How many countries have you visited? 20? 30? 50? 100?

In the travel world, the number of countries you have visited is often treated almost like a score. The higher the number, the more experienced the traveller.

We see it a little differently.

Of course, we also know how many countries we have visited. It is nice to see how far we have already made it, and we enjoy adding every new country to the map.

But we do not want to travel just to increase that number as quickly as possible.

What matters much more to us is whether we have actually experienced the country properly.

And if we really like somewhere, we have absolutely no problem going back.

A second time.

A third time.

Or even more.

So before we ever reach 100 visited countries, it will probably take us quite a long time.

And we are completely fine with that.

Can you visit 10 countries a year with 20 days of annual leave?

Technically?

Of course.

Even many more.

If you count every short visit to a new country, make good use of weekends and public holidays, and choose destinations based on cheap flights, you can add a surprisingly large number of countries to your map in a single year.

You can fly out on Friday evening. Walk around the city centre on Saturday. Take a few photos on Sunday. Fly home that evening.

And another country is “done.”

But that is not really how we want to travel.

A country is not something we need to tick off a list

When we travel somewhere, we usually do not want to see only the capital city and one famous landmark.

We want to get out of the city.

Drive across the country.

See towns and villages. Go into the mountains. Taste the local food. Learn something about the history. Stop somewhere that was not even originally part of our itinerary.

And sometimes just sit somewhere with a coffee and watch ordinary life happening around us.

All of that takes time.

So for us, the question is not:

“How many countries can we manage this year?”

It is more:

“How many interesting trips can we fit into one year?”

And those are two very different things.

So how many countries can you realistically manage?

A lot depends on your travel style.

If you have 20 days of annual leave, you could theoretically do something like:

• two nine-day trips using five days of leave each,
• several long weekends,
• another shorter trip around a public holiday.

And on top of that, regular weekend trips without using any leave at all.

So purely mathematically, it is not difficult to visit 5, 8 or even more new countries in a year.

With 25 or 30 days of annual leave, of course, even more.

But the number itself says absolutely nothing about how well you actually explored those countries.

20 days of annual leave does not have to mean only 20 days of travelling

As we already mentioned in our article about planning annual leave, combining weekends and public holidays properly can turn a limited number of leave days into much longer trips.

For example:

5 days of annual leave = 9 days of travelling

if you connect two weekends.

With a public holiday, the ratio can be even better.

So with 20 days of annual leave, you could theoretically create four nine-day travel blocks.

That gives you:

36 days on the road.

And we still have not counted ordinary weekend trips that require no annual leave at all.

So yes.

Even someone with a fairly normal amount of time off can travel several times a year.

But we would not automatically use four nine-day blocks for four new countries

And this is where the main difference comes in.

We could say:

January – country number 1
April – country number 2
June – country number 3
September – country number 4
December – another long weekend, country number 5

And the number would grow nicely.

But if we know that a particular country deserves two weeks, we would rather wait.

Albania is a typical example for us

We could easily fly to Albania for four days.

Tirana.

A trip somewhere nearby.

Maybe the coast.

A photo.

And then we could say:

Albania – visited.

But why?

We already know that when we go to Albania, we want to explore it properly.

We want mountains. Cities. Nature. The coast.

The roads between different regions.

And if we are already in the Balkans, we would also like to combine the trip with Montenegro, for example.

So instead of four days, we would rather spend around two weeks there.

The result?

Maybe only two new countries will be added to our statistics.

But what we bring home from the trip will be completely different.

Sometimes we would rather return to the same country

This is probably the biggest reason why chasing a record number of countries does not make much sense to us.

Some countries simply cannot be properly experienced in a single trip.

Take the United States.

Visiting New York for five days and saying:

“We’ve done the USA.”

would feel a little absurd to us.

Florida is completely different.

The American West is completely different.

New England is different again.

Alaska is almost another world.

And Hawaii is the same.

That is exactly why we want to return to certain countries.

If we like a country enough to visit it three times, for us that does not mean:

“What a shame, we could have visited three new countries instead.”

Quite the opposite.

It means we found a place that deserves to be explored more deeply.

Some countries are perfect for four days. Others are not enough even for a month

It does not make sense to use the same rule for every destination.

For example, a small European country can often be explored quite well in just a few days.

For a city break:

3–4 days.

For a smaller country:

5–8 days.

For a proper road trip:

10–14 days.

And for large countries?

Even two weeks may barely scratch the surface.

The USA, Canada, Japan, China, Australia, India…

You could plan several separate trips to each of them and still have plenty left to discover.

That is why we try to adapt the length of the trip to the destination, rather than forcing the destination into whatever free gap happens to be available in the calendar.

And we count the Czech Republic too

One thing is often forgotten when people talk about travelling.

You do not have to cross a border to travel.

A weekend in the Ore Mountains is not less valuable to us just because we never left the Czech Republic.

The same goes for the Krkonoše Mountains, Šumava, South Bohemia or some forgotten place connected with history.

Trips around the Czech Republic have one huge advantage:

we often do not need to use any annual leave at all.

We leave on Friday after work.

We come back on Sunday.

And those five days of annual leave can be saved for a trip where we really need them.

We do not want to say there is anything wrong with counting the countries you have visited.

Of course we count ours too.

We have a map.

We enjoy seeing how much of the world we have already experienced.

And every time a new country is added, we are happy.

We just do not want to make it the main goal of travelling.

Because someone who has visited 70 countries is not automatically a “bigger traveller” than someone who has visited 25 and returned to many of them several times.

They are simply two different ways of travelling.

Of course, one day we would love to see a huge part of the world.

Maybe we will reach 50 countries one day.

There are people in the world who have never even left their village, let alone their country.

So we are grateful that we have the opportunity to travel, because not everyone is that lucky :).

For us, the better question is: how much have you experienced?

Because “how many countries have you visited?” does not actually tell you very much.

Someone can drive through ten countries during one European road trip.

Someone else can spend three weeks only in Japan.

Someone may return to Italy every year and discover a completely different region each time.

Travel is a joy, not a competition.

Our goal is to look back at every place we have visited and be able to say:

“Yes. We really remember this place.”

And that is exactly how we want to travel with WandersKaty.