After five days of diligent searching, we’re down to our final four in our license plate search – North Dakota, Wyoming, New Mexico and Nevada. Unfortunately, distance and population (or rather lack thereof) are working against us. Strangely enough, we’ve seen 3 different Alaska license plates during this time. Weird!
Some other factoids that we learned in our quest – 50% of the United States population lives in only 9 states. The bottom 25 states only account for 20% of the population. More people live in California than in the entire country of Canada.
We’ve seen four different Canadian plates – Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island. Prince Edward Island has about 1/5 of the population of the least populace U.S. State (Wyoming). We happened to catch a Seafood Tractor-Trailer that was from Prince Edward Island while we did a pass-through at a truck stop. I never would have thought that we’d see that license plate. I also learned that Canada has a new territory (as of 1999) called Nunavut.
That nugget reminds me of what a moving target education is. Since I was out of school we have had the demotion of Pluto as a planet, a “new” ocean named the “Southern Ocean“, and the break-up of the Soviet Union into so many different countries. I remember thinking that the our planet had a set “definition” when I was a student myself, but in truth, things continue to be in flux.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that we’re going to have to do some traveling to complete the game. The good thing is that we’ve both learned a lot and we can still easily use the game board to learn other things about the states. I’m hoping to be able to come up with other games that we can play with it in the car because Tornado Boy has really enjoyed this.
A special thanks to Philip Martin for his awesome free clip art. I modified one of his to highlight the four specific states that we’re missing.
My husband and I never thought that we will see such dramatic change in the geography and political system (in my case) of our countries in our lifetime. You are right – a lot of things happen as we speak – add to this natural events, such as earthquakes, and you get to realize that geography is a very dynamic science.
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