States map

A fun tradition for many RVers is to display a map of the places they’ve been on the side of their RV. We’ve had such a map for a while, but finally got around to installing it. (You may have spotted it in some of the Xscapers posts; I actually wrote this post before the bash, but pushed it out for more timely topics.)

We mounted it on the side of our front slide out, next to the entry door. A fairly common location.

The map consists of a self-adhesive base map of the United States, plus corresponding stickers to add on top as each state is visited. Our rule is for it to count, we need to camp at least one night in the state.

Here’s me adding the base map, trying to avoid bubbles:

David adding map base

The base map:

Map base

Adding state stickers for the places we’ve been since buying the coach:

David adding states

So far we’ve been to Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona in our coach. Plus we decided to include the Yellowstone trip, since we were camping in a rental travel trailer while our coach sat at home (only because our coach wouldn’t fit in Yellowstone National Park). So that adds Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming (we’ll visit them again in our coach in a few months time anyway):

States

A view of our coach and map from further back:

Coach with map

As mentioned in the 2021 travel post a few weeks ago, in 2022 we plan to add Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas to that map. It’ll be years before we visit every state. Alaska and Hawaii will be particularly tricky; Alaska we can reach via Canada, but we’ll have to fly to Hawaii — we have been there in the past, but won’t count it until we visit again… and may have to rent an RV there if we want to be strict with our self-imposed rules.