Counties?

[CentralCAroadgeek]

Updated county maps as of July 2012.

Canada (though it is only greater Vancouver):

USA:

[vdeane]

Wow, you're only 13 and I only have two more counties in the US than you do (and that's eastern counties, so they're a lot smaller than many of the ones you have!).  I feel even more inadequate than this thread already made me feel.

[Jim]

Wow, you're only 13 and I only have two more counties in the US than you do (and that's eastern counties, so they're a lot smaller than many of the ones you have!).  I feel even more inadequate than this thread already made me feel.

Hate to make you feel worse, but here are the travels of my not-yet-3-year-old daughter:



We'll have to get back to a lot of these places when she's old enough to remember them.

[Ian]

Mine's okay considering I'm only 17...

[vdeane]

I'm amazed at how well traveled everyone else here is compared to me... not sure how I'm supposed to fix that.  I have a lot of roadtrips I'd like to do, but right now I'm in college with little money, and afterwards I'll be working with little time!  I guess you have to have parents who take you to lots of different places (my family vacationed at the same place every year until I was around 10).

[mightyace]

^^^

In my case, the trips to Wisconsin were because my mother's family was out there.  (And the surviving family members still are.)  South Dakota was a trip to see Mount Rushmore and to visit more family.  And, Denver was a seminar my dad went to on sabbatical.

Since then, living a good distance from my parent helped.  Plus, my NASCAR fandom has taken me to a few places I never would have gone to otherwise.  (like North Carolina [Bristol and Charlotte], south Georgia and Florida [Daytona], east-central Indiana and west-central Ohio [Indianapolis])

[Scott5114]

I'm amazed at how well traveled everyone else here is compared to me... not sure how I'm supposed to fix that.  I have a lot of roadtrips I'd like to do, but right now I'm in college with little money, and afterwards I'll be working with little time!  I guess you have to have parents who take you to lots of different places (my family vacationed at the same place every year until I was around 10).

It's not too difficult to get started in filling in the counties in your local area... just take weekend day trips where you only use one or two tanks of gas and then go back home. You can probably get your entire state done this way if you get counties done in manageable, cheap chunks. Another way to pick up counties is to just take different routes to places. I had to drive between the OKC area and Springfield MO, where I went to school, so once I got bored of I-44 I started taking less sensible routes (like US-160 to US-169 to I-44, or US-60 to US-69 to I-40) just for something different to do. That let me get a lot of the counties in eastern OK, southeast KS, and southwest MO (and a few in northwest AR). I filled in even more counties by applying the same strategy when we went to visit relatives in Kansas City.

The problem happens when you hit the wall where you have no unvisited counties within several hours' drive. However it is still possible to do this on a budget, if not exactly comfortable.

[corco]

I'm amazed at how well traveled everyone else here is compared to me... not sure how I'm supposed to fix that.  I have a lot of roadtrips I'd like to do, but right now I'm in college with little money, and afterwards I'll be working with little time!  I guess you have to have parents who take you to lots of different places (my family vacationed at the same place every year until I was around 10).

My trick has been to move every couple years and thoroughly explore the area I'm in. When I lived in Washington, I just started clinching highways and eventually drove every mile of state highway in Washington. The whole state was a day drive away, so I could just take a bunch of loops and get most of it. The rest I got by just taking different routes every time I'd drive home to Idaho.

Same deal with Wyoming. And then Arizona. Now I've driven the entire highway system in three states (I still need 286 in Arizona, but I'm going to get that next week) without doing much more than just taking day trips and taking different routes on drives I needed to do anyway.

In the past couple years since I've been making a little bit more money (but working an average of 45 hours a week while going to school full time) with less time, I've taken to taking one or two big trips a year, but even those are only about four days long and I just drive as far away as possible on interesting roads and turn around and come back (functionally this has become my annual trek to Texas/Oklahoma, exploring different parts of those states every time). Last month, one of my jobs furloughed me for a month since we were between projects and school was out too, so I took my savings and just drove all month,  popping in on weekends to work 30 hours at my other job. Unfortunately, that'll be all the driving I really do this year, but it was enough for me to finish the Arizona highway system.

Being kind of a nerd, I don't go out to bars all that often and run up big tabs and stuff- it's amazing how much more money I seem to have compared to peers in my same financial situation since I don't buy much more alcohol/other substances than a 12  pack a week or so. I'm also too busy working to spend money on frivolous things, so my roadtrip budget exists even though I'm going to school full time.

I'm hoping once I don't have to pay for school next year and am hopefully just working one career job, I'll be able to seriously ramp up the driving.

