come about that was smaller, Rhode Island. While speaking on the sizes of states, there remain only two states of the 50 that I have never been to now, the biggest and the smallest ones. …

Little Town VA According to the gauge on Charles’ car the temperature got as high as 103 degrees, in the words of his grandmother it was “close.” We headed for an afternoon drive into Virginia to see where Charles and John used to live and have a taste of small town life there. We went up to Leesburg and down through Aldie to Middleburg. It’s horse country. And a dirt road is considered to be prestigious. …

Maryland was a great stop, fantastic. Great hosts and great variety. John and Charles will be friends for a lifetime. Waiting until the last minute to try and write about it all is a mistake. But I did knock out a pretty good blog entry on D.C. Because I’m not writing as often these entries are just getting longer, and longer, and longer. Oops. Baltimore For a short evening I made a couple new friends on a drive to Baltimore. …

Possibly the greatest part of my trip is making connections across this country. Not the kind of connections they tell you about in business class, you know, not the networking kind where you shake hands and exchange business cards. I’ve been able to connect with people across this country from all kinds of backgrounds through conversation. It probably goes back to being a kid and always wanting to sit at the adult table and listen to their conversation. …

In the words of my amazingly awesome mother, “Just imagine!” Every day there are decisions being made in this city that have such enormous impact on the country and world. Every single news program I’ve watched in the last year has a story that relates back to a decision that was made in this city. George W. Bush is the most talked about man in the world. As for the United States he’s probably the second most talked about person. …

Today was the shortest drive I have had on the trip to go from one host to another while going to a different state. The total distance in the drive from Virginia to Maryland? A whopping 13 miles. A short drive like that only has enough time to play maybe three songs from my iPod, which makes the next thing even more ironic. There I was, on my way, and the first song to play includes the lyrics, “on my way to Maryland. …

Virginia! It’s not entirely wanted for my Virginia experience, but you never know, there may be more Virginia on my way back down from Maine. What happened is I was planning to knock out West Virginia first while near the southern end of the state. When that fell through last minute I had to go with whatever connections I had, and after a few missed connections I found myself going all the way through Virginia to the northern end outside of D. …

Wow, here I am, just on the outskirts of Washington D.C. I’ve now covered 34 states in 9 months and have somehow managed to spit out over 300 blog entries and post over 1600 photos (oh, but I have taken waaaay more). There have probably been over 30 newsletters I’ve sent out (alright, so I’ve missed a few, sorry!). Though there are nearly 1/3 of the states remaining, I feel very close to being on the home stretch. …