The Fastest Road Trip to Touch All 48 States

A road trip that touches all 48 contiguous states with the least possible driving. Instead of detouring to a city in each state, every stop sits on the state border at the point where the optimized route enters that state, so you clip each state with minimal backtracking. The stops and their order were computed together by a traveling-salesman-with-neighborhoods solver: each state is a region the path must touch, seeded from the state capitals, then the order (nearest-neighbor + 2-opt + or-opt) and the touch points (slid along each state boundary) are refined back and forth until the total distance stops dropping. This is the no-nonsense counterpart to the alphabetical-capitals trip, which is deliberately the worst order possible. Run the optimizer again in the builder to re-tighten it for real roads, or copy it and keep one region.