Hello 👋 I’m Shubhankar Kumar.

I'm an AI engineer based in the Bay Area. Before California it was finance bro in New York, and before that a grad student in Chicago. I've been to over 40 countries but in 2024 I got obsessed with seeing just how diverse this country actually is.

I get 10 to 12 days of PTO a year. Every single one of those days goes to visiting family abroad. That means every trip you see on this page happened on a completely normal weekend. No days off, no holiday weekends. Just Friday night after work to Sunday night before bed.

When you only have 48 hours, you stop being lazy about it. You research harder, you move faster, and you come home having actually done something. I also deliberately avoid long weekends. Everyone travels on long weekends, which means everywhere is overcrowded and overpriced. A random Saturday in October beats a Memorial Day weekend anywhere, every single time.

Almost every trip is solo. Not because I'm antisocial but because the way I plan trips is hard to ask someone else to keep up with. I'm also not trying to collect states or national parks. I've been to 35 states and around 30 national parks, and there are plenty I have no interest in visiting. Every state and every park has something beautiful for sure, but I'm specifically looking for the most jaw-dropping, and I never go back to a landscape I've already seen.

The US has every possible landscape and most people who live here have never seen any of it. That's what this page is about.