Need a Maldives courtesy flag?

When we were still on our Thailand-Maldives-Chagos-Mauritius plan, we stopped at the flag store and bought a few courtesy flags. They were all out of the Chagos, but we bought, among a few others, the flag for the Maldives.

When we got back to CanKata, I integrated the new flags in alphabetical order with all the others we have, and I discovered that we already had a Maldives flag. So now we have two. And we don’t need either one now that we are on the Thailand-Sumatra-Cocos Keeling-Mauritius plan.

I think I need to segregate some of our flags into a “Places we probably won’t ever sail to” flag bin.  We had once thought that we would sail through the Red Sea and Mediterranean (hard to believe it is no longer possible), and bought flags in preparation.  Once upon a time, we thought we would need flags for:

Croatia
Egypt
Eritrea
Greece
Iran
Israel
Italy
Maldives (2!)
Malta
Morocco
Oman
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Turkey
Yemen

Our bin with “flags we will need” is much smaller now. But our adventures will be just as big. And now we can add an African safari or two to our list. A pretty good trade-off, I think.