The countries we've visited (and why I hate country counting)

We count countries. The number is mostly meaningless, but we keep the lists anyway, mostly to track where the girls have been and to have something to argue about on long flights.

Why we keep the count anyway

The girls technically started their list in 2021, when we took a two-week test run through Italy, Spain, and France to see if full-time family travel was something we could actually survive. It was. So in 2022 we sold the house and started checking boxes in earnest. That's where most of their 32 countries came from -- the big loop through Europe off the Queen Mary 2, then Bangkok, then the slow drift through Southeast Asia that eventually became our life.

Harper in particular is close to overtaking Lindsay, which says a lot about what it means to have lived more of your life abroad than at home. We wrote about that milestone separately when she hit it, and it still catches us off guard sometimes when we think about it.

The honest reason we keep the number at all is that the girls like it. They know which flags are theirs, they can pull up the list from memory, and they care about it the way kids care about things that feel like a score. We're not going to take that away from them just because we've decided as adults that the metric is philosophically compromised.

Why country counting doesn't really work

Apply any real scrutiny and the whole framework starts to collapse. Does standing at the DMZ count as visiting North Korea? We visited the DMZ from the South Korean side, which means we were standing a few meters from North Korea, staring across a line, and the answer to "did you visit North Korea" is entirely dependent on who you ask and what they consider sufficient. The DMZ tour operators would say yes. North Korea's government would have no opinion, because you didn't exist to them.

Taiwan is its own mess. We've been. We loved it. Whether it counts as a separate country from China is a question with a genuinely contested answer and real geopolitical consequences, and we're not going to resolve it here. We count it separately. Others don't. The number is only meaningful if everyone agrees on the rules, and nobody does.

Sint Maarten is a personal favorite of mine for illustrating the absurdity. You land on the Dutch side. Did you just visit the Netherlands? You walk across to Saint Martin. Did you just claim France? Neither side looks or feels like the country that notionally governs it, but you're adding two passport stamps for crossing what is essentially a neighborhood street. Meanwhile, we spent four months in Thailand and only added one. The ratio of depth to credit is completely inverted.

There's also the retroactive problem. Adam visited Sudan in 2005. South Sudan became an independent nation in 2011. Does that mean he gets to add a country without going anywhere? The TCC (Travelers' Century Club) and other counting communities have their own answers to this, and they all disagree with each other. Visited the Golan Heights while in Israel? Depending on your framework, you may have visited Syria. Visited Crimea? Ukraine or Russia, depending on which year you're counting.

The number we actually care about

The more useful metric for us is time. Days in a place, not borders crossed. We've spent 325 days in Japan across 13 trips. We've done 327 days in Thailand. Vietnam is at 227 days and still climbing, mostly in Da Nang. Those numbers mean something. They mean we know where to get good coffee at 7am in Osaka, and which convenience store in Da Nang has the best sticky rice, and that the second week of November in Chiang Mai is when the lantern festival happens and everything books up three months in advance.

A border crossing doesn't tell you any of that. The 36-country number doesn't tell you that we've been to Japan more than a dozen times and still don't feel like we've finished with it. It doesn't tell you that we've watched Harper grow from a kid who cried at every overnight flight to one who confidently navigates airport lounges and knows to ask for a window seat. It doesn't tell you that the first time we arrived in Bangkok in 2022 we had no plan and ended up staying four weeks because we found a neighborhood we liked.

Adam's list

Lindsay's list

Lindsay's 33 tracks closely with the family route from 2021 onwards. The gaps versus Adam are the pre-family trips he took solo — Bahamas, Canada, Netherlands — which haven't made the joint itinerary yet.

The girls' list

Lily, Cora, and Harper started in 2021 with Italy, Spain, and France, then picked up the pace from 2022 onwards. Their list sits three short of ours because the Bahamas, Canada, and Netherlands were Adam's pre-kids trips. Those gaps will close.

What we'd count instead

If we were designing this from scratch, we'd track nights over borders. A country you slept in at least three times is a different thing from a country you drove through to catch a ferry. We'd also track languages attempted, which says something real about engagement. And we'd definitely count the number of times we ate somewhere with no English menu, which is a reasonable proxy for actually being somewhere rather than being a tourist in it.

But the girls would argue with all of that, because they want the flags, and the flags are at least something concrete you can update and fight about. So the list stays. We just don't pretend it means more than it does.