Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“I remember visiting my mother. My parents were separated, and my mother lived on a
farm way out in remote West Virginia. And I would sit in our Land Rover in the driver's
seat.I'dlaytheroadatlasdownbesidemeinthepassengerseatandlookdownandpretend
thatIwasdriving.Whentheroadonthemapturnedtotheright,I'dturnthesteeringwheel
to the right. And I pretended that I was driving to the Pacific Ocean.”
It's no accident that, in his garden-gnome travel photos, he's always swarmed by grin-
ning locals. Charles is scrupulously social when he travels. People are as important to him
as places are. More important, maybe. “I like understanding where people are from, how
they think, and seeing how that relates to geography too. There's a real power in meeting
someone and knowing something about them, just because of where they're from.” I tell
him I've noticed that my trivia background can do the same thing, but he disagrees—his
brand of travel gets you something more. “It's a real bond. The first step is knowing the
trivia, just knowing the name of the place, but the second is having an emotion tied to it.
Triviaissecondhandatbest,butonceyou'vebeenthere,youcanfeeltheirsituation,you're
able to relate.”
But as with Alan Hogenauer, the checklist, the system, is a big part of his travel com-
pulsion as well. One of the first concepts I ever studied in my computer science classes
was the TSP, or traveling salesman problem, in which programmers try to find the shortest
route a traveler can take to visit every city in a given list. This seemingly simple problem
is actually an incredibly rich and complex one, and even fast modern computers can take
years to solve it exhaustively when a few hundred cities are added to the list. The travel-
ing salesman problem is a theoretical exercise, but Charles Veley has spent the last decade
working on solving it in real life.
“I love it. I'm a computer guy, and when you have an algorithm you're working on,
you find that the more you work it, the more it improves. So I was working constantly on
around-the-world tickets. You want to be efficient. Let me make sure I'm not going to be
stuck in a place I don't want to be for seven days. If I just research a little more, maybe I
can find a way to make this trip more efficient and more enjoyable.”
I nod eagerly—I'm an efficiency nerd myself. My wife's idea of a successful date is one
where she likes the movie or the play or the restaurant, but I'm content if I can just find a
great parking space, ideally the
optimal
parking space. What a rush.
“But does that kind of rigid efficiency take away from the spontaneous fun of travel?” I
ask. “The freedom of the open road, all that?”
“Well, that's the challenge,” says Charles. “To do both. My philosophy is always to plan
every minute accounted for—but be prepared to throw the plan out the window.” In 2005,
Veley mounted an expedition to Rockall, a ninety-foot-wide skerry in the North Atlantic.
It's so hard to get to that the number of recorded visitors at the time—twelve—was the
same as the number of men who have landed on the moon. Charles's attempt failed due to
high swells, and his crew had to settle for reaching over the side of the boat and literally
