Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Thejetagehasgivenbirthtoanewkindofconnoisseur:thegeographicallyinclined
col-
lector
. These are not collectors of things, of baseball cards or Fiestaware or
Happy Days
action figures, but of places. You can't go every place on Earth, of course, not even with
twenty-first-century technology. After all, the playing field is 200 million square miles in
area.Sothecompletisttravelerwillspecialize:visitingnoteveryplacebutthehighestpoint
on every continent, or every U.S. county or state capital, or every Denny's, or . . . the pos-
sibilities are endless.
There are tens of thousands of these place collectors wandering the globe, but they all
have something in common: they all pretend that the checklist is incidental to the journey,
but they all know deep down that's not true. The list is crucial.
Louise McGregor is a quiet, gray-haired woman in her sixties who looks like your
grandma. Unlike your grandma, she
really
had her heart set on a trip to Somalia. “They
wouldn't let me off the plane in Mogadishu!” she is complaining to a gaggle of women in
the noisy bar of a swanky Beverly Hills prime rib restaurant. “All the Somalis got off, but
whenwetried,'Wheredoyouthink
you're
going?'”Somaliahasbeenachaoticno-man's-
land of anarchy and bloodshed for years, but Louise seems genuinely miffed at the slight.
She was able to cross off Djibouti and Yemen on her recent trip to the Horn of Africa, but
not Somalia.
“Have you ever been someplace where you felt like you were genuinely in danger?” I
ask.
“Of course! I've lived in New York and L.A.”
Comeon.Iwouldn'treallystacksmogandtrafficupagainstsuicidebombs,beheadings,
and pirates.
She shrugs. “The most fun places just aren't safe. My friend and I look at the State De-
partment list of dangerous places, and that's how we choose where to go.”
Themodern-dayAmericanversionoftheTravellersClubistheTravelers'CenturyClub,
founded in 1954 in southern California by Bert Hemphill and Russ Davidson, who worked
togetherinaneliteL.A.travelagencycateringtopeoplelookingforveryposhtripstovery
unusual destinations. “Century” refers to the club's exclusivity rule: you must have visited
at least one hundred different countries to join. The idea was that this would be a nearly
insurmountable goal, but forty-three charter members had qualified by the time the decade
wasout.“Itturnsoutonehundredwasn'tallthatdifficult,evenbackthen,”saysKlausBil-
lep, club chairman for the past twenty years.
Today the club boasts more than two thousand members, and this holiday prime rib
luncheon is its biggest annual shindig. I was looking forward to hobnobbing with these
modern-day explorers, spiritual descendants of Francis Beaufort and Robert
FitzRoy—preferably someplace with a roaring fire and wildebeest heads on the wall. But
my safari fantasy was rudely interrupted when Klaus filled me in on the club's regular
