Mob-Rule and County Clinching (2014 version)

[Laura]

How many of you actively track your counties visited on mob-rule? Post your map and/or a link to it.
Also, have you visited all of the counties of your state (or other states)?
What are your current (short term) county clinching goals?

I've visited all of the counties (and independent cities!) in Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, DC, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Delaware was my first state completed, though. My most recent completion was Virginia in March of 2014, with my last county being Scott and my last independent city Franklin.

In the short term, I'd like to finish visiting all of the counties in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. I could probably finish PA in a long weekend. Once I finish those two counties, though, I won't have much left within an easy drive.

County clinching is something I like to do in addition to clinching routes. I do place a higher priority on route clinching, but I have been known to take short detours if a county is close by.

Here's my map: http://www.mob-rule.com/user-gifs/lauramb.gif


Note: I've created a new topic and decided not to resurrect former threads because most everyone's answers have changed in the threads from previous years (including my own!)
Other threads for reference:
https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=1736.0
https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=4226.0

ETA: CANADA
http://www.mob-rule.com/user-gifs/Canada/lauramb.gif

[cjk374]

Here's mine.  I only need 6 more parishes to clinch all of Louisiana. My 2nd closest state clinch is Arkansas.

[formulanone]

I hit 1000 counties as of two weeks ago. I've completed Florida and Alabama, the two most recent states I've lived in. I also clinched each county in Maine (two weeks on business) and Rhode Island (completed in about two hours). I think Georgia or New Jersey will probably be one of the next two I complete. If I miss a county or two, or miss out on clinching a road, I just figure I'll catch up with it another time.



Mostly, I fly somewhere and pick up a few counties as time or as travels permit in between work. If it takes more than 5-6 hours, my company prefers I fly. Whichever is more cost-effective after airfare and rental car costs are evaluated against work mileage, but arrival time is also factored in. Most of my work region is the southeastern US, but they fly me out to whatever project I'm needed at due to fluctuations in customer demand; some projects have one person, others could have dozens. I'll also try out different airports to clinch more counties and if time and/or money is saved...but primarily, to keep my status and frequent flyer miles with a particular airline.

I don't get to drive on multi-day trips very often, maybe twice a year to go to Florida with my wife and kids. I count a county by merely driving into it, being a passenger on the ground, or walking through its borders. I have a handful which are airport layovers (a matter of debate, thus colored differently).

I really like the Google Map with the county borders laid over it.

[algorerhythms]

Here's mine: http://mob-rule.com/g17?center=39,-99&zoom=4&user=algorerhythms

There are counties I've visited since the last time I updated that map, but I've forgotten my password for the site, so I can't update it. The ones that are missing that come to mind right now are 2 counties in Oklahoma from when I went to Stillwater, and one each in Wisconsin and Michigan from travelling to a conference in Madison and transferring planes in Detroit.

[corco]

Here's mine. I do my years in reverse to most people, so the year represents the year I most recently visited the county as opposed to the year I first visited the county. Upside is I get to update mob-rule more frequently and get a total county count for the end of the year. Downside is not knowing how many new counties I picked up in a year.



Oddly, I still haven't been to all the counties in Montana. I am taking a work trip to NE Montana in a month or so, so I should get most of the remaining then. Otherwise, I'm full bore on driving the Montana highway system now that I've finished Idaho, so that will obviously require visiting those counties.

I've visited all of them in WA/WY/AZ/ID. Short term non-Montana goals- not too many, actually. I'd like to finish up Utah at some point soon, but it's not a super-high priority. My main thoughts for travel next year are 1) Drive a lot of Montana highways, 2) Denver meet, 3) UP Meet, 4) Quebec, with 3 and 4 possibly combined. With Idaho and Wyoming's counties and state highway systems clinched, I've kind of boxed myself in for out of state travel and I'll probably begin to adopt the fly-and-drive model for out of state roadtrips going forward. What I envision is finding a couple roadmeets I want to attend every year, using Google Flights to find the cheapest airport+rental car cost within 800 miles or so of it, and then working the vacation around that. When it looked like I might go to NE Alabama before I got this new job, for instance, it (strangely) appeared that it would be cheapest overall to fly into Peoria, Illinois for attendance, so things like that will determine how I get counties.

Otherwise, I'm closest to finishing Delaware (only three counties left!) so maybe I should make that my focus.

Also Canada:

[sammi]

I don't have a lot of counties done, which is to be expected because I can barely leave Toronto for a few days without my parents.

On the US map, there's my 2000 trip. I highlighted counties between San Francisco and SFO airport, between NYC and Cape May, and the counties containing Orlando and Kissimmee, FL. The darker blues are Niagara Falls, NY and the 2013–2014 Chicagoland trip.


On the Canadian map is the trip to Niagara Falls, Montréal and Ottawa (in that order) in 2010, a few weeks after arriving in Canada, then my school trip to Waterloo in 2011 (does that even count? ), and the Canadian side of the Chicagoland trip. And of course, in purple, my home "county".


I should also mark the stayed-in counties.

[algorerhythms]

Found my password for the site, so here's my updated maps:

[agentsteel53]

I'm missing only several that I can drive to.

[adventurernumber1]

I'm missing only several that I can drive to.

Impressive.

