Travel is about going places from which you never entirely come back.
– Pico Iyer
In December I sat down to update the list of countries I’ve been to, adding Tunisia and the four Balkan countries Robie and I visited last year.
The list includes my first border crossing into Canada at the age of three, twelve countries I traversed during a summer backpacking trip across Europe and the time I bisected the Continent from Portugal to Finland during a college semester abroad. After graduating, I sought out businesses that would pay me to travel and went to places like Barbados, Venezuela, Curaçao, Iceland, Dubai, the Maldives and more trips to Mexico than I can count – all on someone else’s dime.
I’ve blanketed Europe by rail, crisscrossed borders on an African safari and spent two years sailing around Caribbean island nations. Along the way, I’ve touched six continents, dipped my toes in three oceans and visited nations that no longer exist, all with the dream of one day joining the Travelers Century Club.
The prestigious, non-profit, social organization founded in 1954 boasts more than 1,500 members worldwide with membership open to anyone who’s traveled to a minimum of 100 countries. With this single criterion, The Travelers Century Club (TCC) boasts some of the world’s most seasoned travelers.
By the club’s broad definition, a visit to a country includes anything like fuel stops, through-transits and port-of-call stopovers as long as a traveler took the time to step foot on land. By contrast, I once talked my way back through Security and Immigration after getting off a plane and walking outside to glimpse Copenhagen in the distance during a long layover. But I still didn’t count that as a visit to Denmark.
To me, traveling is more than pulling up to a dock or landing in an airfield. At the very least, it’s mixing with locals at a train station, figuring out how to order a coffee in a language I don’t understand, and often mistakenly ordering more pastries than I need since the index finger I used to indicate ‘one’ might mean ‘two’ in foreign countries (with the thumb signaling one for anyone curious to know).
After adding five new destinations to my list of countries for 2025 and tallying the results, I can claim to have visited 83 nations across the globe. Yet according to the Travelers Century Club, I’d reached the cusp of membership with 99 countries under my belt.
So, why the discrepancy?
The difference comes from how the TCC defines a country. While we both describe a nation as a place that has its own sovereign government, the club makes additions for “distinct territories and colonies, protectorates and island groups that aren’t independent nations.”
For example, while Abu Dhabi and Dubai are both cities in the UAE, to the Travelers Century Club they each constitute a separate ‘country’. TTC also includes places that are geographically separate from their parent country so places like Spain’s Balearic Islands, European Turkey, even Alaska all get their own designations. This means that while I follow the United Nations list of 195 countries, the TCC’s addition of islands, enclaves and geographically removed territories adds 135 nations to bring their total to 330 countries that currently make up our planet.
I have only one rule for a place to be added to my list – that the land be an independent nation at the time I visit. It means that since Yugoslavia was a country when I went to the Balkans in 1988, it’s on my list. But just because the nation later split into seven independent countries doesn’t let me now claim to have been to Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina – because that would be double dipping. It also means Scotland doesn’t count until it secedes from the United Kingdom. (Sorry, Robie.)
Even if I used the TCC’s expansive list of what constitutes a country, I can’t become a member of the esteemed club until I apply. That includes completing a form and paying the initiation fee of $100 plus the first year of dues ($75 for US citizens and $85 for residents of other countries). As I perused the form, I also realized I would also need to argue that two of their retired countries (East Berlin and East Germany) aren’t on the list and ask why Yugoslavia isn’t included as a former country. Yet the part that really tripped me up was what to put for a home address.
The club insists I provide my home address so they can calculate dues, issue a membership card and mail me a quarterly copy of their newsletter, The Centurian. As a permanent nomad without an address, I would have expected an organization of “highly traveled individuals from across the globe” to understand my lifestyle choice, but they don’t. So when Robie and I landed in Sicily in February to begin our three-month stay on the island, I quietly celebrated reaching the Travelers Century Club coveted 100 countries. Still, the milestone felt anticlimactic. Despite it being my first trip to Sicily, I long ago lost track of how many times I’ve been to Italy.
Then we traveled to Malta, and I notched No. 84 to my country list. Only 16 to go before I truly become part of the century club – membership or not!
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