It took us 7 years to visit 48 states. Back in early 2017 we had just come home from an overseas assignment. I had shut down my travel blog and bought an F33A Bonanza. My daughter told me I should start blogging again and I asked what would I blog about. She asked if I had visited every state and I said, no. Thus was born the beginning of an idea. Beechtales first post said that "It will likely be a mixture of flight reports, fun pictures, comments on destinations visited and general information about my plane and me.".
It wasn't until 2 months later when I started to commit to the idea and after landing in Georgia I marked it off the list. I had been ruminating about what a 48 state challenge should be for me. I had just picked the plane up from California and flown it home, were those states already done? In the end I decided to start fresh. I also needed to decide the purpose of the whole thing. I made a list of all the states and then started picking something from the state I wanted to see. Some states had many options and it was a hard choice to come up with just one. Some states, well not so much, they did not really offer anything new I wanted to see.
With all this in mind, I decided the criteria would be to land the plane in the state. We would sightsee most but the focus would be on trips we wanted to make to places we wanted to see. In the end we ended up with 7 technical stops. Two of the states we had spent a good amount of time in previously so in reality our technical stops were Kansas, Mississippi, Indiana, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. We did overnight in Mississippi and I have been through it many times so maybe that can come off the list too.
We completed 21 states with the Bonanza before I upgraded to the Baron for the last 27. Along the way we landed in 10 of the original with the Baron. We actually hit some states multiple times for multiple reasons but for the count I am only considering the primary visit.
It took us 16 different trips, about 190 hours of flying and over 28,000 nautical miles to complete the quest. Definitely not the most efficient path. Just clicking a random path between the states and you can cover all 48 in under 7000 miles. I'm sure there is a more optimum path, heck we flew 5100+ miles to see 9 states. So efficiency was not a driver, in fact for all the flight time we could have flown around the world quicker.
Nine of our trips only added one state to our tally, for example I had to be out in Oklahoma city for a class. We had already landed in Oklahoma and most of the states on the way. We picked up Arkansas on this flight but it was not an efficient way to get a state.
We also did 6 bigger trips where we snagged 4 or more states, our record was 9 on one trip. Some of the flying was routine, droning along but we had the occasional weather to deal with though few instrument approaches. Part of our luck was self made, we did adjust trips a bit to pick our weather and in some cases when the weather went really stinky bad, we moved trips.
From a flying perspective some of the most memorable sites were flybys of Niagara Falls, The Arch, The Rockies, The Grand Canyon and the Hudson Corridor. We also did a good job seeing some of the iconic and lesser known national parks. CC and I are not outdoorsy people but we enjoy the outdoors in moderation. We like to hike easy and some moderate trails but then enjoy sleeping on clean sheets after a hot shower and a warm meal.
From a flying perspective, it is a lot different flying 900+ mile distances than the more typicall sub 300 mile visit to the Grandparents. The longer legs mean more weather, more different terrain and more planning. I stay instrument current and proficient and can say there were no flights where I was concerned or felt over my head. Again, I cheated, I left a day early or late sometimes so I chose my weather.
Should we have gotten done quicker, maybe, but we were in no rush. I am glad we did it though, we often go back to some of the same places which is fine, we like them but it's good to push yourself to see new stuff.
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