Even from the air, I could see that Boston was different in ways I hadn't imagined.

I was 17 and on my first trip outside California. As the plane descended, I was startled by how dirty the historic old buildings were. In my hometown of Los Angeles, the buildings were not old enough to have picked up grime.

That was just the first of Boston's surprises. When I ordered a hamburger from a take-out window off Massachusetts Avenue, it came on French bread with grilled peppers. People were more hurried and more brusque. I heard the Boston accent with its broad a's and dropped r's, but none of the foreign accents I was accustomed to hearing in Los Angeles. History was everywhere; walking the Freedom Trail, it was easy for a teenager who hated history class to relate to the acts of rebellion that blossomed into the Revolutionary War.

I was fascinated by my first glimpse of how different two states in the same union could be. It sparked a lifetime of wanderlust that led me to visit all 50 states, a quest that took another 36 years.

Partly I felt a compulsion to complete a list, like watching every one of the American Film Institute's 100 greatest movies or seeing every team in Major League Baseball in action. And partly I was curious about people and places in the same nation yet seemingly from different worlds.

I finally made it to my 50th state on a sunny morning last fall, when I crossed from New Hampshire into Maine. I stopped at a roadhouse near Fryeburg to celebrate with blueberry pancakes, then celebrated again at Wicasset with a lobster roll.

In every state I found something -- a style of cooking, a way of talking, a quirky piece of folk art, a feature of geology, a relic of history, a way of thinking about books or politics or relationships -- that I had not encountered before.

In Washington state, I attempted downhill skiing for the first -- and last -- time. In Alaska, I tasted caribou. In New York, I was baffled by performance art. In Nevada, I struggled to master the complicated rules and odds of shooting craps. In Idaho, I learned not only how to catch and clean a rainbow trout, but to catch the night crawlers I used for bait. I went to my first disco in Colorado Springs, my first rock 'n' roll museum in Detroit, my first horse race in Florida.

Seeing all 50 took a lot more effort than I'd expected. I stayed on the couches of family and friends who had moved out of state. I tagged along on my husband's business trips and tacked extra time for sightseeing onto my own professional forays. When I had to change planes in Atlanta, I booked a hotel there and spent a day exploring a multitude of places with ''Peachtree'' in their name.

ON THE ROAD

Mostly, though, my husband and I took road trips. We planned big loops through the West when we lived in California. We drove up and down Interstate 95 and made a lopsided arc through New England. We motored from Seward, Alaska, to Prudhoe Bay, the last 400 miles on a gravel road. When we moved from California to Florida, we came by car, stopping to see a show in Las Vegas, touring Graceland in Memphis and gawking at how unexpectedly pretty Arkansas was.

And always, we tried to spend time in another state we hadn't crossed off the list yet, driving an extra 50 miles to lunch in North Dakota, rerouting our trip to see the dairy lands of Wisconsin. We drove from Detroit to Seattle -- about 2,350 miles if we had stayed on I-90 -- and took so many detours that our zigzag route covered nearly 4,000 miles.

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