[SSOWorld]

short of 1000 US counties by 12, with AZ, WI, NJ, DE, DC and RI complete.  2013's count will never be broken (by my efforts that is) again.  That year only became so huge because of 2 XC road trips, when I'm usually lucky to have one.



Canada doesn't offer much for me, and add 3 muni's of Mexico as well.

[hbelkins]

My next realistic state clinches are New York, South Carolina and Missouri, but I'd say my days of collecting new counties are effectively over unless I win the lottery.   

[pianocello]

I've heard of people tracking county seats, so I decided to do that as well on a different color. I also used different colors to indicate places I've spent the night, lived, and clinched.

[oscar]

I've heard of people tracking county seats, so I decided to do that as well on a different color. I also used different colors to indicate places I've spent the night, lived, and clinched.

One of these years, I'll have to shift from coloring based on year clinched, to the quality of the clinch (county seat, substantial contact with county, "spinback" or other minimal contact).  My travels have been increasingly on US routes, which often pass through multiple county seats, so that has the side effect of replacing some of my "spinback" clinches with "county seat" clinches.  I probably still have a few hundred of the former, though.

[Mapmikey]

My recent trip to Vancouver got me up to nearly 1550.

I don't fly so finishing them all is definitely out.  I am a route clincher but do keep track of the counties I have been to...

States I know I will finish besides those already done (SC, NC, VA, MD, DE, CT) are FL, GA, PA, WV, NJ, ME, VT, NH

Some likelihood: NY, AL, WY

Mapmikey

[Duke87]

It's probably easier to get more counties if you live in a more central location. For me the point of difficulty is getting out of the northeast:


As for Canada, I've been to more than 20% of their counties but they're all small ones on the St Lawrence Corridor:

[empirestate]

Mine's about where it was on last check-in:


State clinches include my home of NY, plus a bunch of easy ones: CT, RI, DE, NJ and NH. I also have MA save for the islands, go figure. Amazingly I'm still missing Forest County in my native PA, not to mention one whole state. I figure I'll get both some day when I least expect it. I'll also definitely finish HI on my next visit there; I already made a point of clinching Kalawao County on my first trip. Didn't hurt that it was also a cool trip in its own right, and also helped with the National Parks Passport program, which we started during that vacation. 

The coloring is by length of stay, from any length of time at all, to overnight, about a week, about a month, or I basically lived there. (Yellow is reserved for my first county, the one that issued my birth certificate.) I also count airport layovers and other semi-contacts in gray; right now, I have no airport layovers so this category is taken up with inland water passage whilst onboard a ship.

There's a lot more of that last category in Canada:

[vdeane]

My small but tracked county map:


My only "state clinch" right now is DC, but NY and VT are close.  The pink "clinched" category means I've been on all CHM routes plus others that I considered to be needed (such as VT's state highways, or NY parkways not included on CHM).  It does lead to easy clinches in Ontario though (I'd have two more if it weren't for ON 34) as I don't include downloaded routes as needed.  By the end of the year, I will have added Rensselaer County to the clinched list, and possibly Orleans as well.

[clong]

My wife and I keep ours together. I would like to finish up Alabama, but not much to see in the counties I haven't been to and no real reason to go other than to check them off.

[Thing 342]

I have much of the Mid-Atlantic clinched. I hope to get VA and SC clinched sometime soon.

[okroads]

Here is my map. I have clinched 100% of OK, KS, DE, and RI. I clinched KS & RI this year.

[bugo]

I don't collect counties and I don't go out of the way to visit counties but I keep a mob-rule account so I can see where I have been on a map.

[Alex]

I was introduced to county collecting on a roadtrip with Adam Froehlig in 1999, when we rode together to southeastern Louisiana. At the time I thought the concept was silly and not worth undertaking, but after a 2001 trip with him to southeastern Alabama, I started to get the bug for it. I joined mob-rule at some point after that and later began to archive my older maps. The oldest I have is from January 17, 2013 when I had 584 counties:



When Marty introduced color codes to the mob-rule site, I separated my counties by year. This lasted until 2005, when something went wrong with his server and everyone lost their color code data (anyone else remember that?). At that time, I decided on doing a new code and added "overnighted" (as has Nathan further upthread) and who I was with (helps me remember the roadtrips better).

My recent trip home to Delaware included a lot of extra driving and another seven (one in WV and six in VA including the independent cities of Poquoson and Franklin) counties bringing me up to 1912:



I also am part of a group helping our friend Larry fulfill his county map as part of our travels. http://www.counties4larry.blogspot.com/
When we were roommates we had a county collecting competition and which led to an April Fool's joke I played on him saying I was driving to Kentucky that weekend to collect all the remaining counties. I caught him on his computer later that evening looking at flights to Kentucky and let him off the hook!

[vdeane]

I don't know if anyone else noticed this yet, but there's also a map now that has a user's counties overlayed onto Google Maps. http://www.mob-rule.com/g17?center=42,-80&zoom=6&user=vdeane

[Alex]

I don't know if anyone else noticed this yet, but there's also a map now that has a user's counties overlayed onto Google Maps. http://www.mob-rule.com/g17?center=42,-80&zoom=6&user=vdeane

Its linked on every profile page too. It has been there for awhile now, though how long I am not sure.

[vdeane]

At least since April, since that's when I updated NYS Roads with the new link.