Who am I?

Thanks for stopping by! My name is Keaton and after spending about half of my childhood growing up overseas in Asia, I have cultivated a deep love for travel. After coming back to the states for college and spending a couple years developing my career and working hard to save every dollar I could, I decided to take the leap and truly start my biggest dream: To go to every country in the world before I die! However, I want to truly experience each country, immerse myself in their culture, meet the locals and learn about their way of life. I don’t want to just check a country off after a 12 hour extended layover. When I started formulating this goal and plan about 2ish years ago, I think a lot of people I told my plans to thought it was too outlandish and that I wouldn’t follow through with it, but here we are now! Apart from traveling, I really enjoy most sports (especially Formula 1), personal finance, EDM shows/festivals, and hiking. I am beyond excited to start this journey trying to accomplish this crazy goal of mine and to share my insane stories that I will encounter over my life with those of you who want to follow along, even if its only my parents.

Why have I decided to make this website/blog?

There are really a number of factors that answer help answer this question.

I have received a lot of feedback from family (mostly my mom) and close friends, who I have talked about this upcoming trip with, that they want some way to follow me and how my journey unfolds.
I want to use the blog as a bit of an accountability check for my finances on the trip to help make sure I do not end up spending over budget. Being transparent with my finances on here (and trying to stick to my ~$50/day budget) will make day to day decision making on spending easier knowing that more people than just myself will be tracking it.
Having this website will sort of act like a lifetime diary of all the experiences that I will gain. I will be able to look back many years from now and relive these memories in my head but also will be able to show my potential future family some of my memories as I get older.
Not to brag a lot, but I do think of myself as a genuinely good traveler and give pretty good travel advice. If I can help anyone out there with recommendations or inspire someone to travel more, thats a huge plus to me.
Lastly, I have always been someone who likes to rank things. The concept of figuring out the greatest place in the world has been something that has intrigued me for a while. Once I have completed my goal to visit every country in the world, I should have a comprehensive list of my own ratings/rankings for every place and truly determine where I believe is the greatest. Hence how I came up with the name, “The Country Critic!”

My country rating system:

One of my missions while visiting every country in the world is to find what I believe to be the greatest country on Earth TO ME. I Know I will get a ton of flack for what I am about to say from my fellow Americans, but it is engrained in many of us from a young age that America is by far the greatest country in the world and nothing else comes close to competing. After experiencing growing up in other countries and numerous experiences traveling elsewhere, I know that statement to be completely untrue. There might have been a time when America was the best and there are still numerous great things about the country. However, there are so many flaws and issues that seem to be even getting worse as I have gotten older. It begged the question to me to figure out my own ranking system over my travels to find the best. I have figured out a grading system with 11 different categories for each country that I will visit and come up with a comprehensive score out of 100 for each place.

Below are the categories I will be rating every country on and their points scale:

Food (10pts), Locals (10pts), Activities (10pts), Transportation (10pts), Comfort (10pts), Cost (10pts), Safety (10pts), Nightlife (10pts), Outdoors (10pts), Sports (5pts), Infrastructure/Cleanliness (5pts)