Planning your 2022 Travel Goals

 Welcome to 2022! As we head into the new year and think about our travel plans, we only hope that life will continue to move more towards life before COVID. I am ready to be back on the road exploring the country and enjoying new adventures. 

In November, we were in Breckenridge, Colorado, and I came across a new Lonely Planet book called the Ultimate United States Travel List, which ranks their top 500 experiences in the United States. I have been working my way through the books and find that they have a variety of outdoor locations, art museums, a few amusement parks, and a variety of other sites throughout the United States. I have visited many of the places in the book. Many of the unvisited locations have inspired my travel plans for the year ahead.

It is important not to get hung up with evaluating their rankings, so I will not get into the rankings I agree with or think are absolutely absurd. Instead, I have looked at the book for idea creation and to learn about locations in our country that provide unique opportunities that I may not have known about. There is a bias in the book to New York City, which the authors must think is just the best city in the country. While other portions of the country, like the upper midwest, are almost totally ignored.  

I love maps, and I can visualize and plan trips better when they are on a map, so I created a Google Map with each of the locations marked in rank order. The teal-colored icons are places that I still need to visit. The gold-colored icons are the places that I have visited. I have marked the first 300 locations on the map and will continue to add more in the coming weeks, so check back again to see the final 200 locations on the list.

You can also view the map in Google Maps.

I hope you enjoy using this map, and if you are interested, pick up a copy of the book at your local book store. The book provides brief descriptions of each location and colorful photography of many sites.