I’m interested in Wonders (great attractions of the world). It’s complicated. What’s a Wonder? One man’s Wonder is another man’s “Who Cares?” or at least so it seems. What trips-my-trigger may not trip yours. So, I’d like to put together a Wonders Database of my own. It has to include the Hillman Wonders and the UNESCO World Heritage List. Then I can start by adding some of the sights that are not in the first two lists but are in the following books: Lonely Planet’s Ultimate Travel: Our List of the 500 Best Places to See, Destinations of a Lifetime: 225 of the World’s Most Amazing Places, The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World, The World’s Great Wonders: How They Were Made & Why They Are Amazing, Great Journeys: Travel the World’s Most Spectacular Routes, Drives of a Lifetime: 500 of the World’s Most Spectacular Trips, Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World’s Greatest Trips, Food Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 Extraordinary Places to Eat Around the Globe, and 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. I think you’re getting the picture by now of what I think a Wonder is.

So how does longitude and latitude fit in? Well, I’ve been some places and one of my biggest issues is what to see in the limited amount of time that I have. Sometimes, it’s just not enough to know what country a Wonder is in. Sometimes it’s really good to know what the longitude and latitude of a Wonder is so that I can pull it from a database for proximity reasons.

So, now I have a database created and I’ve started populating it. Now how do I pull stuff from it that is closest to my current position or a position that I think I will be at in the future? That’s really the key – help me plan my trips more efficiently. I have the MySQL files and I figured out a little query  - select wikiwndr, lat, lon, abs(40.7128 – lat) minlat, abs(-74.0059 – lon) minlon from wonders where lat > 0 and lon < 0 order by abs(40.7128 – lat) + abs(-74.7128 – lon) asc – that does what I need. Note that the coordinate above is for New York City and it seems to work really well. This post is really about me being able to start a reference library of books that deal with Wonders along with my initial research into pulling Wonders from my database by distance from a point.