Have Fruit, and Ready to Travel Again!
October 11, 2020 Who wouldn’t love to visit all 50 U.S. states? I’m guessing that accomplishment is on many people’s bucket lists, if not somewhere near the top. I’m at 39 states — stuck there at the moment, I suppose, considering the ongoing reluctance to travel during a pandemic. Although tomorrows are never guaranteed, at age 56, I figure that’s a decent enough number. Just 11 more to go, right?
A career in journalism hasn’t hurt the cause.
Sports writing got me to Washington state for the first time. I covered the first two games of the 1995 league championship series between the Seattle Mariners and my hometown Cleveland Indians.
Reporting on the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns and then (post-newspaper days) attending trade shows for various industry magazines took me to New Orleans on several occasions. Those are the only times I’ve ventured to Louisiana.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve visited the state of Nevada, but each of those instances can be attributed to covering Las Vegas trade shows in the fields of agronomy, medicine, and construction. A couple of those trade pubs also landed me in Arizona (Phoenix) and Iowa (Cedar Falls) for the only times.
More recently, my work with CropLife, a sister publication of American Fruit Grower and Western Fruit Grower, did wonders to literally expand my horizons. The row crop magazine sent me to Oregon in 2018, and last year, in one marvelous road trip, I polished off the hat trick of Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.
What’s ironic is that I switched from row crops to fruit growing this past February before I could make my debuts in five states where you can’t get off the plane without falling into a corn or soybean field.
So, now I find myself relying on the world of fruit growing to get me to Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. Call me crazy, but I just don’t see that happening. Needless to say, ditto for a sixth state, Alaska.
That leaves me with five battleground states. Not to put any pressure on any of you out there, but moving forward, if you’re reading this from New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, New Hampshire, or Maine, I’m asking for your help. I need you to write my editor, Dave Eddy, at [email protected], and give him a solid reason to send me your way. Hey, everyone has a story, right?
Sooner or later (hopefully sooner), the coronavirus is going to subside. When it does, my push toward 50 states will enthusiastically continue. Just show me the way to Santa Fe.
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