The Collector of Nothing

 Somewhere USA

Cheers to your collection!

Collecting, but not things

Right now there is a State Tracking website that is going viral and a few of my friends (Sergey and Mile L. to name drop two) have sent it to me to see where I stand. We are currently on an indefinite cross country, nomadic living trip.  We started in April of this year and have no plans to stop.  If you want to read about it from the beginning you can start here.  Warning, there is a lot to read.  The state tracking site is interesting because it allows people to track where they have been and it even gives them a score so they can compare themselves to other fellow travelers.  As I filled it out it caused me to think about how I collect these days.  Over the years I have collected many things including coin banks, shells, stamps, coins, and video games.  At times those collections have taken up a lot of space and even monthly storage units.  They took up much more space than we have in our 2017 Dodge Grand Caravan.  Thankfully I have gotten rid of these collections over time and even gotten some of my investments back by selling them off.  Now I collect nothing, well nothing tangable.  I collect lists of experiences that I keep in various tracking docs and sites much like the state tracking site mentioned above.  

Here is my current score but it will increase in the next few days as we pass through AL and MS and settle into LA for 2 months.

Some of my collection

The above image is interesting but my tracking is much more granular than by state. 

I track by county! Something my friend Lyle introduced me to. I keep track by year. Purple is 2022 when we really started moving around after retirement.

While we travel from city to city and county to county I also collect quite a few other things.  I have a Google Sheet that I use to track some of these.

Counties visited by month

Breweries Visited

Transit ridden

Places I have played pinball

Tiki Bars I have been to

Birds I have seen and where I saw them

Even beers that I have tasted and where I tasted them (many of these are samples or sips from Donna's beer)

Stretches of highway traveled.

And places I have spent the night (Thanks to my friend Jeff for this idea)

These are just some of the more interesting things I track.  I also track all kinds of other things.  It fulfills the need to collect without the baggage of having things.  

If you missed yesterday's post you can find it here.  I was probably collecting something of some sort.

Texas by the Numbers

 McKinney, TX

Our time in The Lonestar State until we return in January

Packing Day

Today is packing day and that isn't very interesting so Texas by the Numbers it is!

Texas by the Numbers

We will have just over 1000 miles of Texas highways driven (this doesn't include side streets or county roads) at the end of the day.

We add another 100 miles on the way out. 

This map is really hard to see.  The bold lines are the highways we have traveled in Texas.

We added 35 new counties to our county total

We still have a long way to go to finish Texas.

We added 2 New Tiki Bars to our list

Swizzle in Dallas, TX

4 Kahunas in Fort Worth, TX

We added Texas Pinball to our list of places we have played.

Arcade 92 Retro Arcade and Bar

We added Public Transit to our list

- Dart Rail Red Line

- Dart Rail Orange Line

- Dart Bus Route 3

We added 3 new places where we have spent the night in Texas

Amarillo, McKinney, and Longview Texas

We added 1 new Brewery to our list

Siren Rock Brewing in Rockwall, TX

We went Thrift Store Shopping in a new state (Texas)

We visited 6 new museums

Morton Museum of Cooke County Gainesville, TX

Colin County History Museum McKinney, TX

Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary, McKinney, TX

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX

Perot Museum, Dallas, TX

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX

We went to the movie theater 3 times and saw;

- Thor: Love and Thunder

- The Gray Man

- Nope

We visited 1 new Farmers Market

We went to our first Guinea Pig /  Rabbit Show as well as our first Dressage Competition.

Keep your fingers outside of the cage at all times

Simon and Sharon doing their thang

To quote Ferris Bueller, "Nothing - wha - what do you mean nothing good? We've seen everything good. We've seen the whole city! We went to a museum, we saw priceless works of art! We ate pancreas!" (we didn't eat pancreas but we did have Ramen)

The "whole" city!

Went to a museum

Priceless work of art

Not pancreas

So to wrap up McKinney, we didn't do as much as we waned to do because it was really hot and we were far from public transit, but we did do a lot and had a great time doing it.  We even got to catch up on some of the shows we love and I got to watch quite a bit of the World Series of Poker.  Most importantly we got to spend time with family we haven't seen in a long time.  We got to hang out with Sharon (Donna's Sister) and we got to know Erika (our niece) a lot better.  We got to trade experiences.  We showed them some of the things we love and they showed us some of the things they love.  It was a cultural exchange! Next stop, Tulsa, OK.  You can read about it here (kidding, I can't link to a place I haven't visited and a post I haven't done yet).

If you didn't get to see yesterday's post you can check it out here.