Q: What makes a wonderful gift to someone who has been bitten by the travel bug?
A: A scratch map! (pun not intended) ;)

Anne gave me this highly entertaining gift for Christmas but I’ve just got round to getting the materials to hang this map in the apartment. Right now, I’m attempting to remove the curls out of it, after a lot of fun scratching out the places that I’ve to, plus a couple of countries which I’ll be visiting soon – I’m too excited to leave them off the map!

Most of the time, I am scratching off entire countries to which I’ve visited a few places. However, with large ones like USA, Canada, China, Indonesia and Australia, it is very hard to justify that and I ended up working with states or provinces or regions, just to get a more accurate representation of things.

Logically, I know the world is a really large place, but by specifically highlighting them like this, it’s even more obvious how few places I actually have been to; country count really doesn’t mean much when you barely spend a few days in a city before hopping off to somewhere else. I definitely have the work cut out for me if I want to explore more of different nooks and crannies… especially Africa and South America!