States Visited vs. Counties Visited

I love maps. As a little kid, you could give me an atlas and I would entertain myself for hours. In middle school, I was the first kid from my town to qualify for the state geography bee. Yep, I’m a geography nerd!
States Visited
Now as an adult, I can go to all those places I saw in the atlas as a little kid. This year I was able to add Oregon and Hawaii to my states visited map. So, that’s now 38 states down and 12 to go!
It may look impressive until you take a closer look.
Counties Visited
I signed up for a free account at mob-rule.com where you can track counties visited (did you even know there’s a hobby called county collecting?).
You need to have a good memory of your travels plus a good USA atlas with county lines or an online map like Bing Maps which overlays county boundaries if you zoom in. Google Maps does not do this.
So my counties map looks pretty sparse. It just shows you the huge amount of land that is the U.S.A. Also, the further west you go, the larger the counties tend to get geographically, so that skews it a bit. You can tell what states I’ve lived in too (primarily Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin). So many places to see here and it looks like I just scratched the surface.
Got to keep traveling!
Image credit: Where the Hell is the 101? via Flickr.