Dan and I have kept a map of the United States for nearly 9 years now. The map is more than decorative; many of our best trips have begun as brainstorms in front of this map.

The map has been pinned to our wall in three different homes. When we left Ohio it had 120+ pins in it, requiring Dan to spackle and repaint the wall. We’ve tried to replace it a few times with maps that are easier to, for instance, move across the country, but we have never been able to find one that we like as much as this one. This week, while I was in Chicago, Dan spent a few hours in the garage carefully mounting our map on foam core. After 6 months in Colorado, the map is back in its rightful place on our wall.

The map only counts places that Dan and I have been together. We have ten states remaining to visit: Delaware, Kansas, Louisiana, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, North Dakota and Hawaii. We can knock many of them off the list within a short drive — New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Kansas border Colorado. Nevada and Idaho won’t be too bad a drive either. I have a feeling Delaware will be our final state — I can see us vacationing to Hawaii but have a hard time picturing why we’d end up in Delaware.

We’re working on plans for a trip around our birthdays in August. As usual, the plan began by standing in front of this map and dreaming, “Where can we go?”