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(Todd here discussing a recent road trip)

Day 1 (Boston to York, PA): 11

Day 2 (York, PA to Terre Haute, IN): 28

Day 3 (Terry Haute, IN to Oklahoma City, OK): 2

Day 4 (Oklahoma City, OK to Gallup, NM): 6

Day 5 (Gallup, NM to Phoenix, AZ): 0

5 day total - 47

Have any idea what I'm talking about? Over the past few days Nicole and I have driven (voluntarily I might add) from Boston to Phoenix. During road trips like that one finds things to do on the boring stretches of road. For me the boring stretch started when I drove from Boston to York by myself. I started noticing the license plates for the other cars on the road and found a bigger variety then what I'm used to in AZ. It kind of makes sense when you have several states all within a few hundred miles of each other unlike the west coast where you might have 3-4.

Driving from Boston to York I saw 12 different plates. From Florida to Washington to all the locals around Massachusetts (except New Hampshire - that was a day 4 find) I started writing down the different plates I saw.

By the time I got to York, PA where Nicole was visiting a friend I thought I was on a pretty good pace to see most of the plates. It wasn't until Eagle Eye Nicole joined me that things started getting interesting.

Day two involved a drive from York, PA to Terre Haute, IN. With Nicole and I switching as drivers it gave the passenger the ability to relax and just enjoy the ride. I found like 4 more plates and Nicole pulled in an impressive 26 or so. Yep she found more then half of all the states in about a 6 hour portion of the drive. After only two days I, with Nicole's big help, had found 39 different state plates. I was starting to think going 50 for 50 might be a possibility.

Day three took us to Oklahoma City, OK. One thing I quickly found out is once you find nearly 80% of the answers the first two days it is kind of hard coming up with the rest. That combined with a nice rain storm made day 3 not so successful. Again Nicole was able to pull out 2 more (Iowa and Montana) and that doesn't count the District of Columbia plate she found in the hotel parking lot. Does DC count as one of the 50?

Day four went from Oklahoma City to Gallup, NM. My earlier thoughts of going 50 for 50 shrunk dramatically after the previous day's whopping 2 finds but none the less the roadway was still boring so game on. Nothing much on the road (except more rain) until we got to Albuquerque. Coming out of the mountains Nicole was napping while I drove. I passed a jeep hauling a small U-Haul trailer displaying a Missouri plate. Missouri was like day one or two so those were pretty boring but as I passed the jeep I thought I saw colors on the plate that I hadn't seen before.

Of course I was going 65 mph (My lawyer advises me not to say anything higher then 65) while the Jeep pulling the trailer was like 50 so I had to pull way to the right and slow down to let the Jeep catch up. It was about 4 miles later, enough time for me to question what I really saw and question if I should really slow down this much) when the Jeep caught up. New Hampshire! I thought being this far west that New Hampshire was going to be a no find but bam right there outside of Albuquerque was a New Hampshire Jeep pulling a Missouri trailer. I of course had to wake Nicole up to show her.

About two minutes later she found a Wyoming, Nevada and Colorado plate before asking if she could go back to sleep. Day 4 equaled 5 more plates.

Down to the last day with 3 to go. I don't want to give away all of the answers but can you guess which plates we needed? Yes Hawaii is out, so is Alaska. But what is the remaining missing state? We're still technically driving through AZ on our way to Phoenix as I write this but I don't have faith we'll find it. Leave comments with which state you think we're missing. You know the path we took.