This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

And up next, a listener's story.

Aaron Thompson and her son, Joe Milink, are the definition of determination.

Here they are, along with Joe's wife, Vicki, to share their story.

I've always said we're kind of a strangely competitive family.

And the other thing about our family is we're very active.

Our vacation to us is backpacking.

I wouldn't say we do extreme sports, but we do like to push it.

Yeah, it's kind of weird because it's just something that we did.

I really enjoy running a lot.

You know, it's something that we set out to do a while ago.

You know, we were just running marathons and we realized that we had knocked off so many states.

And one moment where it was like, oh, we have, you know, 10 or 12 states already knocked off.

And that's when Joe said, well, why don't we try to do all 50 states?

And at the time I said, sure, let's just, yeah, why not? Let's do it.

And so what happened was kind of before the pandemic, we said, we probably need to pick up the pace.

No pun intended there. And then my daughter-in-law, Vicki, is the one who organizes everything.

We could not have done it without Vicki,

because she's our pit crew extraordinaire, and she lines everything up.

But we would turn it into, like, many vacations.

Like, Alaska, that was a family vacation.

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