We have six months until we leave on our extended around the world trip! Planning is in full swing with getting immunizations and passports, purchasing travel gear and making arrangements for our house, bills and mail.

This Christmas our daughter had a hard time figuring out a gift to get us, as we don’t need anything and “things” are going to be left behind when we leave. Even so, she found a great gift! Just looking at it gets me excited for the places we are going to go, see and experience. It is a Scratch-off World Map! So now we can scratch off the places we have already been and anticipate the place we will scratch off when we get back.

So we have made some scratch-off map rules (well, I made the rules and Michael made a sound that I interpreted as agreement) that include only scratching off places we have both been and for large countries only scratching off the portions of countries to which we’ve been. Then we started scratching.

As we scratched off the countries where we have already traveled, we found that we have been to many places in the world. The visual also shows vast area still left to explore. Our map validates our decision to start our trip in central Mexico and travel south from there to Central and South America. And then who knows where we will go from there.

Although we won’t be taking this gift with us when we leave, it will give us the next six months to look at the map and plan, plan, plan.