Ok, it’s meme time! This thingie popped up on two of my friend’s blog over the weekend, so by the laws of the Internet I had to feature it as well.

visited 10 states (4.44%)
Create your own visited map of The World

visited 8 states (16%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Very obvious first impression: for someone who calls himself The Gamer Traveler, I’ve been to very few places in the world. In my defense, I have used my time abroad very well, and spent good chunks of time in each of my tours: 35 days doing the Grand Tour of Europe, 2 weeks in Ireland, a week in Paris, and 2 weeks in Belgium & Netherlands. Frankly, I don’t like traveling abroad for less than 2 weeks, though as in the case of Paris, I would consider a week-long trip if it is concentrated in only one place (and boy, have I been eyeing one of those week-long escapes to explore Venice).

When it comes to the states, I fare just as bad, I’m afraid. I am guilty of, for many years, not really having considered travel inside the US interesting or appealing, which is total hogwash. The other factor is that living in Miami, at the bottom tip of Florida, it takes 6-7 hours just to get out of the state, so interstate car travel has been nonexistent (not to mention that, after having grown up in an island only 100 miles long, the idea of being able to drive far beyond that is still strange to me). In fact, all of my travel inside the US has been by plane, thus the scattered red marks on the second map. Funny thing, three of the states I have visited I’ve gone there because of gaming (Wisconsin and Indiana for Gen Con, and Nevada for GTS), so I guess there is still some merit to my moniker.

The best part of it all is that, from each of those trips, I have gathered tons of ideas for my games, the source of what I share with you here and in the podcast. Thinking back to what I have covered already, there is still tons of stuff to share, and I’m not done traveling yet either (in fact, I’ll be doing my first interstate roadtrip in July!), so there should be TGT for a while.

So how about you? Where have you been? Feel free to post your map image (or link, if the image tag doesn’t work) in the comments and tell me what you’ve drawn from one of those places as inspiration for your game.