Tuesday T-Shirt Tales: Alaska State Parks

T-shirt tales? Because every t-shirt tells a story, don't it.
And I have so very many of them. Shirts. And stories. ---- Whaaaaat??

All T-Shirt Tales

SUMMARY: A shirt for a place I haven't been.

Side Note: I missed last Tuesday. Not deliberately. I wrote a quite long and personal account of a recently acquired shirt. Worked on it for a couple of days, rereading and re-editing. Added photos. Just needed to add one more sentence. Hit Return when I didn't mean to, so, unthinkingly and automatically, I used my browser's UNDO. And the whole thing vanished. Couldn't get it back. Thanks so much, Chrome or Blogger or whomever--I don't care who. Devastating. 
I'll get back to that one eventually. But couldn't face it or anything else again last week. Nor this week for that one. With single keystrokes such are entire histories changed or lost. Fortunately I have lots and lots of t-shirts to write about.

My parents started us out right: Traveling. Not overseas--just wherever we could get to by car and then camp. For weekends, or for vacations, which were usually not more than a couple of weeks.   But, by the time I moved out, I had driven with them across the entire width of the country five times. And my dad in particular liked to go places he hadn't been before, so we took different routes each time, mostly, near as I can remember. Including one 6-week across-and-back summer trip.  We hit so many state and national parks as we went! A habit that's hard to kick once it's started.

When I was in junior high or early high school, I made Dad a color-me-traveled map of the US on a large sheet of posterboard--an idea that I had seen in a magazine somewhere.  He immediately sat down and marked all states where each of the 7 of us had been (I'm arbitrarily in red). Later, they went cross-country twice more with my three youngest sisters, and he filled those in.

I've since traveled by car to places I hadn't been with them, and then to top it off spent several years in the '80s flying around the country on business. Seldom managed to see much of anywhere, but by golly I'd landed in airports and stayed in hotels and attended meetings in a whoooooole lotta states.  Also spent two weeks in Hawaii, twice. I didn't keep careful track (doh!) but I am quite confident that I have now set foot in 49 of our 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. 

I didn't update the map; it was his to do or not.
I have that map now, though. Frozen in time.

Happened to be wearing it
in 2015 to check out the
ballyhooed presence of the
Hello Kitty bus selling
Hello Kitty snacks. You can see
the extreme long line out behind 
my head. I took photos
and went home. 

But: I have not yet made it to Alaska. Someday. It's on my Bucket List. My parents made it, finally, in their retirement years.

And one of my sisters went twice, I believe.  She is generous with gifts and astonishingly aware of what people like.  When she returned from a summer visit there in 1998, she handed me this beautiful blue --of course--t-shirt. To wear for inspiration to get me up there.  And it does remind me, every time I wear it.

It’s one of only three t-shirts that I believe I’ve ever had for places I haven’t been, out of the 250-plus that I remember having over the years. That means I have to get there eventually, right?