Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

things along the way, they seem much more real.”
    But I’m accustomed by now to place collectors protesting, methinks, a little too much. They all downplay the appeal of the checklist itself, but having a system is clearly a very real source of pleasure for these people. Otherwise, why wouldn’t you chuck the list at some point and just go wherever the hell you felt like? Part of it is simply the universal smug thrill of crossing something off a to-do list, of course. And Hogenauer says that finishing a checklist is even better. “You recognize things in their entirety. If you can say you’ve got one hundred percent of something in your background, you don’t have to worry that you missed out on something.”
    The checklist ensures novelty and breadth of experience as well. The specter of mortality, the awareness of limited time, seems always to be with these systematic travelers, especially the older ones. Hogenauer tells the story of working at his first job, for Ma Bell, with an older coworker who had elaborate plans to finally see the world with his wife upon retiring. She died the very day he retired. “The look on that guy’s face!” he remembers sadly. “It was such a momentous realization. You’ve got to do things when you can.” So why go back to Cancún if you’ve never seen Tierra del Fuego? Why put off seeing Laos if you’re right next door in Thailand? Gather ye visa stamps while ye may! Old Time is still a-flying!
    The Travelers’ Century Club has expanded the world’s list of “countries” to 319, but even that is too limiting for some collectors, forever hungry in a shrinking world for the next place, the new thing. And so a TCC member named Charles Veley created MostTraveledPeople.com , a website where his loyal globetrotter readers can vote on an even longer list of legit destinations. They’ve currently inflated the count to a whopping 872. All fifty U.S. states are now separate “countries” on thelist. So are the twenty-two regions of France, even if they’re all about the size of Vermont. It’s the rare spot that doesn’t make the cut, in fact. Point Roberts, Washington, a tiny bit of the United States that dangles down from Canada just a few hours northwest of my house, is currently on the vetoed list, with only 40 percent approval.
    No one’s been everywhere yet, but the competition is intense. “I get a lot of e-mails from people claiming that other people are cheating,” Veley tells me, his unfailingly mild, affectless voice betraying no irritation whatsoever. “Some people just like to tattle.” We’ve met near his home, a converted colonel’s residence in San Francisco’s decommissioned Presidio. He looks exhausted, not so much from last week’s four-country swing through Europe, during which he was able to cross off the tiny North Sea island of Heligoland, but from a subsequent stop that sounds even more grueling: taking his three young children to Disneyland.
    Though Guinness doesn’t have a category for it anymore (too subjective, too contentious), Veley is, by the universal acclamation of international newspaper headlines, the world’s most traveled man. He’s been mugged in Buenos Aires and peed on by Costa Rican tree frogs. He’s had his canoe overturned in the hippo-infested waters of the Zambezi River. But in photos of his journeys, he’s always smiling placidly, usually in a neat Oxford blue shirt and khakis, whether he’s hanging out with Nepali holy men, Ethiopian village children, or Rio’s Carnival showgirls. The overall effect is like that prank where a stolen garden gnome turns up in odd places all over the world, always with the same wide eyes and benign grin.
    At thirty-seven, Charles became the youngest person in the history of the Travelers’ Century Club to polish off the club’s entire checklist. He and some friends had founded the software company MicroStrategy, and the dot-com boom of the late nineties had made them millionaires many