50 States of Plates

Welcome, registered reader, as I take you through the fascinating topic of car number plates in the US, or as they like to call them here, license plates. This is obviously a fascinating topic for any number of reasons, but here it's made even more so by there being different plates in each state. When our young visitors were over from the UK, they took up the task of counting how many states they'd seen, and claimed to get to 48. Now that might seem a little far-fetched to you, reader, but have some faith.

To either validate or debunk this claim, I recently started a list of the 50 states, and check each one off as I see the relevant plate. Of course, we live in the age of "pics or it didn't happen" so I make sure to take a picture of each one too.

Now this is a really big country; it's 2500 miles overland to New York, so it's always a little surprising to me when I see plates like this here in Palo Alto:

But see it I did, and so far, just wandering around Palo Alto of an evening, I've managed to get up to 24 states. It's surprising that here on the edge of the continent I'm seeing vehicles that have travelled from as far afield as Oklahoma, Maine, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

Many states use their states as a bit of a marketing opportunity. So obviously Florida is the Sunshine State, and Texas is the Lone Star State. But apparently the best thing Idaho can find to say about itself is that it's the home of famous potatoes:

Now, I don't know if this is just one or two potatoes that just happened to hit the big time, or whether the starchy tubers are particularly great in Idaho-land. But wait, Idaho is scenic too! Let's go there now, stare at the scenery and rub shoulders with some famous potatoes!

Louisiana is apparently a sportsman's paradise:

What I think they mean is that the fishing's quite good there, but it's hard to tell.

We're into the more difficult states now, and I suspect Alaska and Hawaii are only really going to be possible with some travel. We're off to Colorado in a couple of months so hopeful of seeing some more there, but let's see.