And yes, sleeping overnight in St. Paul counts! I count Arkansas even though it was a night in a hotel on the way back from Texas the summer before I entered third grade. I don't remember anything other than enjoying a late night swim with Dad (Mom never learned to swim and after witnessing three cousins drowning in a lake during a family reunion when Mom was barely a teen, she never wanted to learn).
Oooh...if you come into North State CA, I can give recos. Lavabeds (way up in Modoc I think and not Siskiyou), Shasta Lake and Redding, Mt. Lassen in Lassen Co). All along the Cascades range and all volcanic, so very cool.
I would definitely not be opposed to another visit to CA. My one and only visit was to LA, with bff, to see a mutual college friend (technically, we met him shortly after college, through a good college friend), when he was playing with the LA Philharmonic. During the stay, we drove for a couple hours, first up the PCH and then down it, but we didn't stop in any of the towns. A cousin used to live in Livermore; he's now on Bethel Island. I've always wanted to visit him (when he was in Livermore, I wanted to stay in San Francisco and then either have him come into the city or pick me up to go see his place). I will never not regret missing his wedding...he and his wife got married in a cool speakeasy-turned-hotel and with the exception of his MIL getting drunk at the reception and falling into a fountain, it sounds like it was a great wedding. Alas, they chose the exact same date my brother's son was graduating from high school, an event I wasn't going to miss. For a while, I tried to figure out how to go to the graduation and then fly out, or maybe fly in for the rehearsal dinner (not that I would've attended) and then fly out but I couldn't make it work.
