Here’s mine. I’ve also been to airports in Colorado and Kentucky. Hawaii in a year and a half.

Delaware I’ve only ever stopped at a rest stop while driving through to Washington, but I felt like that was enough to claim it, I mean it’s Delaware.

I guess I should have included Wyoming for Yellowstone alone. The South Dakota recommendation is surprising to me. Can't say I've ever had any real desire to go there. Even more surprising is your opinion of Oregon. Crater Lake and Portland aren't worth it?

Had a Clark Griswold-type father that loved going on family cross-country road trips - took one to Idaho to visit his college friend, and another to California and back (this is all from Massachusetts, mind you). Many a night was spent with him trying to use expired coupons or haggling on set prices with Motel 6 or Super 8 night clerks.

Utah I don't remember since I was 4? Was only a day or two.

Going to a wedding next year in Alaska, that will require a layover in Washington (likely will just drive up with friends that are also going that live in Redmond), so that will knock out those two. Hawaii is on my list for an upcoming winter vacation, but don't know how I can financially justify taking PTO (or an overly pricey long weekend) to Oregon...

Growing up our yearly vacation was to fly somewhere, rent a car, and drive around to different cities to see a game in their stadiums with stops "along" the way that had cool things to see. The green is places we actively went to for a specific reason without a stadium.

I haven't taken an actual vacation in years though. I'd like to do things like that again because I got a lot of cool memories from it.


edit: utah and wyoming should be green for yellowstone and zion

I'm mostly praising South Dakota for Badlands National Park:



Badlands does take up an extensive drive in the western half of the state though too, so it's not just one small picturesque spot.

Deadwood is in the area west of Badlands also and is also a cool way to spend a day.

Mt. Rushmore is actually pretty worthless as a tourist stop. Having seen a picture of it, you've gotten all you need to. It would be cool as a hidden gem that nobody talks about, but it's fame way exceeds its worth. That said, it's right next to the Badlands, and you can knock out a visit in like an hour or two, so I don't necessarily tell people to completely bypass it. I only tell people not to go out of their way for it.

While normally that North Dakota-sized hole in my map would feel like one I would never bother to fill, I plan to one day trek west to Theodore Roosevelt National Park and then loop south through that SD area to see the Badlands again.

I admit I haven't been to Crater Lake, and would like to go, though if I never move back west I'm dubious I'll ever get to it. I grew up like 500 miles from it, so it wasn't in the immediate radius for a quick weekend trip.

Portland is fine I guess, but nothing that I really feel redeems the state. And outside of the city, with both Washington and Oregon, the usual scenery of endless green in that part of the PNW is actually fairly boring and monotonous to me.

I may need to give SD another chance someday, as my father decided to take us to Sturgis right in the middle of the Annual Motorcycle Rally. Rooms were very overpriced, and the town was full of obnoxious bikers (like straight out of that South Park episode kind of obnoxious)

I've periodically noted places I'd like to see in a bunch of states, meaning to eventually fill in every state. My sense is that, if I were to hit every state, I would struggle the hardest to find a worthwhile experience in that Iowa/Nebraska/Kansas trifecta in the plains. Maybe throw in Oklahoma on that list for good measure.

The best thing I can come up with is going to the College World Series someday, which would knock off Iowa and Nebraska.

As far as Kansas and Oklahoma go, absolutely no idea.

Oklahoma - JR's bbq restaurant

Some of my wife's family lives in OK and I have no idea what's to do out there despite hearing my in-laws going a few times in the past.

There's a really nice wildlife preserve in Oklahoma that my roommate and I took a trip to once. Lots of trails, pretty scenery, lots of animals to see.

My tentative plan with Iowa was to go to the Field of Dreams site as I drive through someday.

The only thing I really saw with Nebraska was that Omaha has one of the top-rated zoos.

Lake mcconaughy is pretty awesome camping / water activities in Nebraska. That's all I have ever done besides drive through

It's not that John Krasinski fails to pull off a beard. It's just that the beard isn't nearly enough to make me feel like I'm not watching Jim Halpert.

