What Will We Do At The End Of Our 50 State Road Trip? Here’s What We’re Planning.

When telling people that we’re on a 7 year, 50 state road trip, the most common question we’re asked is what our favorite state has been (answer for me so far: New Mexico and Vermont).

The second most common question is what we’ll do once our road trip comes to an end. Seeing as we’re in year 7 of our 7 year road trip, that question has been weighing on our minds for quite some time.

Shae and I have tossed around all kinds of ideas over the years, but over the last year or so we’ve settled on a plan for after the road trip ends, although exactly what that’ll be is still up in the air.

Here’s some of the ideas we’ve come up with in the past but discarded, as well as what we’re actually planning for 2025.

Previous Ideas

Like I said above, we’ve come up with all kinds of ideas of what we’d like to do in the future. These have had varying degrees of seriousness, but here’s some of the main ones we’ve discussed.

1) Continue the road trip

When first setting out on the road trip – and also for several years of the trip – we’d kicked around the idea of simply continuing the journey beyond the initial five year plan. As things turned out, we did end up extending our road trip to seven years due to COVID and international travel slowing down our progress.

For reasons we’ll get into later when I share what our plans will be, extending our road trip even further isn’t on the table now.

2) Rotate locations

One of the things we’ve done on the road trip is try to head north in the summer and south in the winter to help ensure we have good weather for much of the year. We’ve had locations we love in both the north and south, so we’d talked about the possibility of continuing to travel, but for three months at a time and rotating where we stay based on the time of year.

For example, we love Vermont but wouldn’t want to spend the winter there. We love Tucson and Albuquerque, but wouldn’t necessarily want to spend summers there. The general idea had therefore been that we’d spend, say, November-January in Tucson, February-April in Albuquerque, May-July in Vermont and August-October in Kentucky or something like that.

This is something we’d be open to doing in the future, but it’s not something we’re planning immediately once the road trip ends.

3) Road trip around Canada

Canada has some amazing beauty. We’ve visited a few places before like Toronto and Montreal, but still haven’t visited Banff National Park, Vancouver, Jasper National Park, Calgary, Nova Scotia, etc.

A road trip across Canada sounds like a fun idea, but it would likely be a much shorter journey than our current 7 year trip. That’s because inclement weather would make it much harder to drive for a good chunk of the year, with that weather and low temperatures impacting on how enjoyable it would be.

4) Road trip around the UK

I’m originally from the UK, while Shae is from the US. For the first five years of our marriage we lived in the UK, then we moved to the US in 2009. An idea we’ve tossed around – made possible by my UK citizenship – is a road trip around the UK or, more specifically, England.

The US has states, the UK has counties. There are 92 counties in the UK, with 48 of those being in England. We therefore thought a twist on the 50 state road trip idea could be a 48 county road trip, perhaps spending a year there and visiting one county per week.

This isn’t a serious consideration at the moment, although it could be something we look into in future years or if things go badly in the 2024 election.

5) Road trip around Europe

Despite growing up in the UK and Shae living there for five years, we haven’t done anywhere near as much travel around Europe as we might’ve liked. That’s because in the early years of our marriage we had debt and any money we did have for travel went on visiting friends and family in the US.

A road trip around Europe would therefore be a fantastic opportunity to explore the continent. There are a few potential obstacles with that. One is that I have a British passport and Shae has an American passport. Following Brexit, I’m not sure how easy it would be to travel around due to the 90 day per 180 day restriction in the Schengen area.

Another potential issue is that we’d still have our dog Truffles with us. While you can get pet passports, I imagine traveling between countries with a dog could have some kind of restrictions, especially when combined with Schengen visa restrictions. A further issue would be some of the logistics like how car insurance would work when traveling across multiple countries.

6) Canoe the Mississippi River

This is one of the less serious ideas, but one that was tempting for the challenge of it. The Mississippi River starts at Lake Itasca and ends in the Gulf of Mexico. You can canoe the entire distance, with the record being less than 17 days.

