About Glen

Who Glen is

Glen Hollins was born in 1954 and grew up in Tucumcari, New Mexico, a Route 66 town, back when the billboards along the highway sold it as a night's stop. He got his first trucking job in 1975, at twenty-one, and watched his own town empty out after I-40 went around it in 1981.

For twenty years he drove over the road, hauling freight to all 48 states and logging his runs in pencil in the margins of his road atlases. For eighteen more he ran regional routes out of eastern New Mexico, hauling feed, fencing and equipment parts to farm-supply and hardware stores in small towns across New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. He got to know the store owners, the café regulars and the old sheriffs, and saw Main Streets fill up and empty out.

He retired in 2013 with more than two million miles behind him and his company's two-million-mile safe driving award. Then he and his wife June spent eight years crossing the country in a camper, and on those trips he finished the list he'd been keeping most of his life: standing in every county seat of the lower 48. Since 2021 they've lived back in Tucumcari, where he sits at his desk under a pinned map of the United States and tells what he saw.

Home

Tucumcari, New Mexico, on old Route 66

On the road

38 years, 1975–2013: twenty over the road to all 48 states, eighteen on regional runs to small towns

Miles

More than two million

The list

Every county seat of the lower 48, finished in the camper years with June, 2013–2021

Family

Married to June since 1978. A daughter, Amy, and two grandchildren

How the books are put together

• Real towns, real facts. Every fact about a town, its history, its courthouse or its museum, was checked against at least three independent sources before it went in. Glen's notes tell what he saw; the facts come from the record.
• Practical, and dated. Each town says what to see, when to go, how to get around on foot, where to park and how far it is to the nearest hospital. All of it was checked in October 2026.
• Real photographs. The 200 pictures in the book are real photographs and old postcards, most from the Library of Congress and the public domain, each with its credit.
• Visiting, not moving. The books are about towns worth a drive and a day. They don't give advice on moving, retirement, taxes or money, and they don't rank towns as good or bad places to live.
• Hours change. Cafés close, museums change their days. Check before a long drive.