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refers to the club’s exclusivity rule: you must have visited at least one hundred different countries to join. The idea was that this would be a nearly insurmountable goal, but forty-three charter members had qualified by the time the decade was out. “It turns out one hundred wasn’t all that difficult, even back then,” says Klaus Billep, club chairman for the past twenty years.
    Today the club boasts more than two thousand members, and this holiday prime rib luncheon is its biggest annual shindig. I was looking forward to hobnobbing with these modern-day explorers, spiritual descendants of Francis Beaufort and Robert FitzRoy—preferably someplace with a roaring fire and wildebeest heads on the wall. But my safari fantasy was rudely interrupted when Klaus filled me in on the club’s regular luncheons. “They used to be dinner banquets, but then some of our members heard about freeway shootings in L.A. Most of them don’t really like to drive at night.”
    So let me get this straight: these intrepid explorers have been to Kamchatka and the Galápagos, but they won’t brave the 405 afterdusk? That’s when I first realized who has the time and money to visit one hundred countries: the very rich and/or (usually “and”) the very old. Looking around the restaurant, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the “Century” part of the club’s name might refer to its members’ ages. There are plenty of the Orange County furs, pearls, and face-lifts that you’d expect. *
    And yet . . . most of these senior citizens have probably been to more cool places in the last year than I have in my whole life. Sixty-something Louise McGregor just drove across Ethiopia on a twelve-hour bus trip and apparently caused a bit of a ruckus on a Mogadishu runway. You can’t say they’re not adventurers.
    “How many countries have you been to?” she asks me, having ascertained that I’m merely a curious interloper and not a club member.
    Uh-oh. I’d been doing a mental count in the car on the way here. I feel like a reasonably well-traveled guy, having lived on three continents. And yet my total is a dispiriting twenty-four—and that’s counting a ninety-minute layover in the Taipei airport, as well as the time I stuck my foot across into the North Korean side of a conference room during a high school field trip to the DMZ.
    “Twenty-nine,” I lie, rounding up to the nearest, uh, prime.
    Louise is taken aback. “What are you doing writing a book about geography if you’ve only been to twenty-nine countries?”
    Touché. In this room, at least, I’m freakishly provincial. But I wonder if Louise isn’t onto something: could America’s infamous lack of map savvy have something to do with our reluctance to travel overseas? After all, it’s hard to care much about a place you’ve never visited and know you probably never will, and a shockingly small slice of America even has a passport. † Sarah Palin made headlines for not owning a passport as late as 2006, when she needed one to visit U.S.troops in Kuwait and Germany. When Katie Couric asked her why not, she boasted that she wasn’t one of those idle, privileged college students who got whisked off to Europe with a backpack. “ I’ve worked all my life ,” she said. “I was not a part of, I guess, that culture.” Is this what we’ve become, a country where an interest in occasional travel is a culture— and a suspiciously un-American trust-fund kind of culture at that—rather than a familiar part of middle-class life?
    At lunch I’m the youngest person at my table, by an easy forty-year margin. Eighty-seven-year-old Bill Crawford, buttering a roll to my left, just got back from Greenland. (“How was it?” “It was cold!”) He’s a dapper fellow in tweeds, a turtleneck, and a trim white beard. His interest in faraway places was born at age fifteen, when he saw Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty. “I said, ‘Someday in my life I’m going to visit Pitcairn