Read Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks for Free Online Page A

Let us pray.
    Even if you didn’t have ecclesiastical reasons to stay close to home, a map of Rome would have been about as useful as a map of Mars. During the Middle Ages, most people lived, worked, married, and died without ever going farther than twenty miles from their place of birth. If you were that rare ambitious soul who actually did dream of travel beyond your home county, your lifetime checklist was probably a single pilgrimage: Canterbury, say, or Santiago de Compostela, or Jerusalem.That was it. If there had been a travel best seller in the fifteenth century, it might have been called One Place to See Before You Die .
    That was pretty much the state of travel for the next five hundred years. When Lord Castlereagh founded the Travellers Club in London in 1819, its membership was limited to gentlemen so well traveled that they had to have been—can you believe it?—five hundred miles from London. Yep, five hundred miles. A single ski trip to St. Moritz, and you too could sip cognac in the oak-paneled Travellers Club library alongside the Duke of Wellington and explorers like Sir Francis Beaufort and Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle .
    A transportation revolution—mass rail transit in the nineteenth century and then air travel in the twentieth—changed all that. For the first time in human history, it’s possible to go virtually everywhere. And so people have. The north face of Mount Everest, one of the least hospitable places on the planet, was completely untouched by human hands until 1921. It’s now so overcrowded that climbing teams send up Sherpas weeks ahead of time to grab primo spots, like teenagers camping out overnight to snag concert tickets, and international cleanup efforts have been needed to remove trash from the cluttered slopes.
    The jet age has given birth to a new kind of connoisseur: the geographically inclined collector . These are not collectors of things, of baseball cards or Fiestaware or Happy Days action figures, but of places. You can’t go every place on Earth, of course, not even with twenty-first-century technology. After all, the playing field is 200 million square miles in area. So the completist traveler will specialize: visiting not every place but the highest point on every continent, or every U.S. county or state capital, or every Denny’s, or . . . the possibilities are endless.
    There are tens of thousands of these place collectors wandering the globe, but they all have something in common: they all pretend that the checklist is incidental to the journey, but they all know deep down that’s not true. The list is crucial.
    Louise McGregor is a quiet, gray-haired woman in her sixties who looks like your grandma. Unlike your grandma, she really had her heartset on a trip to Somalia. “They wouldn’t let me off the plane in Mogadishu!” she is complaining to a gaggle of women in the noisy bar of a swanky Beverly Hills prime rib restaurant. “All the Somalis got off, but when we tried, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’” Somalia has been a chaotic no-man’s-land of anarchy and bloodshed for years, but Louise seems genuinely miffed at the slight. She was able to cross off Djibouti and Yemen on her recent trip to the Horn of Africa, but not Somalia.
    “Have you ever been someplace where you felt like you were genuinely in danger?” I ask.
    “Of course! I’ve lived in New York and L.A.”
    Come on. I wouldn’t really stack smog and traffic up against suicide bombs, beheadings, and pirates.
    She shrugs. “The most fun places just aren’t safe. My friend and I look at the State Department list of dangerous places, and that’s how we choose where to go.”
    The modern-day American version of the Travellers Club is the Travelers’ Century Club, founded in 1954 in southern California by Bert Hemphill and Russ Davidson, who worked together in an elite L.A. travel agency catering to people looking for very posh trips to very unusual destinations. “Century”