Travel Lists as Cheat Codes: The Secret to Quality over Quantity
The trick to using lists for inspiration, not obsession, and finding wonder along the way
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you — it should change you.”
— Anthony Bourdain
When I completed my journey of visiting all 193 United Nations member states, I naively assumed that the most difficult task had been accomplished. What followed, however, was a far more difficult and introspective question: what next? Like when I finished my first Ironman triathlon the goal that had structured my movements for years had suddenly evaporated, leaving me without a clear compass.
Initially, I resisted the temptation to seek out another framework. I wanted no part of the Travelers Century Club, MTP, or NomadMania lists. These I decided were artificial constraints; a way to have something to obsess over and chase. Instead, I gave myself over to a period of freer travel between 2016 and 2019, returning to places that had either long captivated me, or still held their own interest for me, and exploring them in greater depth.
In Zagreb, for example, a city I only really knew in passing, a work trip became an invitation to engage more slowly. Without the urgency of adding a new country to my tally, after putting on a successful conference I lingered in cafés, walked the neighborhoods without aim, and discovered the local charms that only emerge when you’re not constrained by an outside force.
This approach colored my travels for the next several years. In Sydney in 2017, I did not climb the Harbour Bridge. Instead, I returned simply to dwell in a place I loved, to rediscover familiar places with unhurried eyes.
In Namibia the following year, I was forced to confronthow superficial my first trip there had been. Standing beneath the skeletal trees of Sossusvlei, framed by a sky so wide it seemed almost endless, I recognized how revisiting a country allows one not simply to see more, but to feel differently.
The same year, I traveled with the first group of tourists permitted into Saudi Arabia, allowed in for the Formula E events. Many participants were extreme travelers, eager to finally capture a country that had long eluded them. For me, it was an opportunity to make amends for a perfunctory earlier visit. Standing on the cliffs at the aptly named Edge of the World, I realized that lists might propel us toward destinations, but it is our own engagement that transforms them into experiences of meaning.
By the end of 2019, the pendulum had begun to swing back. In the frozen north of Canada, I found myself in Tuktoyuktuk, staring out at the Arctic Ocean, and quietly acknowledging that I was, once again, chasing regions…and loving it.
And then, of course, came the deafening silence of Covid. Two years in which my travels lay dormant while I, like so many others, stayed grounded. That doesn’t mean I didn’t make lists…I ran every mile of every street in my hometown of Arlington, Virginia, and made it more than halfway through every street in Washington, D.C.
When international travel resumed for me, it felt less like a continuation and more like a rebirth. In Zimbabwe’s Matopos in 2022, amid granite boulders balanced against the sky, I felt the beginnings of a new approach to travel for me. With tongue only half in cheek, I thought of it as a new era—Taylor Swift would forgive me. This time, lists were not constraints but possibilities, ways of organizing inspiration rather than obligations to be fulfilled.
By 2024, in Greenland, I had ceased to deny it: I was engaging with the lists from Travelers Century Club, with MTP, with NomadMania. But I was doing so differently. Lists had become less about the performative satisfaction of completion and more about the imaginative spark they offered. They pointed me toward experiences like drifting past landscapes carved by time, reminders that travel is not about boxes checked, but about awe captured.
What I have come to understand through all of this is that lists are not rigid prisons. They are springboards. They lend structure to curiosity, channel ambition, and provide direction at moments when the sheer vastness of the world can feel overwhelming. But their purpose is not completion; their purpose is transformation.
Your turn: Do you rely on travel lists? Anything from bucket lists, official clubs, or private notes? Or do you prefer to follow the unpredictable currents of your own imagination?