Shae and I enjoy kayaking and canoeing, so one time while out in a canoe on the Mississippi River this was something we chatted about. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s something either of us would be passionate enough about doing, especially considering we’re somewhat novice kayakers/canoeists.

Our Actual Plan

For more than six years Shae and I have moved more frequently than an average of once per week, sleeping in about 400 different beds in that time. Traveling full-time has been an amazing experience and has given us the opportunity to see and do far more things than we’d never have dreamed about a decade ago.

Having said that, Shae and I are tired. Packing up pretty much everything we own, moving and unpacking everything week upon week upon week is exhausting. We certainly don’t have to move as frequently as that, but if we didn’t we’d get to visit far fewer parts of each state and it’s been some of the less-likely-to-visit places that we’ve enjoyed the most.

The thought of continuing to travel full-time and moving every week after we finish in Hawaii at the end of the road trip is unappealing. We’ve therefore decide to settle somewhere for at least 1-3 years at the end of the road trip. Yep, we’ll be going from “No Home” to “Have Home” for at least some period of time!

We’ll still continue traveling domestically and internationally; it just won’t be every day of the year. It might also be that we start getting itchy feet, so perhaps after 1-3 years we’ll decide we want to start traveling full-time again once we’ve recharged.

Where Are We Planning To Settle?

So, the question you might now have is where are we planning to live? Well, we don’t actually know that yet!

There’s been a lot of places we’ve enjoyed on the road trip, so in theory the world U.S. is our oyster. When we first discussed settling down, we came up with more than a dozen cities/states we might particularly want to move to for one reason or another:

• Hampton Roads, VA (Portsmouth, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, etc.)
• Albuquerque, NM
• Vermont (nowhere in particular – we love it all over the state!)
• Holland, MI
• Roanoke, VA
• Morgantown, WV
• Finger Lakes, NY (most likely Geneva)
• St Louis, MO
• Savannah, GA
• Philadelphia, PA
• Lexington, KY
• Houston, TX
• Tulsa, OK
• Cincinnati, OH
• Lewisburg, WV
• Rochester, NY
• Louisville, KY
• Las Vegas, NV
• Martinsburg, WV

I know, that’s quite the mix of places. There are also some cities on there where you might question why we’d choose to move there.

For example, although we were surprised at how much we liked Tulsa, Oklahoma, it wasn’t somewhere we’d ordinarily consider moving to. However, Tulsa has a program where they pay remote workers to move there. I have a friend who’s taken advantage of this program and they’re still living in Tulsa.

Similarly, Rochester, NY and several cities in West Virginia – including Morgantown, Martinsburg and Lewisburg – have similar programs for remote workers.

At the start of the post I mentioned that New Mexico and Vermont have been my two favorite states on the road trip so far. The thing is, neither is ideal for us to settle in. Property prices in Albuquerque are higher than we’re looking to pay, while Vermont is too cold for too much of the year for us to want to live there year-round.

We’ve narrowed locations down to five. In no particular order, they’re:

• Virginia (Hampton Roads or Roanoke)
• Cincinnati, OH
• West Virginia (Morgantown, Lewisburg and Martinsburg)
• St Louis, MO
• Finger Lakes, NY

It’s funny – if you’d told me before we set off on the road trip that we’d think about moving somewhere like upstate New York or West Virginia once the road trip was over, I’d think you were crazy, but here we are.

We recently spent some time in West Virginia and Cincinnati to check out neighborhoods. We’re heading to St Louis today for a few days on our way up to Idaho, so we’ll take a drive around there to check out some neighborhoods based on properties we’ve seen on Zillow.

So that’s where we are right now. It’s been hard though; having one eye on where we’ll settle next year has made it hard being fully focused on the road trip for the last year. With states like Alaska, Montana and Hawaii coming up though, we definitely don’t want to be distracted from all their natural beauty.

We’ll continue posting about our plans in the future, as well as sharing more about what we like about each of the areas above to explain how and why they made it on to our shortlist, so stay tuned for those posts.