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

times over. Charles decided to retire early and see the world. All of it.
    He traces his wanderlust back to a childhood fascination with geography. Not all systematic travelers love maps—TCC chairman Klaus Billep confided to me that “when we add Abkhazia or Tokelau to our list, people have no idea where they are. They have to call usor look them up on our website.” But Charles is a map nut after my own heart.
    “I remember visiting my mother. My parents were separated, and my mother lived on a farm way out in remote West Virginia. And I would sit in our Land Rover in the driver’s seat. I’d lay the road atlas down beside me in the passenger seat and look down and pretend that I was driving. When the road on the map turned to the right, I’d turn the steering wheel to the right. And I pretended that I was driving to the Pacific Ocean.”
    It’s no accident that, in his garden-gnome travel photos, he’s always swarmed by grinning locals. Charles is scrupulously social when he travels. People are as important to him as places are. More important, maybe. “I like understanding where people are from, how they think, and seeing how that relates to geography too. There’s a real power in meeting someone and knowing something about them, just because of where they’re from.” I tell him I’ve noticed that my trivia background can do the same thing, but he disagrees—his brand of travel gets you something more. “It’s a real bond. The first step is knowing the trivia, just knowing the name of the place, but the second is having an emotion tied to it. Trivia is secondhand at best, but once you’ve been there, you can feel their situation, you’re able to relate.”
    But as with Alan Hogenauer, the checklist, the system, is a big part of his travel compulsion as well. One of the first concepts I ever studied in my computer science classes was the TSP, or traveling salesman problem, in which programmers try to find the shortest route a traveler can take to visit every city in a given list. This seemingly simple problem is actually an incredibly rich and complex one, and even fast modern computers can take years to solve it exhaustively when a few hundred cities are added to the list. The traveling salesman problem is a theoretical exercise, but Charles Veley has spent the last decade working on solving it in real life.
    “I love it. I’m a computer guy, and when you have an algorithm you’re working on, you find that the more you work it, the more it improves. So I was working constantly on around-the-world tickets. You want to be efficient. Let me make sure I’m not going to be stuck in a place I don’t want to be for seven days. If I just research a littlemore, maybe I can find a way to make this trip more efficient and more enjoyable.”
    I nod eagerly—I’m an efficiency nerd myself. My wife’s idea of a successful date is one where she likes the movie or the play or the restaurant, but I’m content if I can just find a great parking space, ideally the optimal parking space. What a rush.
    “But does that kind of rigid efficiency take away from the spontaneous fun of travel?” I ask. “The freedom of the open road, all that?”
    “Well, that’s the challenge,” says Charles. “To do both. My philosophy is always to plan every minute accounted for—but be prepared to throw the plan out the window.” In 2005, Veley mounted an expedition to Rockall, a ninety-foot-wide skerry in the North Atlantic. It’s so hard to get to that the number of recorded visitors at the time—twelve—was the same as the number of men who have landed on the moon. Charles’s attempt failed due to high swells, and his crew had to settle for reaching over the side of the boat and literally sticking Post-its to the island’s sheer cliffs. Three years later, he returned, and once again the twenty-foot swell was too high for the inflatable Zodiac to land. But, ready as ever to improvise, Charles donned a wet suit, jumped