When I was 19 years old, I tagged along with a friend on a cross-country drive to deliver a baby blue Plymouth Duster to her brother in Los Angeles. On that trip, I saw my first cornfields. My first hay rolls. I saw Chicago. The Great Salt Lake. (Yuck.) Cows. The Rockies. We drove from New York to San Francisco and then down the jagged coastline to Los Angeles, where I dipped my toes in the Pacific Ocean and fell madly in love with America.

Over the next few years, I romanced the nation in a series of aimless month-long Greyhound bus trips using what was called an Ameripass—like a Eurrail Pass but less comfortable. (And seeing America by bus might be the exact opposite of flying over.) I zig-zagged around the country with a sketchy itinerary, stopping as the mood struck me, staying in cheap motels and rundown small-town hotels, surfing the couches of friends of friends and, on one occasion, resorting to a night on the floor of Billings, Montana bus depot for lack of an alternative. Those were grand trips. The scent of bus-restroom disinfectant still makes me nostalgic.

During one of those trips I first visited Texas, staying with friends of a friend in Fort Worth. I returned a couple of times in subsequent years before deciding, on little more than a whim, to move to Dallas in the 1980s. That’s been a long interesting ride in itself—I wrote about it in my first book, The Yankee Chick’s Survival Guide to Texas. I didn’t intend to stay but here I am and there you go. At this point, I’m as much Texan as New Yorker.

Since that first cross-country trip, I’ve traveled the world. But I’m not done with America and never will be. I haven’t seen all 50 states yet. Much of the north-central part of the country remains virgin territory for me, aside from glimpses through bus windows. I begin this blog with a mission in mind: North Dakota, here I come.