This year marks our home state of Nebraska's 150th anniversary! To celebrate, Carson put together a list of the "The Jewels of Highway 2" for USA TODAY.

Like its bigger neighbor the South (hi, Chicago!), Milwaukee is indeed a city of neighborhoods, each with its own icons and features and people. 

I'd imagined a city brimming with beer, decidedly blue collar. Instead, Grand Rapids greeted us with new restaurants, modern high rises, art museums and bourgeois bars.

As two new RV'ers, going international with our setup was a little daunting, but well worth it. We can confidently say: camp in Canada and you won't regret it.

Carson and I fell in love in New York. At least that's how I remember it.

I told myself before we started the trip that I wanted to see the Grand Canyon again. I just didn't expect to find it in Pennsylvania.

You'll be hard pressed to convince me that you can do Maine any better than we did. But we'll let you in on a few bits of local lore and love from our best-ever hosts, Fran and Carey.

Our week in the Granite State convinced us that New Hampshire just might be the happiest place on earth. And we've got five definitive moments to prove our point.

We'll be back, Vermont. While we still think your Queen City isn't quite the place for us -- a little too small, a tad too remote -- but we can all agree that Green Mountain coffee is the best. 

Maybe it’s because we watched all five seasons of The Wire. Or the fact that we both liked Natty Boh before we even stepped foot in the state. Whatever conscious or subconscious factors were at play, by the time we left Maryland and set up camp in Delaware, we’d both fallen a bit in love with Baltimore.

We were pushing to get to the Army Corp of Engineers’ Acorn Valley Campground outside of Des Moines. It was Wednesday, early enough, we believed, to secure a walk up campsite at any number of state parks off I-80. But as we cruised from the Land of Lincoln into endless miles of cornfields, we kept coming up short. 

And the number one reason to visit New Jersey is...Hank Sauce. Hands down. 

During our stay in Massachusetts, Ethan and I would visit author John Cheever's grave and paddle a canoe to an abandoned insane asylum along the Charles River, but it seemed most appropriate to focus our Massachusetts coverage on Ethan himself, and the movie he sunk his heart into. On our last day in town, I sat down with Ethan for an extended interview about his life, his work, andWest of Her. 

The Merle Haggard cover band was in full swing, and two carafes of house Pinot Grigio were quite enough for me to saunter up to the lead singer, a cherub retiree in a straw hat and faded Hawaiian shirt, and ask if knew any Billy Joel. It was then that I knew. We needed to get the h**l out of Panama City, Fla.

Things fell apart for the first time in Alabama. Looking back, it was a pretty minor tragedy. But for two newly minted roadies with a year’s worth of trailer renovations still fresh on our minds — it felt like a swift kick between the ribs.

A state best known as the home of Joe Biden, a tax haven for U.S. corporations, and the first state in the U.S. Truth be told, we almost forgot about Delaware. In the end we were so captivated by the tiny state, that we decided to compile a short list of things to do for those of you who are less familiar with the charms of Delaware.

As a Nebraskan, D.C. and much of the east coast seems ancient. It's not an absurd statement given that our home state is a good 100 years younger than most cities up and down the Eastern seaboard. In D.C., it's hard to escape history. In one afternoon we toured all of the National Mall with my 75-year-old grandmother and we weren't even hustling. 

"Hey! This is a state park. You don't litter in state parks. You litter in Charlotte, but not a state park."

The Duckmaster. The National Civil Rights Museum. Prince's Hot Fried Chicken. The "Birthplace of Rock N' Roll." Pulled pork nachos, and much much more. Tennessee, you don't know when to quit (and we hope you never do).

If a couple is brutally murdered in the woods, and nobody is around to hear their screams, do they really make a sound at all? 

Our first stop was to the Carousel Bar at the Hotel Monteleone, once a hangout for writers like Hemingway, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams. On New Years Eve, it played host to hundreds of drunk Southerners, young and old, overdressed and hardly dressed, many of them wearing masquerade ball masks. A smooth jazz band played in the corner. 

A gang of wild javelinas scurried past the headlights, three or four reds (baby javelinas) bringing up the rear. It set the right tone for our Christmas week in West Texas, marked by an abundance of wildlife, gluttony and a spirit of adventure. 

My mom and I agreed that she would visit while Carson was away on his trip. I could have certainly stayed by myself in Elsie for the five days he was gone. But we'd had a rough month, and when she offered to come I felt relieved. 

The landscape seemed to calm itself as we drove east, heart rate settling down. The scrubby and scaly silhouettes of the Patagonia and Santa Rita mountains gave way to long, flat valleys punctuated now and then by a single hill or bluff.

