How to Track Everywhere You've Been — By Colouring It In
Candelaria ReymundoWhen you travel, some moments stay with you: an unforgettable sunrise shared with a hundred strangers, the hike where you made a friend you never saw again, the afternoon you got lost and stumbled onto a hidden courtyard nobody else seemed to know about, the bus that broke down and somehow became the best part of the whole trip. That adds up to more than a nice set of memories. Over time, it becomes part of who you are. Tracking everywhere you've been isn't really about the number of countries you have been to. It's about giving all these moments a place to live and being able to see, at a glance, just how much of the world you've already let in.
What's the Best Way to Track Everywhere You've Been?
There are more ways to do this than most people realise. Scratch maps let you reveal a country by rubbing off a foil coating. Pin boards let you mark exact cities with a physical pin. There are apps that turn your location history into a percentage of the world seen. Charm bracelets, currency collections and travel journals all do a version of the same job. Each has a genuine appeal, and each has a catch.
Scratch maps and pin boards are made to be looked at, they live on a wall. Apps are thorough but abstract; a percentage on a screen doesn't really feel like anything. Journals ask a lot of ongoing effort to keep up.
There's a far more personal way to do this: a scratch map alternative built on colouring. A colour-in travel tracker, which is a map printed onto something you use often, in this case a mug or a tote bag, lets you fill in by hand the countries you have been to, creating a colourful record of your adventures. It's also the only method on this list in which you're actually creating, rather than just marking or downloading. Colouring in a country by hand (choosing the colour, adding a small doodle for the one detail you don't want to forget), and then baking the mug for the ink to become permanent, is a creative process. Your mug ends up looking like nobody else's, because your trips and your memories are only yours.
Why Does Watching a Map Fill In Feel So Satisfying?
You don't need a psychology degree to understand why this works. It's the same feeling as ticking off a checklist, filling in a sticker book, or watching the rings close on a fitness tracker. Visible progress is motivating in a way that a mental tally never quite manages to be. Seeing the blank space shrink is, in a small way, its own reward.
A travel bucket list tracker taps directly into this. Every new country you colour in is proof, in front of you, of a life that's actually being lived the way you want it to be. It's not really about the map. It's about being able to see how much of the world you've already discovered, and how much is still waiting.
Also, a mug or a tote grows alongside you: the country you added last summer sits next to the one you added a decade before, on the same object, the whole time. That continuity is part of what makes it satisfying: you're not just adding to a collection, you're watching one single thing carry your whole travelling life at once.
Does Taking Photos Actually Help You Remember Your Travels?
Most of us spend a lot of our lives half-looking at things. Phone out, filming instead of watching, photographing instead of actually noticing the moment we're standing in, looking at the map to make sure you find that one spot to eat everyone recommended. It's not a criticism, it's just what autopilot does. And the trouble with autopilot is that your brain isn't really recording anything while you're on it: the smell of a place, the sound of a market, the way the sun feels on your skin at 6pm somewhere you'll probably never visit again. None of that gets filed away if you weren't paying attention to it in the first place.
Travel makes this worse, because we take even more photos when we're travelling (ironically because we want to remember) and then those photos land in a camera roll with four thousand others and quietly get forgotten. Here's the interesting part: there's research behind this.
A 2014 study published in Psychological Science found that people who photographed objects on a museum tour remembered fewer of them, and recalled fewer details, than people who simply looked. Psychologist Linda Henkel called it the "photo-taking-impairment effect": the idea that reaching for a camera can let your attention switch off, because some part of you assumes the photo is doing the remembering for you. The one exception: when people zoomed in to photograph one specific detail, memory for that detail held up fine, because zooming in forced them to actually look and decide what mattered.
None of this is an argument for leaving the camera at home; it's an argument for being selective. A handful of photos taken with real attention beats a few hundred taken on reflex.
It's a similar idea to why writing things down by hand improves memory and creativity: doing something active with an experience helps it stick, while passively documenting it often doesn't. If you’re into journaling, our recycled illustrated journals are built for exactly that.
But for everyone who doesn't have the time or the habit for that, colouring in a country on the map when you get home works the same way: it's a small, deliberate act, not a passive one. A small, satisfying way to mark that a trip happened. A new place explored. The kind of thing that makes you smile picking up your mug for coffee on a grim Monday back at your desk.
Why Not Just Buy a Souvenir Mug From Every Trip?
Let me tell you a story about how we actually started this business. Having visited over 60 countries, travel is definitely a big part of who we are: the curiosity and eagerness to see new places, to go somewhere far and remote, to live a little beyond what we already know. That feeling is worth holding onto, and remembering a trip properly brings it right back, every time.
That's why our souvenir of choice, wherever we went, used to be something we would keep using back home, usually a mug. An "I ❤︎ NY" mug for Saturday brunch, one from a New Orleans café we loved for afternoon tea. Picking each one up brought the place and the whole trip back with it, until we ran out of cupboard space in our flat in London.
And then the question that got this business started came up precisely during a flight: "What if we could have one mug where we record all our travel memories?" It wasn’t simple to develop, but our World Map Mug was born to bridge that gap. We now have a single mug that brings back fun memories from different adventures, helps us keep track of where we’ve been, and keeps us motivated to explore more. Needless to say, this is a far more sustainable solution than getting mass-produced mugs from each destination.
As opposed to a scratch-off poster or a pin board that has to match your home (and your taste at thirty won't be your taste at forty), a mug doesn't have that problem. It lives in the cupboard, gets used, and never needs to suit anything but your morning coffee. A colour-in tote works the same way, going with you to the shops rather than needing a spot on a wall and getting refreshed with a simple wash. Neither becomes invisible through familiarity, because you're not just looking at a map; you're using the item often. The record of where you've been travels through your actual daily life, instead of sitting still in one room of your house.
Ready to Start Colouring In Your Own Travels?
Whether you’ve been to five or to thirty countries, you already have moments like these of your own: a beautiful sunset with a view in a new city, a connection with a stranger you'll never see again, an afternoon that went sideways... Right now, most of that probably lives only in memory, or in a phone you rarely have time to scroll back through.
Colouring in your own map gives all of it a place in your daily life. That's really what this whole idea has been about from the start: not the number of countries, not the bragging rights (okay, maybe a little), just being able to see all the places that left a mark on you.
Our colour-in mugs and totes come with a pen so you can start tracking where you’ve been right away. First, you colour in the countries you have been to. Then, for the ink to become permanent, mugs need to be baked in the oven and totes need to be ironed inside out. Once this is done, the mugs are microwave and dishwasher safe and the totes are machine washable. And you can keep using them for life. ❤︎
Your travel memories will then unexpectedly make you smile as you prepare your morning brew. The coloured map on the tote will get a stranger talking at the market. And, simply, travel will stay part of you. All you need to do now is keep exploring, one country at a time.
Our World Mug was the original design, and it's since grown into a whole range: Europe, USA, US National Parks, UK Explorer, and more. Explore the full colour-in mugs range and pick your new favourite mug.