Read Online Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings - Free Book Online

skills at sniffing out cheap travel deals, and realized he could do it for $30,000. That’s still a lot of money, of course; most people don’t have $30,000 between the couch cushions that they can, on a whim, drop on around-the-world travel. But Chris saw it as a bargain. “That’s cheap!” he marvels. “That’s so cheap! What else could I buy for thirty thousand dollars? A lot of people might buy a car for that, and I can see one hundred different countries?” It was no contest. Off he went. He’s since expanded his quest to the entire world—his current total is 149 countries, with the hard goal of finishing by April 7, 2013.
    Chris is driven by the same things that guide the other super-travelers I’ve met: the love of logistics and novelty, a near addiction to setting and achieving ambitious goals. But you won’t find him on MostTraveledPeople.com , voting on whether or not Point Roberts, Washington, should count on some Official List. “I don’t care about that,” he says simply.
    “They’re very serious about it.”
    “I know they are, and I don’t care. I wish them well. I’m concernedabout their motivation, but I hope they’re happy. If they’re happy, that’s great.”
    “What’s the danger?”
    “The danger is relying on external reward, because there isn’t any.” He’s right. Winter has explained his Starbucks count by saying, “I want everyone in the world to know my name,” but his eccentric quest will never make him genuinely famous. When The Guinness Book of World Records dropped its “Most Traveled Person” record, Charles Veley lamented that “ It was like finishing a marathon only to discover that all the officials had gone home . . . very frustrating.”
    “And he spent a million dollars on it,” marvels Chris, sighing. Chris has spent a tiny fraction of that on his own adventure, proving his point that almost anyone can travel, and extensively—it’s just a matter of how badly you want to.
    The checklist may drive the addiction, but for most of these globetrotters, the journey quickly becomes its own reward. Early in his travels, Charles let his yen for efficiency get the better of him, making token stops in countries just so he could cross them off. Now he can’t wait to go back and really see them: Bulgaria, Iran, Honduras, Tunisia. “There is no finish line,” he says. It’s not about completion anymore.
    And highpointers know that their collection isn’t about the climb so much as it is getting off the beaten path. “It’s a vehicle that takes you places you never would have thought about going to,” Craig Noland says. “Have you ever been to Kenton, Oklahoma?” Oddly enough, I haven’t. He explains that it’s the panhandle town nearest to Black Mesa, the Sooner State’s highest point. “You can go there and see dinosaur tracks and the country’s longest mesa. There’s a three-state border that’s changed places five different times. You can see the wagon ruts from the old Santa Fe Trail. It’s the only town in Oklahoma that’s in the Mountain Time Zone. You can spend the whole day there, in the middle of nowhere! But you’d never say, ‘Hey, let’s go to Kenton and check it out.’ “
    I don’t really have a list of my own, though I admire those who do. I respect finishers, people who won’t settle for doing most of something.I like knowing that tens of thousands of compulsive travelers are crisscrossing the globe right now, elevating the most mundane of human endeavors—getting from one place to another—into a kind of performance art.
    As recently as a century ago, people who wanted to see the entire world knew that could never happen, so they would sit with atlases and idly daydream of the places they saw mapped there. In our age of casual travel, it surprises us to remember that no sitting U.S. president ever left the country until 1906, when Teddy Roosevelt wanted to find out how the Panama Canal was coming along. For the first