For Christmas I was lucky enough to get a Scratch Map from my Fiancée. A scratch map is just like a scratch card, but with countries instead of prizes.

You get a world map (Mercator, meh) and scratch off the countries you have visited. The background colour changes and you can see where you have been. Simply awesome!

Let’s get going, but what to scratch? Can Alaska be scratched when you’ve been to the US? Should all of Canada be scratched or just the bottom half? First world problems are to easy to handle …

After some time we found out that it’s beneficial to acquire a scratch map before you’ve visited too much of the world, otherwise this will take some time. “Luckily” neither of us have visited Russia, China or Australia (yet); that saved us plenty of time, but it does not look as good as it could …

At last we completed the scratching. The wanderlust has always been there, but seing the holes in Western Europe did not exactly make the need to travel less imminent. Now we just have to travel more and keep on scratching.