A travel guide for visiting all 50 US states

Life and Art from FT Weekend

Forhecz Topher

Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture

4.6 • 601 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the height of the coronavirus pandemic, our US banking editor Josh Franklin began a travel hobby that became an out-and-out goal. He wanted to see more of America, so he decided to visit all 50 states, from Alabama to Wyoming. He joins Lilah to tell us what he learned about the country, when he felt “this was worth it” and “this was a huge mistake”, what tips he has for our own road trips, and places in the US we might want to visit ourselves.

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We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap. You can email her at [email protected].

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Links (all FT links get you past the paywall):

– Josh’s piece about travelling to every US state: https://on.ft.com/3NNgYAA

– Josh’s four places: Ocean Springs, Mississippi; North OR South Dakota; the Upper Peninsula along the great lakes in Michigan; and Duluth, Minnesota

– Our travel team’s 43 holidays to take in 2024: https://on.ft.com/3RFoOwY

– Another great recent travel piece: ‘My weekend as a monk: a Scottish spiritual retreat’: https://on.ft.com/3RFoOgs

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Special FT subscription and trial offers for Life and Art podcast listeners are here: http://ft.com/lifeandart

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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopolis. Over the last couple of years, my colleague, Josh Franklin, did something pretty daunting. He decided to travel to every single state in America, all 50 of them. This thing Josh did is part of a growing phenomenon called completest travel. It means planning your trips around
0:22.6	one overarching goal. And it leads people into all sorts of strange and interesting situations
0:27.8	that they probably would never otherwise find themselves in. Josh is our U.S. banking editor,
0:33.5	and he recently wrote a feature about this. So I've invited him into the studio today.
0:38.9	As we start to plan our own trips for 2024,
0:41.6	I thought he could tell us what he learned,
0:43.8	both about traveling and about the U.S.
0:46.3	Hi, Josh.
0:47.2	Welcome to the show.
0:48.0	Thanks very much.
0:49.5	So there's something very compelling to me
0:51.8	about putting some simple framing around a thing like this, like a travel.
0:58.7	And I'm excited to get into it.
1:00.2	But first I have to ask you, like, how does somebody start this?
1:04.0	How did you get into it?
1:05.5	It's a weird thing.
1:06.3	And it was something.
1:07.7	So it was my wife and I who did it, my family and I.
1:10.7	And it was something that we didn't start off and I who did it, my family and I, and it was something that
1:12.2	we didn't start off planning to do it. It kind of coming out of the pandemic, we'd set ourselves this
1:17.4	resolution to travel more and also because, I mean, I'm from London and because it was harder
1:24.0	to go back to Europe because of the pandemic, we decided let's do like a new state every month.
	...

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