Mail Bag

Justin wrote in with a question: “How do I start a county map like yours? I have no ArcGIS to assist me. Is there a paper version or something?”

There are two online resources for tracking the counties you’ve visited. One I discovered about five years ago, and the other just last week. But before you turn to these websites, you’ll have to know which counties you’ve visited. Here’s how I would go about doing it.

Go to Wal-Mart or Target and get the six-dollar atlas they sell in the book section. You can buy the same atlas at a bookstore for 14 dollars, or at a grocery store for nine dollars, or at Wal-Mart and Target for six. It’s up to you. Don’t get distracted by the slightly smaller atlas. It’s more expensive and targeting fools who want to pay more money for less information. The reason you want the big six-dollar one is that it shows more roads and shows the county lines. As I’m sure you can imagine, for something like this, county lines are sort of important. I also prefer the cheap atlas because you can mark all over it and, if you need to, get a new one fairly easily.

Now that you have an atlas, start thinking of drives you’ve made and mark those counties. When I first started, I just traced the outline of the counties I’d visited, but then I got my first county that I’d circled without entering, and just tracing the outline made it look like I’d been there, so now I also underline the county name if I’ve been there.

This is the hard part, for some people. It’s not enough to say, “I’ve driven to Chicago,” but you have to remember HOW you drove there. When you are dealing with childhood trips, that’s close to impossible. However, you can rest reasonably assured that your parents weren’t county-hunting nerds, so they took main highways. If your parents alive and you haven’t burned your bridges with them to the point that they have restraining orders, you can ask them about some childhood trips you dimly remember. Case in point: I remembered living in Pennsylvania and driving to Orlando, Florida, but I didn’t remember that on the way down we drove along the Outer Banks. My parents knew that part of it. Just last year in casual conversation my father mentioned that he’d been to the Florida Keys. I asked him when and he said, “On our trip to Florida.” All of the keys are in a different county, so that’s how I learned that, 27 years before, I’d been to Monroe County, Florida.

Of course, the scale of this atlas is so large that sometimes it’s difficult to determine if you’ve been to a county or not. In those cases, I use Mapquest. I prefer Mapquest because GoogleEarth doesn’t show many roads until you are zoomed in incredibly close, and GoogleMaps doesn’t have county lines shown at any scale. Mapquest has helped me figure out which Texas counties I-40 actually enters and whether I-95 in Georgia goes through Effingham County, Georgia.

Here’s what NOT to do: a guy I work with decided (as most people do who hear about this hobby of mine) to figure out the counties he’s visited. He said, “Well, I’ve lived around Kansas and Missouri most of my life, so I’ve probably been to all of those.” Then he said, “I’ve driven to Colorado a bunch,” so he marked a three-county-wide swath into Colorado. By the time he was done, he had marked over 80% of the country, then he felt pretty smug that I’d been at it for so long and was under 30% at the time. Once we made fun of him enough for his idiocy he was ashamed. The fact is, unless you get off the interstate (and before you started thinking about counties you had no reason to), your cross-country trips will result in very thin strips, not Shermanesque columns. Another guy I work with has just started and is doing it correctly and figures he’s been to fewer than 300 counties. That seems about right. When I married my wife she’d only been to about 160. That number’s a little low because she’s from California and western counties are much larger. Unless you did a LOT of driving as a kid to different places, taking different routes each time, your number will probably be 300 or fewer.

Now that you have a reasonable idea of where you’ve been, you can enter the data on a website. Here are the two I use:

Why Do You Think They Call Them Counties

When I joined you had to send an e-mail to the webmaster with your desired username and password and he would create an account for you. As a result, my username is one letter different from the one I actually wanted and, when I requested an account for my daughter, her name was misspelled. Oh well. The general function of the website is pretty easy and enjoyable, and there are a lot of other users, so you can see how you stack up against your fellow nerds. This site also has some helpful rulings for some of the most frequently-asked questions, such as, “Does I-294 enter DuPage County, Illinois?” (Determination: no.) In the past year or so they added a feature where you can color-code counties and give the colors meanings, so I could have red for counties I’ve been to alone, blue for counties I’ve been to with my wife, et cetera. (They also have links to webpages of others who track their counties. One such page has been blocked by my company’s IT guy; evidently I spent too much time there.)

Counties Visited Map

This site allows for easier account creation and their maps show a basic highway grid to make entering easier. There are fewer users, so you will have less of a chance to compare your totals to others, but it will also be easier to look like a top gun (I’m No. 23 on their site right now). They allow you to keep more than one map at a time, so you can track different things. (This might be an easy solution for those with kids or spouses you’re tracking.) I’ve noticed that this site doesn’t have Broomfield County, Colorado, and it still has Clifton Forge Independent City, Virginia, but since I haven’t been to Broomfield County yet, I haven’t bothered to send them an e-mail. (However, Broomfield is on the itinerary for this year, so they’d better fix it soon!)

So there you are. If you’ve been to Alaska, Georgia, Hawaii, Nevada, South Dakota, or Virginia, there are special considerations you might want to hear about. Otherwise, you can get started. If you want a paper map of your travels, I guess I could make one for you while I’m at work once you know which counties you’ve visited.