About Get Busy Exploring
Hi, I'm Kristian Ranstrom. I built this site because I kept losing track of where I'd been. Not the big trips — those you remember — but the state you drove through on the way to somewhere else, the national park you hit on a day off from a work conference, the fifth Munro of a wet week in Scotland. I had lists in notes apps, pins in three different map tools, and a scratch-off map on the wall that was always a year behind. I wanted one place that held all of it and showed me, at a glance, what was left.
How I like to travel
Given a free day anywhere, I'll look for the nearest trail. The trips I remember best are the active ones: a long day to a summit, a multi-day hike where the pack gets lighter and the views get bigger, a scramble that turns out to be a little more than I bargained for. Mountains are a weakness. I've spent a lot of weekends chasing lists — fourteeners, highpoints, the kind of checklist where every name is an excuse to go somewhere you'd never otherwise pick — and a fair number of those lists are now maps on this site for exactly that reason.
But I'm not a purist about it. I love cities just as much: getting lost in a neighborhood on foot, finding the place the locals actually eat, working out how a city got to be the shape it is. Food is half the point of going anywhere. So is history — I'm the person who reads every plaque, and a city's old town or a region's museum is as much a draw for me as its ridgeline. The best trips have both: a hard day in the hills and a good dinner at the end of it, somewhere I couldn't have had the week before.
What this site is
Get Busy Exploring is a free set of interactive travel maps. Click a country, a state, a park, or a peak to mark it visited; click again for want-to-go. Your progress saves automatically under an anonymous restore code — no account, no app, nothing to install — and you can share a read-only version of any map with a link.
It started with the world map and the US states, and it's grown into the lists I care about and a lot that friends asked for: UNESCO World Heritage Sites, national parks, state highpoints, the Munros and Wainwrights, every ballpark and football ground, the airports you've flown through, and more. The All Maps page has the full set. The blog is where I write up the trips themselves — itineraries, routes, and the occasional opinion about which list is worth your time.