The 1st State is our 44th!

I'm at Sawyer's baseball practice with his sister when I get a call from my dad.  He says he's parked right next to a Delaware in the mall parking lot.  I ask him how he found it, and he said he dropped mom off at the mall and he drove around looking for plates.  Hilarious.  I can't get there for at least another 45 minutes.  He says he'll hang out there until I get there or until they come out to their car.  I'm not even sure where to begin with what's wrong here with this situation.  My family is stalking cars for us. 

It's now 45 minutes later, and I'm in route.  My dad calls and asks me where I am because he is now talking to them and telling them about this crazy quest.  He says they think we are definitely crazy, but they are really nice.  They are now driving to Walmart so he says he will follow them and meet us there.  This silliness I never could have imagined.  We drive into Walmart and there they all are.....My mom, dad, and a younger couple.  I sheepishly pull in a few parking spots away, and we all get out and introduce ourselves.  She is from Wisconsin, and he is from Delaware and they are in the process of moving here.  The Vermont couple love the quest and apologize for the dirty license plate.  As you can see from the picture it turned out just fine to us!  We tell them about the blog so perhaps they will see this and smile.  Thank you very much!

But our night is not quite done.  My dad says he drove through the nearby hotel parking lots already so I'm satisfied with heading home since it is getting late.  My wife says let's just go through them again because there are likely more cars there now.  We check out a few of them....lots of different plates, but none that we need.  We decide to check one more before heading home and we strike gold twice.  Now there have been times during this quest where I'm sure my wife thought I had taken this way too far (this blog....getting stupidly excited when we see a rare one we don't have yet) but her reaction took the cake.  When we all spotted Maine simultaneously she let out a 'holy s&it ' that seemed to reverberate off the closed windows in the car.  Our 4 year old daughter was quite upset not because of what Mom said (she apparently is used to hearing that phrase) but because of how loud she said it.  So she's crying and it almost caused me to break into Clark Griswold's speech to his family in the movie Vacation about how this is a quest for fun and needing plastic surgery to remove our smiles.

46 down 4 to go!

Arkansas

Maine