Capitals Visited

First, for the record: capitAl is the city; capitOl is the buildings. So one visits the capitol in the capital.

So what's the big deal with the capitals anyway? Visiting the capitols are a way to visit each state and find at least one thing to specifically do. In addition to the landmark, there is a book called "The Capitol Collection" (https://thecapitolcollection.com) stamp book.  Each state has a two page spread. The verso (left) has the state, the sequence and date when it joined the union, a picture of the capital, and the name of the capital city.

When you visit a capitol, you can get a stamp for the book.  It includes the date, city, state, and usually a couple images from the state, such as the state bird and or flower.  Here are two of the ones that we have:

While MOST of our capital visits are planned around road trips, the links below will be to the already documented said trips. There were at least three that weren't part of a road trip. Technically.
These will be listed in the order they were visited. I'm thinking. At least. For now...

We looked up, after we started, what the order was of the states that joined the union. Had we have traveled to those states in THAT order, the travel map would have looked like this (I used different colored lines so that it would be ever so slightly easier to see the lines, primarily in the east; and to separate the lines where a third city was in the same line).
  
Pretty chaotic, right?!!?
We're doing them in THIS order (though the path may look continuous, we didn't visit them all at once).

As an aside, something we are doing in conjunction to the capitals, is to visit National Parks (NP) if they are not excessively out of the way.  There are quite a few that are within a reasonble drive or nearly en route to where we are going.  The NP visits are included in the road trip pages, but also separately tracked at the NP site here.

The later state capital visits are (or were, depending on the timing of this writing and your reading) based on "7 to 10 day trips" because that works best around vacation time and work.  But as retirement approaches, the thoughts of taking longer trips start to arise.  So some of these trips may be combined or even split and added to other trips because, well, there won't be any (as many) constraints, especially about "time out of the office", because we'll be free to travel pretty much when we want and for however long we want (being able to finance it all aside), and ALL our time will be "out of the office" at that point.

While the general timeframes below are planned, for now, there are some other things we are considering to accomplish this. One is to take longer trips and do more of them at a time.  Another, though highly unlikely, is to rent (or even buy) an RV, and take a massively long two to three month long trip and visit 23 of them at one time and be done with them, leaving AK and HI to last.  Again, not likely.

There are / will be a total of three states that we visited that are in the same order that they joined the union:
Topeka, KS was 34; Denver, CO was 38; and Juneau, AK was 50.

PLANNED / SCHEDULED

VISITED