R and J in the USA

Well, we are celebrating.

If you are reading this post, you may be among the approximately 3-5 loyal readers of our little blog. We fully recognize we have put a ton of time and energy into something that few folks will read, but for those of you that do, we are overjoyed to have you along with us and putting this together is something that we knew we wanted to do for ourselves, even if nobody else decided to follow along.

As a result of not getting our blog ready before we left on the trip and the trip being one jam-packed day after another for pretty much 5 months straight, once we got the blog up and ready to be populated, we then had tons of states to catch up on writing about. This has taken up all of our spare moments that we can now use to do some of the other projects we’d originally hoped and set out to do during this trip. Over the last five months, we’d find that whatever progress we would make on catching up would soon be cancelled out by the fact that, while working on catching up, we were busy having new experiences in new states and would still be behind…though a little closer with each state.

And there is something poetic about the fact that we have officially caught up to the present moment during the EXACT middle of our trip in both time and space. It is October 30th and we left on May 30th for our 10 month trip. And today is the day we left Nebraska and entered Kansas which are not only the middle of the country (the geographical center of the lower 48 is just near the border between the two), but it is also the crossover from our state #25 and state #26. So, we are in the middle of the trip in every possible way, and in some ways, now starting the trip anew, fully caught up to the present moment.

It will now be a task to stay on top of things and not fall behind on states, but, for the 20 subscribers who may or may not be reading but certainly have born the brunt of one of Julie’s least favorite things in the world (lots of emails everyday), we apologize to you for the daily emails and are here to let you know, you will no longer be getting four emails every day as we post each new state. They will now come over the course of the state, or in a bunch every 5-7 days.

We are officially caught up to the present moment! Woohoo!

Oh, and one more accomplishment. While we are 25 states in on this trip, in terms of states visited in a lifetime, before this trip, Ryan had four states he had never stepped foot in – Iowa, Alaska, South Dakota and Nebraska. So as of our last state, Ryan has officially been in 50 states!

Thanks to our subscribers and our tiny band of loyal readers for your patience and for coming along on our grand USA adventure.

Onwards!