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City Lights: Traveling toward a goal: the All Fifty

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A couple of years ago on my birthday, I woke to my wife sitting next to me in bed holding a tiny wrapped box. It turned out to be a container of colored push pins, and when I responded with a combination of thanks and bewilderment, she laughed and motioned me downstairs to the kitchen.

Leaning against the table was a massive slab covered in brown paper. When I tore off the wrapping, I found a map of the United States that my wife had mounted on corkboard. I had previously voiced a desire to visit all 50 states, and this gift anointed it as an official quest. Since that morning, I’ve stuck pins in Florida, West Virginia and Virginia (which, I discovered, I had unknowingly visited in 1998 on a high school trip), bringing my tally to 30.

At the time, I wondered if my desire to see every state amounted to some odd mixture of patriotism, wanderlust and obsessive-compulsive disorder. So when Taylor Harkins, a Newport Beach native who has embarked on a similar challenge, emailed me last week, I was relieved to learn that I’m not alone.

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Harkins, who graduated from Corona del Mar High School in 2007 and now lives in San Francisco, was recently featured in a CNN story and runs a blog titled 50statesby30.com to log her experiences.

By the time she and I met at Fashion Island, I was two states ahead of her, but the title of her blog indicates that I can’t beat her in one regard: I’m on the other side of 30 (years old, that is), and she may complete her odyssey by the time I reach 32 (states, I mean).

Whatever our ages, I don’t know that I could match Harkins for speed. Last July, she was at work when a college friend told her about the All Fifty Club, a website that recognizes people who have touched all the states. She imagined she had hit 30 or 40, but when she tallied her destinations on the site’s interactive map, she found that they came to a mere 18.

With that, the game was on.

“That exact day, I called my friend in Michigan and I said, ‘How would you feel if I came to visit you in two weeks?’” Harkins told me. “I found a cheap flight. And she was like, ‘Sure, we have a couch.’ So that’s what I did. I literally booked a ticket that day and started the adventure.”

In the months since then, Harkins has stuck her proverbial pins in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Idaho, Illinois and Michigan. Often, she’ll take a three-day weekend and return in time for work on Monday. To pick which cities to visit, she’ll research online and sometimes pick a spot near a state border, which allows her to cross off two states in a day.

As of last week, Harkins’ blog was still under construction (many of the cities she’s visited sported a “Coming Soon!” tag), but she’d posted a handful of photos from her most recent excursion to Georgia and the Carolinas. Up next: Maine, which she’s set to reach in July.

Is there a prize at the end of the 50-state journey, aside from bragging rights? Yes, it turns out. The All Fifty Club offers plaques and certificates and posts online the names of people who have completed the circuit, with some of them accompanied by notes of what they did in all 50 states (ate pie, skydived, gave blood and so on).

For Harkins, the challenge comes partly from patriotism and family roots — she belongs to the Daughters of the American Revolution — and partly from a yen for seeing different ways of life. For Alicia Rovey, who founded the All Fifty Club in 2006, it offers motivation as well.

“There are so many wonderful places to visit in this country and in the world — the All Fifty quest allows people to focus and narrow down the many travel options,” she wrote in an email. “Setting the all-50 goal gives us an ‘excuse’ to go places we otherwise may not plan on going to. It gives us that extra push — I have to go to Alaska because I am trying to visit all 50 states.”

As vacations go, domestic travel is the equivalent of paying the matinee price at the multiplex: It’s less extravagant but cheaper and, in the end, about as rewarding. You may not have exotic stamps all over your passport, but you can plan more quickly, use your regular currency and not have to worry about government coups or malaria shots.

You can also find countless ways to be astonished. If you have never left California and think you’ve seen America, believe me, you haven’t. From Georgia peach stands to twisting New England streets to bizarre Midwestern roadside attractions, there are riches that our surfing meccas and barely changing weather would never lead you to guess.

But I say that as one who has lived in California for decades and sometimes takes it for granted. So I left Harkins with one final question: If she could recommend one spot in the Golden State to an All Fifty contender, what would it be? She went with her new hometown, San Francisco.

“I live in the tourist area, and I take the cable car to work every morning,” she said. “So I feel like I would definitely encourage them to do the cable car. And then you’ve got the Golden Gate Bridge, and you’ve got the beaches and Napa. So I’d do San Francisco — although Newport would be a close second.”

MICHAEL MILLER is the features editor for Times Community News in Orange County. He can be reached at michael.miller@latimes.com or (714) 966-4617.

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