Plates of the States

Nebraska came to Natick today, August 17, 2013. We went to the library for our weekly book fix. On the way home, there it was, a car at the body shop on South Avenue. On that car, a long-sought license plate. The anguish and sleepless nights are over. The final photo of the license plate set has been taken. The quest is done!

Total elapsed time for the challenge: January 3, 2009 to August 17, 2013 -- 4 years, 7½ months.
Patience and perseverence pays!

Some Web pages are trivial, like this one. It was planned to be simply the photographs of license plates from the 50 United States and some others, perhaps, like DC, Govt. plates, etc. The only thing that might make it at all interesting is that the photos will all come from shots taken with my own cameras. The plates will, therefore, need to be on cars I see [when I have a camera!], and that means they will almost all be in eastern Massachusetts when I take the photographs. Time will tell how the project turns out. There will be blanks for a long time.

We did take a trip to Pennsylvania in April '09, and we saw lots of plates as we were driving, but it isn't possible to get photos safely while traveling at 65 miles per hour (105 kph). Opportunities missed...oh, well. I guess the shots will still mostly come from parking lots in Massachusetts.

On April 15, 2010, I got a photo of a Wyoming plate, I'd had five to go for quite a while, and now just four more. I'm going to be a chaperone for the trip to Washington, D.C. next week. Maybe I'll get lucky there. It is school vacation week and there may be people in the capital from the states I still need, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota and West Virginia. I'm willing to bet the trip will give me my best shot at West Virginia, at least.

A long time has passed, about a year. It is June of 2011 and I'm stalled. Only Nevada and North Dakota remain to catch. I'll admit, I don't go searching as intensely as I used to. I'm resigned to stumbling upon them.

The penultimate stumble has happened. As I pulled to a stop at the traffic light by the Wellesley, MA fire station, there was a car bearing a North Dakota plate. That leaves me with Nebraska as the one "hole" in the grid below. Will the quest be complete in 2012? It's been almost three years. I spoke to someone who said her family does a game of plate ID on their annual trip to Maine and that they always get all fifty. They certainly have sharper eyes than I do.

Still no Nebraska as of 2013-06-28, though my sister-in-law saw a car with Nebraska plates in Wellesley. There seems to be some hope I'll cross paths with it. Most recent addition is Prince Edward Island from May, 2013, not part of my initial challenge, but a kind of lateral progress, I guess.

First posted January 3, 2009
(26 June 21, 2009 - 35 as of August 1, 2009 - 41 as of Labor Day Sept. 7, 2009, 46 by 4/15/2010 - 49 by 8/21/2012) - 50 (8/17/2013)