Create your own travel map

This is actually kind of a cool gadget. You know those gadgets where you have to click what countries (or in the US, states) you've been in, and then it creates a world map with all those in red? Which doesnt really say much, because one visit to St Petersburg will draw the map red to Vladivostok? Well, this is not that.

TripAdvisor - Make your own travel map

What it is, is something that takes far more time to make. But it's also more fun. Specially if you're enough of a geek. In fact, I've wanted to make a map like this ever since I was a geeky kid, and now there's this gadget!

You type in the name of the cities, towns and national parks you have been to, and it gradually covers the map with pins accordingly. (If you're not exactly sure of the place name but you know how it starts, just start typing and it will show you the cities that start like that.)

If you zoom in, the available choices of towns for your current selection also appear in a menu on the right. And it's pretty effing detailed - in Holland, for example, they've got the smallest towns and the most boring suburbs. Choices get narrower the unlikelier the destination, but there were only a few places I've been that I couldn't find back, like Hrvatska Kostajnica, Croatia; Bvumba, Zimbabwe; or Bergen in the Netherlands (but they did have Bergen-on-Sea).

Anyway, if you're really just kinda at your tax and you just need to break a coupla hours and space out -- like I did -- then if you're geeky enough this is a pretty cool way to do it. You can put up as many or as few locations as you want, of course, depending on how detailed you want the map to be. You do have to register though.

Here's my map - or at least the section of it that's relevant, cause I've never been in Asia, Latin-America or Australia: