When a List is Not Just a List

When I woke up yesterday, I had 91 countries on my Countries Visited List. Now I'm not sure. How can that be you may ask? There is no quick or easy answer. A little history. Years ago, I saw a mention of something called the Century Club with a TripAdvisor travel map attached. I created and added my own map to the blog. See the bottom of this blog! Now I'm not much of a joiner, so I kind of forgot about the club until yesterday. Next step in the history is that TripAdvisor dropped a feature of their travel map which was a country counter. I don't know for sure why they dropped it. At the time, support replies were that it was an oversight and it would return. It never did. I would conjecture because it was a support nightmare as to the definition of a country. What gets counted and what does not? It is not a simple question as it might seem. Which brings us to my list. The genesis of my list was the TripAdvisor travel map. Support at TripAdvisor some time ago offered, as a substitute for their lost counter, the ability to download one's own list. Clay did that for me and saved it as an Excel spreadsheet file. I have a terrible time with those little boxes and don't use it much. However, it is the master list for my countries visited. I knew there were legacy errors from TripAdvisor and my own entry errors. One day an accounting would come and that day was yesterday.

Clay was motivated by my new reluctance to travel. He has been motivating me by dangling my list. 100 is a nice round, goal-type number. No one likes a quitter, not even a quitter. So when I woke up yesterday, Clay had yet another trip to sell me for next year. 6 or 7 new countries. I was happy adding the 5 or 6 countries we'll visit on our next trip. It was close enough to 100 for me. Not so fast, Clay says. He was using Encyclopedia Brittanica as his reference. He edited my list and whittled my number to only 85. I felt defeated. The late summer trip and even his new proposed trip in 2020 wouldn't bring me back to where I thought I'd been. So I found the list linked above from the Century Club and we edited the list again and now I had 113! Clay was dismayed as he said it meant I would never leave the house again. Right now we've agreed to maintain both lists. We'll either have to find another reference list or live with an indeterminant number.

Pasted below is the itinerary of our next trip.

Self-guided Eastern Europe & river cruise
Days              Location notes                      Sleep                          
1 Thu fly RDU to Prague               plane
2 Fri Arrive Prague                         our hotel Prague - Cloister Inn
3 Sat in Prague segway tour our hotel Prague - Cloister Inn
4 Sun tour Prague                             our hotel Prague - Cloister Inn
5 Mon tour Prague our hotel Prague - Cloister Inn
6 Tue fly to Minsk                            our hotel Minsk - Hotel Monastyrski
7 Wed tour Minsk                              our hotel in Minsk - Hotel Monastyrski
8 Thu fly Minsk to Kiev our hotel in Kiev - Sunflower Hotel
9 Fri tour Chernobyl our hotel in Kiev - Sunflower Hotel
10 Sat tour Kiev city tour                 our hotel in Kiev - Sunflower Hotel
11 Sun fly Kiev to Bucharest            our hotel Bucharest-Europa Royale
12 Mon tour to Bulgaria                     our hotel Bucharest-Europa Royale
13 Tue wash day - rest                      our hotel Bucharest-Europa Royale
14 Wed            8-Day-Transylvania-and-UNESCO-Painted-Monasteries-from-Bucharest
15 Thu        Bucharest - Curtea de Arges - Sibiu tour hotel in Sibiu
16 Fri          Sibiu - Sighisoara - Bistrita tour hotel- Coroana de Aur in Bistrita
17 Sat          Bistrita - Gura Humorului - Radauti tour hotel- Gura Humorului
18 Sun         Radauti - Piatra Neamt tour hotel- Piatra Neamt
19 Mon Piatra Neamt - Brasov tour hotel- Brasov
20 Tue        Brasov - Sinaia - Bucharest tour hotel- Bucharest
21 Wed       tour ends - fly to Chisinau                    our hotel in Chisinau-City Park
22 Thu 2-day gastronomic tour in Moldova    farmhouse on tour
23 Fri gastronomic tour ends our hotel in Chisinau-City Park
24 Sat fly to Bucharest our hotel Bucharest-Europa Royale
25 Sun Embark river boat Giurgiu- amawaterways.com/gems-of-southeast-europe
26 Mon GIURGIU – ROUSSE, BULGARIA boat
27 Tue       VIDIN boat
28 Wed SCENIC CRUISING THROUGH THE IRON GATES boat
29 Thu       BELGRADE, SERBIA boat
30 Fri        NOVI SAD, SERBIA – VUKOVAR, CROATIA boat
31 Sat         MOHÁCS - PÉCS, HUNGARY boat
32 Sun  BUDAPEST – DISEMBARKATION our hotel - Hotel Central Basilica
33 Mon fly Home - BUD to PHL to RDU home