UNESCO World Heritage Sites

I love lists. That doesn't mean I'm especially good at making lists, and ticking off items on them. I try, but honestly, to-do lists don't seem to be in my DNA. I am finally learning to accept that.

But lists like Top Ten Books of the year—those, I need to dash out and buy. (I don't actually do so. I have some restraint.)

Or Top Twenty-One Roads to Road-Trip On—because I do love to road-trip.

Or bucket lists: mine includes seeing all the kingfishers of the world, though I seriously doubt that will happen.

But I continue to be intrigued by the 1,121 sites listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites—places of outstanding universal value to humanity. I've visited a few of them (knownst or unbeknownst): the Urnes Stave Church ➚ and Røros Mining Town in Norway, Tongariro National Park in New Zealand, the Netherlands' Waddenzee, Masada and the Old City of Acre in Israel, Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe . . .

The United States has a few such sites as well, mostly national park–like places:

Ones that I haven't ever been to? They are now on my radar: the Everglades, Independence Hall, Mammoth Cave, Cahokia Mounds (MO), the Statue of Liberty for crying out loud, Monticello, Carlsbad Caverns, the Monumental Earthworks of Poverty Point (lower Mississippi Valley), and the San Antonio Missions. Papahānaumokuākea ⬉ —never mind: I will never get there.

That's a simple list of nine sites. I could do that. But that stinking Papahānaumokuākea sort of throws off the possibility of a perfectly checked off list. Darn it.