John Rheinberger was 25 years old when he set his goal: to visit every country in the world.

Rheinberger, a Stillwater lawyer who is now 61, has been collecting countries ever since. His passports boast stamps from 192, including Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea.

By his count, only three remain — Libya, Cuba and Somalia — but he says they will be the hardest to check off. Still, he hopes to achieve his goal by 2017.

Rheinberger caught the travel bug early. When he was 8, he saw “Around the World in Eighty Days” and dreamed of following in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps. He vividly remembers the day he decided to start his quest. It was Aug. 9, 1974 — the day President Richard Nixon resigned.

“It was a Friday and, you know, there’s a point in life where you think about your own future and where you are in life,” he said. “It was a transformation for the country, and I thought I may as well take advantage of it for myself. I tried to look at it this way: When you are old and gray and you are looking back, you want to at least have something. For me, travel was one of them.”

To Rheinberger, who is single, travel is an investment. “My return may not be in dollars,” he said, “but it will be in experiences of life.”

He estimates that his travels will consume more than a year and a half of his life and about $200,000. He has already spent $192,000. He figures anyone starting today would need about $400,000, but the price could easily reach $1 million, given the decline in U.S. currency.

A former Stillwater City Council member, Rheinberger has bachelor’s degrees in history, political science and geography. He has master’s degrees in history and business administration, in addition to his law degree. He is retired from his job as a part-time Army Reservist in the Office of the Judge Advocate General.

He reads several newspapers each day and pores over history books about the countries he has visited. Now he’s reading “Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700-1917” by Basil Dmytryshyna.

“When you travel to these places, these things mean something,” he said. “I like to get to know the history of these places — they take on a little more light.”

FRENCH FRIES AND COKE

Accumulating all those passport stamps has not come without pain.

Planning the trips can be a nightmare: To get to Iran, for example, you have to get a visa in Pakistan. There is only one flight each week to Nauru in the South Pacific. Upon entering Chad, you must immediately register with the local police. There is a three-hour wait in the airport for a visa in Turkmenistan.

Traveling constantly for decades also takes a psychological toll.

“The opening was really good because you’re going, ‘Wow, I’m going to England, or I’m going to Australia or India or Portugal — some of the neat places everyone wants to go,’ ” he says. “And then, all of a sudden, you get into the bottom tier of it — Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. As it turned out, they were good, but you don’t know that. And then you’re going to the depths of Africa. But then, all of a sudden, it gets kind of good at the end because then you’re closing it down, and you know the nuts and bolts of it.”

He uses the “Lonely Planet” travel guides but doesn’t bring the books. Instead, he makes two copies of the relevant pages and reads them on the airplane en route. “I’m interested in historical things,” he says. “If ‘Lonely Planet’ says, ‘Here’s the biggest bell in the city,’ well, I’ll go see the biggest bell. I’ll go to universities, public buildings, the libraries.”

Rheinberger doesn’t venture out to rural areas because of safety concerns and the greater chance of exposure to disease. “You’ll see more in the small cities,” he says. “I’m interested in the infrastructure of a place. I go to a city, and I look out and I see three things or five things that are different.”

He has been sick only once while traveling — he ate lettuce on an Air France flight from Dakar to Paris and got food poisoning — and he goes to great lengths to avoid germs. He makes sure he is up to date on his shots, and he slathers on mosquito repellent to avoid dengue and malaria.

He sticks to standard American food and eats at his hotel or at McDonald’s: “I like hamburgers. I like bacon and eggs. Nothing cute. If they didn’t eat it in the ’50s, I’m not eating it,” he said.

He also likes to think that he helped introduce french fries to North Korea. “I was in North Korea, and they said, ‘Well, here’s what we have for breakfast,’ and I’m going, ‘Oh, no, no, I don’t eat like that.’ … I said, ‘Well, look, here’s what I’d better have.’ I told them to take a potato and cut it like this — chop, chop — and cook it.”

He drinks bottled water and Coca-Cola and, in Asia, rice beer. “You know it’s safe because it’s pasteurized,” he says.

A FLIGHT OUT ON TUESDAY MORNINGS

International travel is not for the faint of heart. Thieves stole Rheinberger’s passport in Senegal, and he had to pay them $5 to get it back. Two Russian airplanes he flew on in Africa later crashed, he says. “There are casualties to this. You’ve got to be real careful.”

Rheinberger believes there are 195 sovereign nations in the world — the 192 members of the United Nations, plus Kosovo, Taiwan and Vatican City.

After he visits all the world’s countries, Rheinberger says, he is thinking of tackling the world’s great rivers. “There’s the Ganges, the Nile, the Amazon, the Congo — which is iffy, but possible — the Mekong, the Yangtze …,” he says.

But first he’s got to check off his final three.

“I’m working on Libya now,” he said. “I think they will fall like this: I think Libya will be next, then I think Cuba may go, and then Somalia — probably in that order.”

He’s left messages for a Libyan tourism agency and has researched flights to Somalia. “There are tricks to it, you know,” he said. “To get to Somalia, you go to Kenya, and there’s a flight out on Tuesday mornings about 8:30. You’ve got to get to Kenya, and then you take your chances.

“Now it’s becoming more of a problem. Before I could say, ‘Well, look, I’ve got 25 left, let’s not worry about it.’ Now I have to worry about it.”

Mary Divine can be reached at 651-228-5443.

HOW HE DOES IT

When John Rheinberger travels, he:

Uses a taxi, sees the capital city and stays at a nice hotel.

Rarely stays in a country for more than three days.

Never checks his bag and doesn’t carry a cell phone or a laptop computer.

Wears black loafers and brings no other shoes.

Brings three credit cards and up to $2,000 in cash — enough to buy an emergency airplane ticket home.

Takes 27 photos in each country using a disposable camera.

Keeps little bags of coins from each country as mementoes. “They have lasting quality — they have uniqueness,” he says. “People kind of understand them.”

