Some time ago Dave Orchard blogged on the countries visited Meme sweeping the world. I did write a comment for Dave to create his own visited countries map but that was a redundant sub-meme as several others provided a link to the same site.

Round about the same time there was a discussion about memes on XML-DEV including a pointer to this study: Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious. I had hoped to write something more profound here, maybe even knock-up my own meme tracer, but time ticks on and probably the best i can is to slightly mutate and propagate the Vancouver brain virus!

So here is my own count. I think i've visited 32 different countries, though mostly in Europe where 'visited' is going through passport control and being long enough to exercise the plumbing:

Following the Norm Walsh rule of having to spend one night in the country and an additional constraint of only counting countries as they existed at the time of the visit, making my official count 27 (UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, West Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, USSR, Poland, East Germany, USA, Mexico):

So it looks like i still have a little way to go to achieve 'par': one country for each year of your age. One area where i think i do better than most is with a map of countries where i've lived and worked (not just been on holiday) for more than a month (Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Sweden):

Finally, here is a rough map of the main overland trips i've undertaken:

The biggest single trip being three months round China and back on the Trans-Siberian railway. I really should aim to cross the line and visit the southern hemisphere sometime.