American politics and our trip to Rhode Island

Let’s be honest here. The world doesn’t work like the U.S. Senate, where every state gets two senators for a total of 100. If the world was actually like the U.S. Senate, our planning for this trip would have been much less complicated – just spend two days in every state.
That would be a pretty terrible idea, however, for the fact that California, New York, Texas and other large states would be underrepresented. We’d be forced to miss out on a majority of what those states had to offer, in lieu of an equal two days in boring, unnecessary places with arbitrary names and borders surrounding them.
In fact, I think it would be fair to say that our trip more closely reflects the nature of the U.S. House of Representatives, where states are allocated a certain number of elected officials based upon the population of the state from which they hail. We can consider this system in comparison to our process of planning, during which we planned for the most time to be spent in the places with the coolest stuff to see and do. Granted, those aren’t exactly the most scientific of terms, but it’s worth looking at.
Here is a graph about the ten most populated states in the country. The first bar reflects their share of representation in the House, and the second reflects the amount of time we’re spending there.

And the bottom ten:

---

Though some instances see a bit of incongruity (thanks in most part to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming and Badlands Park in S.D.), and while we’ve underrepresented some states (sorry, Hawaii and Alaska), it had to happen somewhere. And I take these graphs to be a testament to our planning abilities. If it’s worked for America for the last 220 years, it can work for us for a summer.
In the meanwhile, I got a comment the other day from a reader telling us how he was excited to see our Rhode Island pictures, as he had grown up there. Sorry to disappoint, but…

---

Here is our picture (singular, picture) from Rhode Island. As you can see on the GPS, the dotted line is the state border, and this was us crossing it. We’d left South Hadley in a hurry to get to Provincetown, and in order to keep to our promise to our readers that we’ll be visiting all 48 contiguous states in some capacity, we drove about 45 minutes out of the way, as we left the Cape for Boston, in order to nip the corner of Rhode Island for just a few moments – about five, to be exact.

But we made it, and now it’s on to Boston.

-Tom

---