50 States Sticker Challenge

There is no sign-up and no official rulebook. The idea is simple: every time you visit a new state, you bring home a sticker from it, and your collection grows into a map of where you have been. Some people finish in a summer of road trips, some over a lifetime.

1. Pick your canvas. One water bottle, laptop lid or suitcase for the whole collection, or the printable sheet on the fridge.
2. Agree on what counts. Driving through? A night? A meal and a walk? Decide once and use the same rule for every state.
3. One sticker per state. Tap the state once when you visit and again when the sticker is in hand.
4. Share or print your map. Send the link to the grandparents, or print the sheet and tick the boxes by hand.

• Water bottle

  It comes on every hike and every flight, so the collection travels with you. Choose waterproof vinyl stickers and wash the bottle by hand rather than in the dishwasher.

• Laptop or tablet

  A flat, smooth lid shows the whole set at a glance. Stickers around two inches wide leave room for many more states than big ones.

• Suitcase or cooler

  Hard-shell luggage and coolers take larger stickers and a few scuffs. Press each one down firmly from the center out so the edges do not lift.

• Van, camper or the printable map

  A camper door or a cabinet inside the van becomes the trip log. At home, the printed sheet takes mini stickers on its squares, or serves as the checklist next to a poster board of full-size ones.

Whatever the surface, clean it with a little rubbing alcohol and let it dry first; the how to apply a sticker guide walks through it.

The best sticker is the one with a story. Visitor centers, national and state park stores, trailheads, museums and small-town shops usually carry local designs, and a sticker bought on the spot is a souvenir that costs a few dollars and weighs nothing.

If you want a theme, choose one and keep it: the state's outline, its nickname, a landmark you saw, the park you hiked or the food you tried. Missed a state's sticker on the road? Every state has a page with ready-made designs — for example the Utah stickers or the Maine stickers, all listed under state stickers. You can also turn a trip photo into your own sticker with the custom sticker maker.

Families: give each child a bottle or a printed sheet of their own, or keep one shared map for the whole family and let a different person choose the sticker in each state. Younger kids like ticking the boxes; older kids can look up each state's capital and nickname on its sticker page and write them on the back of the sheet.

Classrooms: print one sheet per student and mark the states each student has been to, or run a class map on the board and add a state whenever a family trip, a pen-pal letter or a lesson brings one in. It fits geography units on regions and neighboring states — every state page lists the states that border it.

• Look for clusters. The six New England states are close together, and the Four Corners monument sits where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet.
• Keep new stickers flat in a notebook or a zip bag until you get home, so the corners do not curl in a hot car.
• Write the date and the place on the backing paper before you peel it — the map says where, the note says when.
• Alaska and Hawaii usually take a flight or a ferry; many people leave them for last.