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.
The Rules of Travel
First of all, I had to establish some rules for this challenge. The key questions I needed to answer were:
- What does it mean to visit a country?
- What counts as a country?
Visiting a Country
Let’s start with the easy question: What’s the minimum I need to ensure I do to visit a country? Does the airport count? Does stepping outside an airport count? How far? Is it just to set foot? No.
The entire context of this was adventure. I don’t travel to tick boxes, I travel to experience the culture, to expose myself to new experiences. However, that’s even hard to measure. So, how?
The minimum thing I figured that would represent that would be at least to have to go do something that gives you a “receipt” – could be a credit card receipt, a theatre ticket stub, or even a London tube Oyster card. All of these things force you to get out there and experience something.
What is a Country?
Now that the visiting part was at least set, what about the hard question: What counts as a country? You would think that was easy. However, I’ll give you an easy example of why that’s hard: North Korea. Technically speaking, it’s all still part of one Korea. How about another super-relevant example: Hong Kong.
You can see how this gets complicated. Arguably, however, both of those examples are extremely different cultures than the surrounding areas. So, how do I figure out what counts as a country?
Disclaimer: I’m not a politician, so I don’t have to dance around the sovereignty disputes that exist in this space. Given that, I came up with a few ways related to if this territory is on any of these lists:
- The UN’s list of Sovereign States
- The International Olympic Committee’s List
- The United Kingdom’s Countries
- The Kingdom of the Netherlands
Why split up the UK and the Netherlands? Because both of them technically are made up of individual countries merged together under one parliament. In the case of the Netherlands, for example, they are considered “partners” in the kingdom. In addition, though sharing a common currency, military, etc. with the rest of the UK, places like Scotland have their own Parliament, language, road signs, etc. and their culture is quite different.
The Starting Point
I can’t lie in that part of the reason that unlike many Americans, I already had a passport and traveled abroad, so it wasn’t like I was starting from scratch. Growing up in Michigan, my parents had taken me to visit Canada more than once. In high school, I got a chance to go with my German class on a 2 week trip to Europe. And before all of this started, I took a month-long trip between graduating university and moving down to start work. This left me with this list of countries according to my rules above:
- Canada
- Germany
- Austria
- Switzerland
- Liechtenstein
- England
- France
- Spain
- Monaco
- Italy
- Vatican City (Holy See)
- Czechia
- Netherlands
A total of 13 countries. This made it a whole lot less daunting of a goal to complete in 5 years. 17 countries in 5 years is only 3.4 countries per year. That is surely doable, right? And that’s where my journey began.