But yeah, moving every two years helps when you're young. As soon as I graduate here in December, I'm going to be looking to go to any state but Washington, Wyoming, or Arizona. With the economy the way it is, I'll take what I can get, but I figure there has to be something in one of those 46 other states (I'd rather not do Hawaii either- I think I'd get island fever).

[mapman1071]

Arizona 13/15 + 1 Lost County (Lost in 1871) Pah-Ute (Now Clark County, Nevada)

[empirestate]

Being paid to tour the country has helped my map quite a huge amount, but there are a few major chunks in there that were due to personal travel (being engaged to a Californian also tends to add to an Easterner's county count!).

[6a]

Being paid to tour the country has helped my map quite a huge amount, but there are a few major chunks in there that were due to personal travel (being engaged to a Californian also tends to add to an Easterner's county count!).

Heh, being married to a Californian who has a sister in Alaska has certainly helped me along.  Along with corco's idea, I did 6 states in 12 years, along with a huge appetite for day trips.  Now I just need to fill out the map...

[Duke87]

In my case I was out of college before this was something I even thought to concern myself with (probably never would have if I didn't know other people were doing it). Since then, I've pulled in a decent amount of mileage and counties traveling to and from road meets... but then I've also taken some unrelated road trips, a couple of which went pretty far afield. Yes, having a job means you can't do this constantly, but you do get vacation days, weekends, and holidays you can put to use.

[vdeane]

Yeah, I'm hoping that road meets will help with traveling once I get a job and can actually stay overnight.  Not sure how vacation time will work though; my family used to take a week long vacation each year (in 2007 we took two because it was my parent's 20th anniversary), and though that's subsided, we might start doing that again after I graduate (I was thinking that Ottawa and/or Montreal could be fun).  Maybe if I'm smarter I could turn these into clinching opportunities; I've been kicking myself over not asking my parents to borrow the car when we were relaxing in the hotel in DC (I could have clinched the DC area freeways...).

Also hoping to get a group of friends and do stuff with them, though I'm not sure if I'll be successful in that endeavor.

[kphoger]

My list of Mexican municipalities:

BAJA CALIFORNIA
Tijuana

CHIHUAHUA
Ahumada
Batopilas
Bocoyna
Chihuahua
Cuauhtémoc
Gran Morelos
Guachochi
Guerrero
Juárez
Manuel Benavides
Santa Isabel

COAHUILA
Anáhuac
General Cepeda
Ocampo
Parras
Ramos Arizpe
Saltillo

JALISCO
Hostotipaquillo
Magdalena
Puerto Vallarta
San Sebastián del Oeste
Tequila

NAYARIT
Ahuacatlán
Bahía de Banderas
Compostela
Ixtlán del Río
Jala
San Blas
San Pedro Lagunillas
Santa María del Oro

NUEVO LEÃ"N
Ciénega de Flores
García
General Escobedo
General Zuazua
Sabinas Hidalgo
Salinas Victoria
Santa Catarina
Vallecillo
Possibly 1 or 2 others:  some municipal boundaries run along the highway

TAMAULIPAS
Guerrero
Nuevo Laredo

Key
Driving
By bus
By other means (on foot, by boat, etc.)

[agentsteel53]

I do not know my municipalities of Mexico.  anyone have a map?

I've been to Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California.  that's it.

[kphoger]

I do not know my municipalities of Mexico.  anyone have a map?

I've been to Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California.  that's it.

The easiest way is to browse on Bing Maps.  On their more zoomed-in levels, the municipal boundaries are marked.

[formulanone]

The problem happens when you hit the wall where you have no unvisited counties within several hours' drive. However it is still possible to do this on a budget, if not exactly comfortable.

Or get a job which flings you out to another out-of-state location every week or two, and offers a rental car.

Being stuck in the cul-de-sac of the US makes things tricky, so a great deal of my map was created before I was of legal driving age, since my immediate family moved every 2-3 years. Then I get a license, buy a car, go to school, live on my own...but then there's no money left over for anything more than an in-state jaunt once or twice a month. But in time, travel gets a bit more "affordable".

Hate to make you feel worse, but here are the travels of my not-yet-3-year-old daughter:

Don't know how you've done it, but my 5-year-old daughter is hard to keep quiet for more than a single-day of travel, although a little more patient than when she was 3. A couple of hours to Disney World? No problem. Taking the scenic route? Fine. Sometimes, she'll even read off the road numbers (no, I didn't teach her that). But by the second day, she's tested everyone's patience and gets noisy. Ideally, if you stop frequently enough, it probably works better but that's really time-consuming, even in ideal conditions.

Good for you, though.

[Jim]

Hate to make you feel worse, but here are the travels of my not-yet-3-year-old daughter:

Don't know how you've done it, but my 5-year-old daughter is hard to keep quiet for more than a single-day of travel ...

