Everyone has at least a few places nearby that they've always meant to visit, yet never gotten around to actually seeing. I've been fortunate enough to visit several dozen countries along with 48 American states and 8 of Canada's 10 provinces. However, despite a personal hobby of visiting state and national capital cities, I realized that I'd never been to several of the state capitals located closest to my home in the Washington DC suburbs! I had previously visited Cheyenne / Wyoming, Victoria / British Columbia, and Honolulu / Hawaii, not to mention the parliamentry buildings in a bunch of European countries and Australia. Yet somehow I had never visited Dover, Delaware or the downtown part of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania despite these being two of the neighboring states to my own Maryland. When I had some extra "use it or lose it" leave saved up from my work in December 2025, I decided that I would visit several of these local state capitals to check them off my personal list and see what they had to offer. The cost to see these places was almost nonexistent and this had to be a better way to spend the day than sitting around at home goofing around with video games.
The nearest state capitals included Annapolis, Maryland (which I *HAD* visited many times before); Dover, Delaware; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Richmond, Virginia. Conveniently, all of these were within a two hour drive from our house which would allow me to leave after taking the kids to day care and still make it back in time to pick them up in the late afternoon. The next-closest state capital was Trenton, New Jersey (which was close to three hours driving distance) and then everything beyond that would require 5+ hours of driving in each direction. That might be doable for another trip but not for these short jaunts. I'm listing these local state capitals in the order that they officially joined the United States, starting with Delaware (#1) followed by Pennsylvania (#2), Maryland (#7), and Virginia (#10). Initially I was only able to visit the first three state capitals, then finally tacked on a visit to Richmond in July 2026.
At the tail end of the following summer, I was able to take a short trip over the course of two days to visit more state capitals further away to the northeast. My wife had asked me what I wanted as a gift for my birthday, and my somewhat unusual request was to jaunt away for two days so that I could see some more of these locations. I left extremely early on a Thursday morning and drove from our home in the Washington DC area up to Hartford, Connecticut followed by continuing northeast to the small town of Concord, New Hampshire which is also a state capital. Then I drove through Hanover, NH which is the site of Ivy League college Dartmouth before staying for a single night at a hotel in Vermont. The following morning, I visited Montpelier (which is the smallest state capital in the country) in the morning and then drove across rural Vermont, stopping along the way in Bennington where a Revolutionary War battle was fought, before wrapping up this collection of state capitals in Albany, New York. All of these were state capitals that I had never visited before and gave me a nice mix of decent-sized cities along with very small towns. Ideally I would have had one more day to visit Providence, RI and Boston, MA and Augusta, ME which were also in the region but I didn't want to spend more time away from our young kids.
This might not be as dramatic or exotic as some of the places that I've visited but hopefully still entertaining to read about all the same!
