The first time it happened, my father had been dead for one week.

My mother and I were in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, in April, trying to do something with ourselves. We were walking an overlook with long views across the ridgelines when something appeared in the air in front of us. Not in a photograph. Not on a screen. In the air. A shaft of colored light — blues and greens — moving as we…

_Where are you?_

Two friends texted, separately, within an hour of each other.

_Western Nebraska,_ I said.

_So you're in the middle of nowhere,_ both of them wrote back.

I really paused.

I had flown into Denver and taken a nine-seater plane to Alliance: a tiny plane, a tiny airport, a tiny place. And just before the texts came in, I had been looking at the Atlas Obscura map and counted eight…

A few weeks ago, I announced my quest: Visit all 50 states before America’s 250th birthday on July 4th. I had 11 remaining—Arkansas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska—and I asked if you had suggestions.

What arrived was not a trickle. It was a flood. Hundreds of emails, from readers in Fairbanks and Visby, Sweden; from retired…

I have been traveling my entire life. As a journalist, I've reported from places most people never see, like small towns in Malaysia and factory complexes in Tijuana. As a traveler, I've chased the unusual, the overlooked, the wonderful, and the natural around the world. I run marathons and rock climb, so discomfort in the name of discovery is basically my love language. And yet, until this past…