Commentators caping for bad calls is way way way WAY more tilting than the bad calls themselves. People are plainly wrong to get way angrier at the refs than at the ministers of propaganda. Officials are far less likely to be approaching their jobs dishonestly.

I have no real idea if a call was just missed against Chicago since I missed the play, but the long-term booing of the crowd combined with the hyuk-hyuk-hyuking in the announce booth compelled me to say the above again.

Born and raised in Omaha. The whole state is pretty forgettable, but Omaha does have the CWS, Berkshire convention, and a world class zoo. Iowa is literally next door and has all the casinos like a mile away from Omaha b/c Nebraskans were too stupid to legalize it and instead prefer to write a check to Iowa. So at least you can easily knock those 2 states out. Seeing a college football game in Lincoln is also a solid experience. Decent eats if you like sweet corn and steak. Other than that, I got nothing. Probably not worth a visit unless you're a zoo or college sports fanatic, or just to knock it off your list of states visited.

Yeah, my idea for how I'll eventually knock out both is as a pass-through in making a drive west. I considered going that direction this past summer en route to Colorado.

People often ask my advice on what to do when visiting Washington, and I never actually know what to tell them. I gather that this is pretty common of most people, but I just never do touristy things where I live. I walked past the Space Needle a bunch of times when going to Sonics games when that was a thing, but have never actually been inside the Space Needle. I went to that damn fish market in Pike's Place that you see get featured at Seattle events sometimes, and it wasn't my thing. I have love for my home state and for Seattle, but I'm clueless in terms of steering any tourism there.

I went to San Juan Island when I was out there. I thought that area was nice.

I'm reading that Washington lost last night at a game that didn't finish until almost 4:30 AM Eastern.

I'm sure the wait was worth it for LKJ.

Ha. I woke up in the middle of the night, sometime during the 3 a.m. hour, to use the bathroom. While I was up, I checked to see what happened with the UW game. Obviously refused to believe that the game was actually still in progress and had 8 minutes left in the 4th quarter, so I jumped to several different apps that all confirmed. Then I had to go fire up my TV and watch the ending.

WSU didn't look all that great yesterday despite winning by 42 (nobody nationally will have watched, they'll only see that we beat someone 59-17), but that UW result should be enough to let us jump into the top 20 today as long as the voters didn't submit before going to bed or something.

Welp, left the Big House yesterday feeling a bit like Lugar with the confetti in Summerslam ‘93. At least we got this decent love from WaPo:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...er-wants-play/

If you think about it, a P5 team playing a Service Academy is as close as there is to a negative free-roll in college football today. You are absolutely expected to win and crush a group of unrecruited 2-star athletes (so you don’t get much credit for doing so) yet facing an offense you’ll see once the whole season means fluky things can happen and there’s a real chance you can lose. Plus having your D-linemen get chop blocked is terrible.

All this is why that, even though I’m an Academy grad, I *really really* want to see ND drop Navy from the schedule every year. A completely selfish perspective, I understand of course.

It's definitely a negative freeroll to play academies. Not sure that it's worse than playing high-end FCS schools. Why ever schedule Eastern Washington when you could instead schedule, say, Portland State and most won't really process the two matchups as being significantly different?

Also, shoutout to Gardner Minshew for coming in and tearing it up for the Jags so far today. 9-9 for 128 yards is a decent little start to an NFL career. That half alone is probably enough to at least buy him a long-term career as a backup, if it doesn't turn out that he's actually a viable NFL starter.

Carroll just openly (and probably unashamedly) admits to something that I often accuse coaches of but can never prove. I generally love having Pete as our coach, but you don't get to use challenges as a temper tantrum you dipshit.

In Pete's defense, when that PI was upheld I realized they will never reverse a PI call this year. It was pretty close to clean.

I guess we saw the play differently, because my reaction was, "That's probably not PI, but that's never getting reversed."

That said, here's your best available evidence that they won't overturn PI ever, from the preseason: