Long ago I started keeping a list of the countries I’d visited in Evernote, and later Notion, because otherwise the whole thing started to get fuzzy.
Twenty years of travel sounds like a long time, and I suppose it is, but in my head it still feels like a handful of chapters. Backpacking Europe in 1996. Falling hard for Thailand in 2007. Indonesia, Japan, Romania, Nepal, Bhutan. A lot of return trips to places that felt easy to return to, and a few places I mostly remember as airports, train stations, and that odd liminal feeling of being somewhere, but not really being there.
So I had AI take those notes, scan my emails from the last 20 years, and make a map for me.
The thing I like about seeing it this way is that it’s honest in a way memory isn’t. The map makes the repeat visits obvious. I’ve quite literally lost track of how many times I’ve been to Thailand, and for how long in total. I think I’ll ask AI to calculate that next and add a “total days in country” layer to the map.
I desperately want to go new places. At the same time, I really love Thailand, Spain, and Italy, and always want to return to them. The map makes that tension obvious too.
It also makes the gaps obvious. Africa is still blank. South America is still blank.
I’m not much interested in country counting as a sport. Long ago, when I thought about buying a boat, I was fond of saying “I want to sail about the world” rather than “I want to sail around the world.” A subtle difference, because the trophy for circumnavigating didn’t interest me at all, while seeing as many places as I could along the way absolutely did.
That still hasn’t happened, but I treat travel the same way. Yes, I want to go to every country, but not because visiting every country is itself noteworthy. At this point hundreds of people have visited every country on earth. That’s an amazing feat, but I’m more interested in the best stories they have than their country count. I’m interested in the amazing people they’ve met and the unexpected delights they’ve experienced.
I digress, but I’m still on a quest to get people to stop asking “What’s the best place/experience/whatever you’ve had?” To me, that’s like asking someone who their favorite child is. A better question is, “Tell me something amazing no one else has asked you about yet.”
And for goodness’ sake, stop answering questions with, “Everything was great except for this one horrible thing I’ll now tell you about.” That’s not what anyone asked, and it’s definitely not what anyone wants to hear about.
Here’s to the next twenty years, or at least to the next place worth returning to.
