The 30 by 30 Challenge

Air travel would be required to visit 30 countries by the time I was 30.

At the end of 2014, I was going through quite the tumultuous transition; I was reinventing myself. Luckily, my short term and long term goals were pretty well understood. But part of what I lost was my medium term goals, the 5 year plan as it were. However, I met some amazing people during that time, including Jess of FullCircleJess and STEM Journeys, and Jason of The Windy Sailboat. Through many games of Scrabble and many bottles of wine among friends, I finally arrived at my 5-year plan: I would challenged myself to visit 30 countries by the time I was 30. The 30 by 30 challenge it was called, and I had just over 5 years to do it.

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Nomad World Map

NomadWoldMapWhen setting up this site, I knew I’d want to talk about where I’d been. I had done so before previously by putting together a Google Map that had all of my travel destinations for the trip. This got cumbersome and was relatively featureless. I went searching at first for just a way to embed this kind of information into a post or a page and stumbled upon Nomad World Map.

Rather than just allowing embedding of the Google Maps I had created into the post, I was able to create trips within the plugin. I could embed these trips into a post and it would link up with my blog posts about each of the places I had visited! This is a perfect addition to a site with any type of travel blogging. You’ll even notice the ability to embed your current position into your site as a widget!

There was one problem setting up this plugin, though. It’s incompatible with another plugin I had: Page Builder. For some reason the way Page Builder renders the pages is as a widget. This means that the nice full plugin rendering is no-longer available.

The plugin doesn’t seem to be actively supported any longer as a little bit of research into the plugin has shown. However, the author has it posted on GitHub: https://github.com/Tijmen/Nomad-World-Map.