So this is not quite on topic for a miles and points earning blog, but if you define the purpose a little bit looser, it IS a travel blog, and it’s definitely on topic for that!

Some people have a goal to visit all 50 states in the US.  That’s an okay goal, if you’re weak-sauce 🙂 My goal in life is to visit all 3,142 counties!  I am currently at 1,354 visited, or about 43%.  I used to feel like I was making pretty good progress, until I realized that if I visit 100 new counties every year (which is fairly ambitious, especially since I’ve already visited most of the counties that are anywhere near my house), then it will STILL take me almost 20 years to finish!!!!

Counties I’ve visited are colored in, organized by year visited. Click for a larger picture

Naturally, due to Dan’s 1st Law of the Internet, there are several people out there that share this crazy hobby / obsession.  The site that I use to track my counties is at http://www.mob-rule.com/counties – it’s quite easy to use.  Because I’m that kind of loving parent, I am also keeping detailed county spreadsheets for each of my kids, who have 326, 454, 348, 282, 187, and 139 counties visited respectively :-).   There’s actually a whole group for people that track counties and other such things – the Extra Miler Club.  And while I do not officially belong to it, because I’m too cheap to pay the dues :-), I do subscribe to their motto

… the shortest distance between two points is no fun

In any case, today was a good day to pick up a few counties in Central Kentucky that had been eluding me for awhile.  My 2 older kids and I were on a church youth group trip to the Louisville Temple, and since we would be done there still pretty early in the morning, I thought we could make a slight detour on our way home.

Marion County group selfie!!!

You’re talking to someone whose idea of the best route between Chicago and Cincinnati goes by way of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, so clearly a 2 hour detour is no big deal at all!

We started out our trip on I-265 South over to KY 155, picking up Spencer County before continuing south on KY 55 through Taylorsville.  We stayed on KY 55 for awhile, meandering through Nelson and Washington (which were new for the kiddos but not for me) until we reached the Marion County line

We then turned around and headed back on KY 55, before continuing straight on KY 555 North. I did a quick detour on US 150 East which was incorrect, but luckily, although we were traveling sans map, I realized quickly that we were not going the right way. The kids were jonesing for Dairy Queen for lunch, so we started playing the Alphabet game in hopes of it luring a Dairy Queen for our Q. As we went east on the Bluegrass Parkway through Anderson County and Mercer County and then north on US 127 we were on the lookout but quickly making our way through the Alphabet, even finding Q (Quick) and X (Xtra).

How is it that my 12 year old son claimed to never have eaten a Blizzard!??!?

In Lawrenceburg, we seemed to spy every type of fast food available but no (visible) DQ. We pulled off just north of town where Bypass and Business 127 meet, stopped at a Mcdonalds to use their wi-fi to find out where Dairy Queen was (oh, the irony!) Turned out we did pass one but we decided to continue north another 20 minutes to one in Frankfort.

Heading into “downtown” Frankfort, I took the opportunity to snap a picture of one of my favorite road sign occurrences, a Wrong Way concurrency.

Wait, are we going North? Or South?

Heading north on US 127, we reached our final (new) county of the day, Owen County

I actually thought I had previously been here, on Halloween night 1997, site of (awwwww) my wife and my first kiss (double awwwww). But a few months ago, when I was detailing my historical county trips, I determined that the site where Fonzie kissed the Princess was in fact just over the line in Gallatin County. So today we can finally consider that historical wrong corrected!

And I will leave you with one final note – driving through rural Kentucky offers prime opportunities to play the “You live there” game

You live there

So what do you think? Was this kind of a “trip report” interesting? How many counties have YOU visited?

Newsletter Signup

Join the PWaC newsletter filled with credit card and travel tips

Join Now!

You have Successfully Subscribed!