Biography

Shortly after my husband and I were married in 1981, we made a goal of being in every COUNTY in the United States. We both loved to travel and knew this would be something special. We went to Alaska on our honeymoon (which was my 50th state). We went from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay to the North Slope oil fields to Denali Park to Anchorage to the Mananuska Valley to Juneau, where we cruised the inside passage back to Vancouver, British Columbia. (Depending on how you “count” Alaska, we might have covered all of it back in 1981. But per our own count, we covered about half of the jurisdictions.) In the summer of 1985, our younger son turned one year old. And we started our annual road trips.

We “did” Hawaii in June-July 1994. (That was Dave’s last state.) Dave and I had traveled some before our marriage–so our final counties are not the same. He stepped into Garfield County, Idaho, on July 1, 2017. One day later, I stepped onto the ground in Oneida County, Idaho. After 36 years and 5 days of marriage, we’d reached our goal.

Our children reached their 50th state (Alaska) in October 1996–at the ages of 14 and 12.

By our count, we didn’t get to all the Alaska “counties” before Dave died of cancer in 2020. (According to the State of Alaska, there are only four “boroughs”–or county equivalents. By our count, there are 28 subdivisions. Alaska does not have “counties” in the sense that the other states do.) Besides, starting in 2009, we started international travel as well. Between 2009 and 2018, we’d entered over 30 countries.