Welcome to the "4 Wolfes, 50 States" family travel blog!  

Until 2017, our family vacations were always to the beach.  I loved our trips, but after reading an article by a mom whose goal was to get her kids to all 50 states before they graduated high school, I had a crazy thought: maybe we could travel the entire country with our kids, too.  

Thanks to my husband and his hard work, we were on our way the very next summer.  

Now, after completing seven intense but incredible road trips, I want to share our story and encourage others to break out of their vacation routines and see more of America, even if they never go beyond their own or nearby states.

What makes this blog different from the dozens of other blogs chronicling their adventures across the U.S.?  Our approach to traveling.

We take our vacations very seriously.  When we started this adventure in 2018—the summer before our daughter started kindergarten and our son started third grade—we knew we had 13 summers to complete our goal.  That means visiting an average of 3 or 4 “new” states each trip.  We don’t linger in one spot for too long.​

We’re not travel agents, and we don’t pretend to be.  I can’t tell you how to find the cheapest hotel rooms (we tend to stick to a couple of chains, and I’ll tell you why) or give you an extensive and exhaustive list of travel options for each state.  What I can tell you is where we’ve been, if we’d recommend it, and any information we think you need to decide if it’s right for your family.  

We don’t take lie-on-a-beach-with-a-book-for-a-week kind of trips.  We pack as much into each day and cover as much ground as we can.  Sometimes that means shortchanging a city or even an experience.  

For us, a typical road trip means

• spending long hours in the car on the first day
  
• hopping from one hotel to another, usually every 1 to 3 days
  
• hitting the hot-spots and tourist attractions, but also seeing sights specific to each of our interests 
  
• researching and trying local and regional foods
  
• racking up thousands of miles on every trip
  
• finding trains (my “boys” love trains, so we often include a train ride or train spotting in our plans)
  
• skimping on food costs, when possible, and splurging on bucket-list activities
  
• still getting 10,000 steps a day (even on long-car days)
  

Sound like your kind of trip?  Whether you’re late to the 50-states-before-graduation game and need to make up ground, or if you’re just looking for destination ideas, please explore the stories and descriptions of the places we’ve visited along with lessons learned, recommendations, and tips for planning your next family adventure.

Whatever your goal, I hope that our experiences help make your crazy thoughts amazing adventures.

Enjoy!

Janet Wolfe

September 2025
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