Disclaimer: If you’re not a fan of the Travel Century Club and its characterization of what is or isn’t a country then you may want to stop reading. If you do continue, spare me the comments about how Hawaii Isn’t a Country, a title of a previous post.
Sorry for that whiny intro.
Abu Dhabi, my 75th ‘country’. Somehow each Emirate is its own ‘country’ but each state in the US is not according to the list.
75 is a good milestone though still 25 shy of the century mark. Somehow I thought I’d be a lot closer by now given how much I travel, but a shift from my obsession from only going to new countries to using points at the best resorts has kept this goal elusive.
At the same time and the more poetic reason I remain short is because nothing is better than visiting a country for the second or third time. For example, I recently went to Bali, China, Japan, and Mexico countries that I had traveled to before. Going again made the old memories more special and the new memories equally great. Furthermore, the pressure to go, see, do everything is lifted whether it be for personal curiosity or now to fulfill my duties as a blogger.
I’m hoping I have enough time in this life to get to 100 and beyond but in the event that I don’t, I can genuinely say that I’ve been to just about all the places I’ve wanted to see.
75! And counting.
omg they are not countries. stop using that word. you’re being vocabularily (new word) lazy. “countries and territories” would be acceptable to me, along with a formal apology for years of torment and torture.
” the Travelers’ Century Club’s official list of countries and
territories, a total of 324 as of Jan. 1, 2014. Although some are not
actually countries in their own right, they have been included because
they are removed from the parent country, either geographically,
politically or ethnologically (see the Territory Status page for detailed criteria).”