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Thursday, July 8, 1999
I put up my county pages today and it was fun seeing where all I've been. They're fairly accurate though I had to really think about some trips and even leave out some counties because I couldn't remember the route I took. I've been in 40 of 50 states, which is great, but only 718 counties out of 3098. Well 41 states out of 51, if you count the District of Columbia and 7 independent cities out of 43 as well as the counties. I've learned so much while doing this. Some states don't have counties, they have boroughs or census areas or parishes. Other states have cities that are independent of the counties. Virginia is the leader there with 40 independent cities. I didn't know that. There is a group of people who do count counties and some of them are at The Extra Miler Club. They have some interesting pages and I found out that there is a bit of controversy about what should be counted as counties do come and go to some extent. I first heard of counting counties on the misc.transport.road usenet group. I just thought I'd do a quick count and then started organizing them and then thought it would be neat to have maps showing them, since I like maps, and suddenly it was a long term project. It's been fun. Now I have to start filling in the blank spots. The great thing about collecting counties is that you go to the out of the way places in a state and not just the main cities. This web page stuff can be addictive, but you do learn a lot of things that you might not otherwise. I love how the internet just keeps leading you on. It reminds me of the poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost, where it says
Oh, I kept the first for another day! There have been too many times I've seen a great webpage and planned to come back, even bookmarked it, but I never did because I found other pages that I wanted to see. Every once in a while I just have to delete old bookmarks so that I don't get lost in them. The internet is like roads that wind around and wander and never really get organized. I remember driving through some of the Atlanta suburbs and getting totally lost because the roads wandered so much. My brother told me that it was because they followed the old cow paths. Many of our roads follow old game trails or native american trails. We just think that because we've covered them with asphalt and are moving four lanes of traffic on them, that they're modern. This is the wonderful thing about travel because we will never see everything. There will always be something around a bend that we haven't seen. It's also the despair of travelers because we want to see it all and know we never will.
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