As the issues of this newsletter stack up and the guides start covering more cities, you might eventually wonder how it all gets kept track of. How does someone remember a winery visited four years ago, a market stall recommended by a friend, a restaurant spotted in a television show at midnight? The answer, almost entirely, is Google Maps.

Let me tell you about mine.

I have thousands of pins in it. Restaurants, wineries, markets, butchers, ceramics shops, viewpoints, archaeological sites, hole-in-the-wall cocktail bars. Cities I visit regularly. Cities I've been to once. Cities I've never been to and may never get to. All around the world.

The organizing principle is simple: just in case I'm nearby, someday.

This is not trip planning. Most of those pins represent places I have no immediate intention of visiting. It's more like a running index of things that caught my attention, a record of curiosity accumulated over years, waiting for the right moment to become useful.

Here's how it works in practice.

I'm scrolling and I come across an article. "The ten best butchers in the United States," let's say. I start reading it. If a place sounds genuinely interesting, the writing is specific, the reason for the recommendation is clear, the place has a distinct identity, I open Google Maps in another tab and drop a pin while I'm still reading. I might add a private note to myself: Parker article, heritage breeds, dry-aged beef. Then I keep reading. The whole thing takes about thirty seconds per place.

The same thing happens with television. I was watching a show recently where the contestants got to shop at a specialty food market. They showed the sign for about two seconds. I rewound it, found the name, looked it up, dropped a pin. That market is now in my map. I have no plans to go to that city anytime soon. But if I'm ever there, I'll open my map, and it'll be there waiting.

This method covers everything, not just food. Sightseeing. Experiences. A shop someone mentioned in passing. A viewpoint a friend described. A neighborhood that looked interesting in a photograph. If it has a location, it can go on the map.

The thing I've learned over years of doing this is that the pins age surprisingly well. I'll be traveling somewhere and open my map and find a pin I dropped three years ago from an article I barely remember reading. I go check it out. More often than not, it's exactly as good as the original recommendation suggested. Occasionally it's closed, or it's changed in a way I don't like, or it just doesn't land the way I expected. Then I delete it. The map stays current because I keep curating it. It's not an archive. It's a living document.

When the Planning Gets Serious

For everyday use, everything goes into the default Google Maps view. One map, thousands of pins, no categories. When I'm somewhere, I just open the map, zoom to where I am, and see what's nearby that I've already flagged. It's the difference between arriving somewhere cold versus arriving with a head start built from months or years of casual research.

The one exception is purposeful planning. When I know I'm going somewhere and I want to think seriously about what to do there, I create a separate map under "My Maps" in Google. This keeps the planning view clean, no clutter from the default map, just the specific places I'm actively considering for a particular trip. When I lived in Rome and would plan day trips to Umbria for food and wine, I'd build a separate map, plot the wineries I wanted to visit, research their touring options, and then start reaching out to align schedules. By the time the day arrived, I had a real itinerary built from genuine research rather than whatever Google decided to show me.

The distinction matters. The default map is passive, growing quietly in the background as I move through the world and consume information. The custom maps are active, tools for a specific purpose, built intentionally when the moment arrives.

The recommendations in this newsletter and in the Thirsty Compass guides come from both kinds of maps. Some are places I've visited many times over many years. Some I visited once and knew immediately they were worth sharing. And some started as pins dropped while reading an article or rewinding a television show, eventually visited, verified in person, and earned their place on the list.

The map is how I remember what's worth knowing. The newsletter is how I share it.

Where are you headed next? Hit reply and let me know. There's a decent chance I have a pin for it.