How to keep track of every city you've visited (without a spreadsheet)

Ask someone how many cities they've been to and watch them start counting on their fingers. The big ones come right away. Paris, the honeymoon. Chicago, the conference. Then they stall, because the rest of the list is the stuff nobody wrote down.

The wedding in a town you never would have picked on your own. The work trip where you saw the hotel and one restaurant. The cousin's graduation. The drive that stopped for the night somewhere in the middle.

Those are the cities that fall off the list, and they're usually the ones with the best stories.

Does a layover count?

This is the first argument every city list runs into, so here's a rule that holds up: a city counts if you did something there. You ate a meal, slept a night or saw a person. Changing planes doesn't count. Leaving the airport for dinner on a long layover does.

You can pick a stricter rule or a looser one. What matters is picking one and keeping it, so the number means the same thing next year that it means today.

My rule: a city only counts if I did something there. Layovers don't count, and neither does driving through.

Start with what you already have

You don't have to rebuild your travel history from memory in one sitting. Most of it is already lying around.

Your camera roll is sorted by date, and usually by place. Your calendar has the flights. Your email has the hotel confirmations. Go back one year at a time and you'll find cities you had forgotten completely.

The trick is to put each one somewhere it stays attached to the trip and the people, not in a list you'll lose the next time you change phones.

How YourPond keeps your city list for you

In YourPond you don't keep a city list at all. You log moments: a dinner, a weekend away, a wedding. Each moment has a place, and Pond Passport collects that place for you.

Log a dinner in Lisbon and you collect Lisbon, Portugal and Europe in one go. A moment in a US city collects its state too. Moments you logged before you ever opened the Passport count, so if you have been logging for a while, the book is already partly full.

Each city stamp also holds the people you were there with. Open the stamp, add who came, and the city stops being a pin on a map and goes back to being the weekend you had.

See what you're missing

The city stamps are on one page, A to Z, from the cities you'd fly to and the ones you ended up in anyway. Scroll it once and you will remember at least one trip you forgot to count!

If you're planning the next trip, the place guides put a city next to everything else there is to collect around it. New York City and Chicago have guides of their own. Japan is a good example of a country where most first trips only see a couple of the cities in the book. Texas is the opposite problem: plenty of cities, very far apart.

How to start

Open YourPond and log the last trip you took, with the city and the people who came. Then go back through last year's camera roll and log the cities you find there.

Pond Passport is free, on the web and in the YourPond app for iPhone. Your city list builds itself from there.

Browse the city stamps · Stamps by place · How Pond Passport works