Minster: On the road again

Friday, March 16, 2007

I told my wife I would take her to London for spring break, and being a man of my word, that is exactly where we are heading. London, Ky., here we come!

We’ll be passing through on our way to Richmond, Va., to visit my sister’s family. Interstate 64 offers a more direct route, but we’ve already been that way and I don’t like to drive the same way twice. You see, I like to visit new counties.

Yes, feel free to laugh at me. It is a strange hobby, and I know I should be ashamed of it. I keep track of the counties I visit, with the goal of reaching all 3,131 counties (and county equivalents) in the country.

nutgraf

It makes for awkward conversations when I have to explain why our next few vacations are planned for such places as Nicodemus, Kan., and Red Cloud, Neb. In the next couple months we will go to West Mineral, Kan., and see Big Brutus, the second largest electric shovel in the world.

The thing is, I really enjoy doing it. I like marking a map of where I’ve been. I like seeing tourist attractions that most other people don’t know exist.

Last weekend we went to Lincoln, Neb., so I could get five new counties, and on the way we saw the Homestead National Monument and, to celebrate my Bohemian heritage, the Czech Museum of Wilber, Neb. We also saw the famous black squirrels of Marysville, Kan.

The strangest part of this hobby is that there are other people who do the same thing. There’s even an organization, which I’ve joined, and I get a quarterly newsletter explaining all the latest events in the world of county hunting.

When we got married, my wife and I tried to reconstruct her past travels. To save ourselves the trouble in the future, we’ve been keeping track for our kids since they were born.

One of my biggest failures as a father was when I took my son to only three counties his first year of life. On our spring break trip, though, he will get 130.

Instead of sitting in a bar in Mexico thinking, “I spent 500 bucks for this?,” I’ll be zigzagging across the country in a station wagon.

There may be a nicer place to spend spring break than driving two-lane roads in the nether regions of Appalachia, but I don’t know where that place would be. By the time we get back, I’ll have a county total of over 830, more than 25 percent of my way to my goal. And, on our return trip through Louisville, Ky., we’ll see Colonel Sanders’s gravesite.

Good luck finding that in Cancun.

Minster is a Lawrence junior in economics.

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