America 250: Turns Out, We Were Already Celebrating
America 250: Turns Out, We Were Already Celebrating
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Celebrating 250 years of America, one story at a time.
Celebrating 250 years of America, one story at a time.
Somewhere around March, I realized something a little unusual about our travel year.
Monty and I hadn’t left the country and had postponed our only international trip.
That wasn’t the plan. We love international travel and are certainly not giving up our passports anytime soon. But as I started looking back at where we had been—and where we were headed—I realized that 2026 was shaping up very differently.
So we decided to lean into it.
America is celebrating its 250th birthday this year, and without really meaning to, we had already started our own celebration. We decided to make 2026 a full year of domestic travel.
And what a year!
Communities across the country are finding their own way to celebrate America 250, including right here in East Tennessee.
We’ve wandered through the Ozarks and spent time in St. Louis. We’ve gone back to places that are part of my own story, like Savannah and Pembroke, Georgia, and made stops in Augusta. We’ve visited beaches from Alabama to South Carolina, explored the Carolinas, and taken several long weekends enjoying festivals and historic sites in our own backyard in Middle and East Tennessee.
Some trips were planned adventures. Some were quick getaways. Some were family trips, work trips, weekend trips, or simply opportunities to say, “We’re this close, why don’t we go see it?”
And somewhere along the way, I was reminded of something very easy for travelers to forget:
You don’t always have to go far away to find a great story.
You don’t always have to go far away to find a great story.
That realization is what inspired this series, but I don’t want to limit it to us or to only the places we visited this year.
We’ll also go back to some of our favorite places from travels past. I’ll share destinations that friends, family, and fellow travelers are exploring during America’s 250th year. And because I have the privilege of helping other people plan their own adventures through Sharp Ideas Travel, I’ll take you along to some of the places my clients are discovering too.
Some of those trips may take us to America’s most famous landmarks. Others may lead us to a tiny town, a beautiful stretch of coastline, a mountain road, a quirky festival, a historic neighborhood, or a restaurant somebody told us we simply had to try.
That’s really the fun of it.
There are extraordinary places all over this country, but there are also wonderful little towns, back roads, local traditions, historic sites, beaches, parks, food, music, and communities that rarely make anyone’s bucket list.
And maybe they should.
So, in honor of America’s 250th birthday, Sharp Ideas Travel is going to spend some time celebrating travel right here at home—not just through our own travels, but through the stories of people we know, places we have loved, and adventures we are helping others plan.
This won’t be a list of the “50 places you have to see before you die.”
It will be a collection of places worth knowing about, experiences worth having, and stories worth bringing home.
Because whether the journey takes you across an ocean, across the country, or just a couple of hours down the road, I still believe the same thing:
It’s all about the stories.
It’s all about the stories.
So here’s to 250 years of America, and to getting out there and collecting a few more stories of our own.
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