Holy cow. What was the setup that let you work that?
Think it was a 10 or so element yagi at about 15' and 100W. The tropo duct did all the heavy lifting. Wasn't even CW.
It was June contest weekend, and we were all operating our usual W0KVA call the contest group uses for contests (Scott is an electrician by trade, so Kilowatts Volts and Amps is a pretty good call for him!)... We woke up Sunday morning and while one guy was grilling up breakfast, we started turning up volume knobs on rigs and realized 2m was wide open to both coasts.
And then I hear a 4 call talking like he's next door on the 220 rig speaker... I tell the guy sitting in the chair closest to that rig to grab that contact!
And... It's Florida. Lasted another ten minutes or so. Whole gulf coast and most of Florida, just like they were a few miles up the road. The MUF dropped after that and VHF worked for about another hour to the gulf states, but 220 died. 220 opened up to Texas and Oklahoma later that morning as I recall, though, since I had 220 duty later.
The upper frequency bands open up more than folks think, especially in summer with sporadic E and tropo.
These folks will send you email alerts of love spots in real time if you sign up, and their maps are great.
http://www.dxmaps.com/spots/map.php?Lan=E&Frec=144&ML=M&Map=NA&DXC=N&HF=N&GL=N
The VHF+ propagation type that has eluded me forever that I'd love to see work, is Trans-Equatorial -- that's a creepy cool one. Point south from the Northern Hemisphere and work someone at nearly the identical south Latitude as you are North. Very strange stuff.
Aurora (Borealis) propagation is also fairly rare, but I've worked some really big Aurora openings. Point north and your signal is refracted back toward you but scattered all over the place, east/west.
And the scattering does funky things to the signal. When it's strong enough for SSB, it sounds like everyone is whispering really loud, even though they're not. Creepy sounding and very very cool.
Here's the current world record list for the VHF and up world...
http://www.arrl.org/files/file/On the Air/Distance_Records_1June2016.pdf
Notice that many of the records are from the mainland to Hawaii via tropo ducting all the way out into the Pacific.
I never analyzed it completely, but I think I got Worked All States or dang close to it, in 2006 from my Jeep during June contest, on 50 MHz / 6 meters. All SSB. I definitely qualified for VUCC on six, in just two days. Ye Olde, "Magic Band"... Amazing when it opens.
That was a mother of a band opening that year. I was working three or four Q's a minute while driving I-80 in Wyoming with a one-ear headset, a hand switch PTT, and I had a pile up on me for over an hour. Everyone wanted/needed Wyoming, as always...