We've been lucky on that, though it helps that she's been used to long road trips starting at about 4 months old.  It's just one of the things we do as far as she is concerned.  And a portable DVD player helps too.

For my own travels, it has been enabled by a lot of fortunate factors.  I grew up in a family that took a lot of road trips.  Then in grad school I was able to do a bit more with some flexible summers and otherwise low-expense living (with roommates in a cheap apartment).  Then as college faculty, I've been able to get to a few conferences a year.  Sometimes I can drive to them (even if further away during summer months), but even when I fly I try to arrange to have an extra day and a rental car to do some exploring.  It also helps that I married someone from Florida, so we make trips up and down the east coast a couple times a year and have pretty much explored every reasonable alternative to I-95 (and some not-so-reasonable ones too).

[kphoger]

Don't know how you've done it, but my 5-year-old daughter is hard to keep quiet for more than a single-day of travel, although a little more patient than when she was 3. A couple of hours to Disney World? No problem. Taking the scenic route? Fine. Sometimes, she'll even read off the road numbers (no, I didn't teach her that). But by the second day, she's tested everyone's patience and gets noisy. Ideally, if you stop frequently enough, it probably works better but that's really time-consuming, even in ideal conditions.

Good for you, though.

Kids are different.  We moved 560 miles when our elder son was three weeks old.  His temperament is very mild, and we've never had any trouble with him in the car.  He's been with us to México four times, Minnesota probably at least nine times, and various shorter trips every year.  He's now 4½ and turning into a little roadgeek.

Our younger son has had a much longer learning curve.  Our first long-distance trip with him was to Minesota, 670 miles each way.  The last hour and half were miserable, but he was unexpectedly better on the return trip.  There have been more than one trip where we've had to get him out of his seat and keep him in mama's lap–even when the drive was less than an hour and a half.  Part of that was the necessity of breastfeeding, but much of it was simply him screaming.  At almost two years old, he's now much more used to riding in the car.  We don't fear it anymore.  This past June was his second trip with us to México, and he did just great–much better, in fact, than he did out of the car once we were there.

We do make a habit of eating in the restaurant, rather than driving through.  If we're in a hurry, we'll drive through for one meal, but never for both.  It also can help to stop at a rest area and just let the kids run around for twenty minutes.

= = = = =

So, I've started building my U.S. map that y'all seem to have.  Man, that's time-consuming!  I have four states done, and I'm beat for now.  Hopefully I'll be able to finish it over the next week or so.  Part of the problem is that I'm also mapping counties I've traveled through by rail, and it's hard to find the exact routes for Amtrak in between stations.

[vdeane]

Might as well post mine...

[Jim]

So what is the difference between "Clinched" and "Visited" on your map?

[vdeane]

A clinched county simply means that I've been on every part of every CHM-eligible route in the county.  In the US this is Interstates, US routes, state routes, and select freeways.  For Canada it's freeways, provincial routes, and the trans-canada highway.

The fact that I have four counties clinched in Ontario is thanks to the downloading of the late 90s.  For many of the municipalities, traveling on 401 through the area is enough to count it as "clinched".

[Jim]

A clinched county simply means that I've been on every part of every CHM-eligible route in the county.  In the US this is Interstates, US routes, state routes, and select freeways.  For Canada it's freeways, provincial routes, and the trans-canada highway.

Nice idea.  Now you've made me think about which counties I can claim that to be true.  Not many, I'm guessing.  Possibly just Montgomery, Fulton, and Rensselaer counties of NY.  Maybe some out west where I have travelled the only US or Interstate in a county in states that CHM hasn't covered state routes yet.

[Eth]

A clinched county simply means that I've been on every part of every CHM-eligible route in the county.  In the US this is Interstates, US routes, state routes, and select freeways.  For Canada it's freeways, provincial routes, and the trans-canada highway.

Nice idea.  Now you've made me think about which counties I can claim that to be true.  Not many, I'm guessing.  Possibly just Montgomery, Fulton, and Rensselaer counties of NY.  Maybe some out west where I have travelled the only US or Interstate in a county in states that CHM hasn't covered state routes yet.

Based on that definition, I have eight clinched counties, all in Georgia:  DeKalb, Clayton, Henry, Butts, Spalding, Newton, Rockdale, and Walton, with Fayette falling just short.

[Duke87]

And I have four: Fairfield (CT), New York (NY), Bronx (NY), and Richmond (NY).

Finishing Kings (NY) and Queens (NY) is on my to do list, there are just a few pieces of surface street touring route I haven't driven. I also almost have Hudson (NJ), but I'm missing a piece of NJ 7 there.