40 Before 40…Another Update

I’ve written about my plan to do 40 before 40 a couple of times before, after deciding in 2016 than I wanted to have been to at least 40 different countries by the time I turn 40 in December 2026. At that point I had 10 years to get there and it felt like forever, and at the time of writing that post in December 2017, just after turning 31, I’d been to 12 countries, leaving me to do 28 in 9 years, an average of 3.1 new countries per year. Easy, right? Well, in January 2020 I wrote a 40 before 40 update post talking about how I’d at that point visited 16 countries, which was already slower than I should have been. I’d lost a year to a really awful relationship, where he had so generously said he didn’t mind if I went abroad, but then made sure most of my money went on paying to keep him in food and homeless hostels as he was spending his full time wage on junk, and that really held me back in achieving my goal. In that post I talked about how in 2020 I was going to visit Bucharest, Belgrade, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest, and I was so excited. Covid 19 had other ideas.

I did, finally, get away, in October 2021 I travelled to Prague and Vienna and I wrote a post about travelling during the pandemic to commemorate the weird times we found ourselves in. By the end of 2021 I’d visited a grand total of 18 countries, leaving me with 5 years to visit the remaining 22 if I wanted to hit my goal. This is getting a bit difficult now, I need to do 4.4 countries per year which, whilst doable, feels a bit trickier than 3.

2022 has been a better year in terms of travel and I’ve really pushed forward with my exploring. In May I set off on my biggest ever trip, 8 cities in 8 countries over 12 days. It turns out that this was too much for me, what with travelling with Fibromyalgia, and I ended up cutting short my trip due to my health. I’d still been able to see 4 new countries though (Riga in Latvia, Vilnius in Lithuania, Tallinn in Estonia and Helsinki in Finland) before flying to Budapest and getting a bus to Bratislava for my flight home. TECHNICALLY that’s 6 new countries but as I was only in Budapest for about 3 hours and I basically slept in Bratislava then got on a plane, I’m not counting those two as part of that trip. I did manage to do both Bratislava and Budapest in September though, so I’m on 24 countries now. I visited Paris with Fiona in November but as I’d already done France it wasn’t a new country, and I still have 16 countries needed over 3 years which is going to be a stretch. I’m thinking of things like one day in Luxembourg which will tick off another one quite quickly and I’m aiming for some more obscure countries so that I can cut down on the time it takes to travel between them, now I’ve done much of the easier parts of Europe. Watch this space-the challenge is feeling more challenging, but I’m still hopeful I can manage it.

Where should I visit in 2023?