The “Trip A” odometer on the Avalanche read 3,449 when I pulled into my neighborhood. Right before rolling up into my driveway, it flipped one final number. 3,450 miles. That’s a lot of miles.

As always, the drive from my house to the destination was enjoyable. I stayed in hotels, stopped and browsed at antique malls, and met up with various online friends of mine along the route. As usual, the drive home was brutal. I slept in my truck, drank copious amounts of coffee, and held my speed at somewhere between 15-20mph over posted speed limits in an attempt to get home as quickly as possible.

In those 3,450 miles I drove through thirteen states: Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas. (I also whizzed through D.C., but it’s not a state.) That’s 26% of our country’s states in one road trip. For a while I tried to take pictures of each sign I saw welcoming me to a new state, but there were so many that I missed some. My favorite road sign were the ones in D.C. that announced their “Aggressive Driver Imaging System” was in use. I’m not exactly sure what that entails, but I put on my sunglasses, flipped down my sun visor, pulled my baseball cap down low and the collar of my shirt up (like that wouldn’t get their attention …). Dad said it would be funny to drive through the beltway wearing a pair of fake glasses with a nose attached to them (Mason calls them “wocka-wocka” glasses). I remember years ago people spouting statistics like, “the average person is recorded on camera seven times a day.” I suspect in the no-so-far future people would say, “the average person is being recorded on camera all the time,” especially if they live in Chicago, and will talk wistfully about the old days when people were “only” being recorded seven times a day.