The first time we set eyes on Richard Shuman he was cursing at his dog and swatting her with an old bath towel. We nodded as we drove past. He didn't nod back. 

A lot of people who move here say they want it to stay the way it was the day they arrived. “It should just stay like this,” they say. “We don’t want any more growth. Tourists need to stop coming.” Well, wait a minute. You came here as a tourist.

Before we'd left Nebraska, I tossed out interview requests to two of Arizona's finest writers: Jim Harrison (Legends of the Fall, Dalva, etc.) and Philip Caputo (A Rumor of War, The Longest Road, etc.). I assumed both were a longshot. A few weeks later, I found myself in Patagonia, Arizona, drinking with both of them at the Wagon Wheel Saloon.

I once had a professor who announced to class that if he were forced to wipe one city from the map, there would be no struggle. The choice was obvious: Phoenix, Arizona. I thought that was pretty funny, because I knew nothing about Phoenix, and nothing about Arizona.

Merry Christmas from Local Color XC!

At nearly 20,000 acres, the forest within the Bessey Ranger District is the largest hand-planted forest in the United States, established in 1902 by visionary botanist and professor Charles E. Bessey. Growing up, I didn't grasp the significance of a national forest in the middle of the nearly treeless Nebraska Sandhills.

This year marks our home state of Nebraska's 150th anniversary! To celebrate, Carson put together a list of the "The Jewels of Highway 2" for USA TODAY.

I'll be honest. As a writer, I'm not a huge fan of spending my time on lists. But when you've traveled the country, you mentally accrue material like this whether you're trying to or not. And hey, if you have to write a list, what's a better theme than "The Independent Bookstores Every Booklover Should Visit in the U.S.?" 

Mel talks on-air with Jeffrey Steffan at 97.5 about our year-long road trip, and takes a trip down memory lane -- she was an intern at KEXL in 2006!

For reasons we can't quite figure out, Cleveland gets a bad wrap--but we loved it. There's something about this rust belt city that felt more authentic - and much less whitewashed - than so many other cities we've toured on our yearlong adventure. 

We were recently interviewed by Tiny House Magazine about our experience living in Elsie, our 120-square-foot trailer and traveling the U.S. We cover everything from remodeling our THOW to living on the road, so if you've got any lingering questions about our lifestyle, start here.

The Ocean State was good to us. Read up on our latest adventures in USA Today!

Until we hit Richmond, our journey had been (relatively) conflict free. That all came to an abrupt halt in a city we were dying to see again, when it seemed like everything that could go wrong with Elsie, did go wrong with Elsie.

I could have written about West Virginia from 30 different angles, but in the end, I focused on two state treasures: pepperoni rolls, and West Virginia short story writer Breece D'J Pancake.

It seemed like a good way to kill two birds with one stone: make sure the trailer was road-ready and running on all cylinders, and finally give the Western Hemisphere's largest man-made forest its due.

Earlier this week, we had a chance to chat with radio DJ Ritch Cassidy over at 93.3 The Wolf. Ritch caught a replay of our HGTV Tiny House Hunters episode and wanted to get in touch to chat about how we're surviving on the road so far. 

In Carson's fourth installment for USA Today, he shared a somewhat embarrassing story involving me and our first trip to Asheville.

Carson recently shared a recap of our time in Tennessee, so it's only fitting that we follow up on his promise of further explaining the famous Peabody Duck March.

When USA TODAY greenlit my story on Savannah, GA, I stared at my cursor for two days before writing a single word, thinking about Spanish Moss. 

Watch our episode of HGTV's Tiny House Hunters on Monday, March 28!

For his first official Local Color XC interview, Carson met up with author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Philip Caputo at the Wagon Wheel Saloon in Patagonia, AZ. 

For his second "Road Trip USA" installment for USA TODAY, Carson chose to write about our experience in Port Arthur, a city that produces nearly a million barrels of crude oil a day and yet, somehow, shows no signs of prosperity. 

Local Color XC featured in the USA Today travel section!

In our third installment of state park stays, we review parks in New England, Canada and the rust belt.

Welcome to our second installment of State Park Stays, where we review park-by-park where we've stayed during our cross country road trip. We hope you'll find these reviews helpful as you plan your next adventure in our nation's great state parks.

Not all state parks are created equal. We haven’t stayed in many so far, but by our estimation our state parks are in better shape than we thought. 

We’re kind of dreading summer. Not because we don’t want the heat (Lord knows we did NOT pack adequately for an El Nino winter). But because winter camping is wonderful in more ways than one. 

According to the National Association of State Park Directors, there are more than 7,000 state parks in the U.S. That’s a lot of publicly accessible nature, and in our experience, state parks are the best when you’re living full-time on the road.