At first glance, there's nothing remarkable about the place--just another fast-food restaurant in a bland American suburb. But Holden quickly points out its idiosyncrasies: The laminated-plastic tabletops are adorned with the University of Maryland shield, and the words ``Maryland Terrpins'' are emblazoned on the ceiling. ``These kinds of things make collecting exciting,'' Holden says as he orders a lunch of two Quarter Pounders with cheese--no onions--and a large Coke.

Collecting seems an odd way to characterise Holden's quixotic pursuit, but that's what he calls his quest to eat at as many different McDonald's restaurants as possible. ``I'm not an oddball or weirdo,'' he declares, munching on his first Quarter Pounder. ``I'm a collector of the McDonald's dining experience.''

This store--opened two months earlierand brought to his attention by a radio ad--makes it 10,893 since he began counting, all of them in the US, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. That is roughly 80 per cent of the company's 13,800 North American restaurants, though he says the percentage is actually higher because he ate at 1,000 or so before he started recording his visits.

Curiously, Holden has never visited any of McDonald's 11,200 locations outside North America. He says he prefers to travel by car instead of airplane and doesn't have the time and money to go overseas, though he did spend a vacation in the Caribbean, island-hopping from one McDonald's to another.

Along the way, Holden has taken notes on decor, location and unique store features. He keeps a list of unusual menu items, such as pizza, McDonuts, McHoagies, McTurtle Sundaes, Mega Mac Half Pounders, chicken teriyaki, jalapeno relish and sweet-potato pie. As for themes, he is partial to the handful of McDonald's that specialise in rock 'n' roll memorabilia. But he speaks fondlyof a riverboat McDonald's in St. Louis, a New York Yankees McDonald's in the Bronx and one store in New Hampshire where the owner displayed his collection of match-books in glass cases.

What Holden hasn't collected, surprisingly, is a spare tire. A 53-year-old manager of logistics at Imaging Acceptance Corp., a Maryland data-imaging company, he is a trim 193 centimeters tall, weighs 88 kilograms and looks a decade younger than he is.

Holden's affinity for McDonald's began in the 1960s when he was a student at American University in Washington. The cafeteria was closed on Sunday nights, so he got his dinner at a nearby McDonald's, and eventually took orders from dozens of dorm mates. ``It was a recognisable name from my childhood,'' he says, noting that he grew up eight miles from founder Ray Kroc's original franchisee in Des Plaines, Illinois. ``I remembered it being clean, fast and frugal.'' He still recalls the 15-cent hamburger.

Exhausted capitals, parks

By the early 1970s, Holden, ahabitual sightseer, had visited every US state capital and national park. ``I wondered what else there was to do,'' he says. ``I guess that's when I started consciously collecting McDonald's.

Back then, there were only a couple of thousand McDonald's, and before long he had eaten at most of them. He says it was an excuse to visit places he would otherwise never have seen, like Cleveland or Newark, New Jersey.

Holden's method was at first haphazard. But in the mid-'70s, he began requesting copies of the company's annual report, which contained a nationwide directory of stores. ``With the advent of things like that, it became traceable -- a known universe,'' Holden says. Trouble was, the universe was rapidly expanding. During the late '70s and early '80s, McDonald's built an average of 360 restaurants a year in the US alone.

Holden was left racing to catch up. But that just made collecting all the more challenging. ``Today I finished every known store in Maryland,'' he says, biting into his second burgerat the McDonald's in College Park. ``But next week they could build a new one in Baltimore.''

He cultivates sources within the McDonald's hierarchy. Bonnie Lamoree, development coordinator in McDonald's Washington office, sends him updated lists of stores in her area and sometimes gets them back copy-edited by Holden.

In pursuit of his goal, he has embarked on some epic binges, including a one- day trip around suburban Detroit in which he stopped at 45 McDonald's. By the end of the day, he was buying cookies and apple pies to eat later. (He doesn't count a visit unless he buys something to eat.) He plans to beat his personal record with a similar scramble around south Florida soon.

Some people who know about Holden's hobby are a bit mystified by it. Kathleen Vacanti, who was his girlfriend for several years, says she couldn't understand why he stopped so often for snacks on their vacations -- always at McDonald's.

``After about a year, I finally confronted him,'' she says. "Why not Burger King? Iwasn't hungry or thirsty, so I'd sit in the car. I'd see him inside taking notes. It all seemed very suspicious.''

Eventually, Holden and Vacanti worked out a compromise. They bought her lunch at Taco Bell, then took it to McDonald's and ate there together. ``I can't stand McDonald's,'' she says. ``I'm a vegetarian.'' She says McDonald's played no role in their eventual breakup. ``I'm a psychotherapist, and I could never figure him out,'' says Vacanti, who remains a close friend.

His boss, John Rome, also says he had to make some accommodations for Holden's desire to visit McDonald's while travelling on business. His job lets him do a lot of travelling. ``If you can handle his mysterious routes from point A to point B, he's the best employee you could have,'' Rome says. Unmarried, Holden devotes his vacations and many weekends to his pursuits.

Hair cut

One of his biggest thrills was getting a trim at McClip -- the hair salon in the company's headquarters complex in Oak Brook, Illinois. ``He wasvery taken with the fact that he was getting his hair cut in the same chair as Fred Turner,'' McDonald's former Chairman, says McClip owner and stylist Sethea Schwarz. In fact, he was so enthralled, he made the 1,160-kilometer trip from his home in Virginia to Illinois once every six or eight weeks for nearly two years to get a $12 haircut.

At times he speaks of his quest as a kind of game in which he ``captures'' certain McDonald's, as if he were playing a board game.

Other times he waxes philosophical: ``So many issues from the last half of this century can be understood, at least partially, from a seat inside a McDonald's,'' he says, including environmentalism (which precipitated scaled-back packaging), multiculturalism (prompting McDonald's belated expansion into minority neighborhoods) and the rise of the automobile and tourism (hence the company's strategy of building along interstate highways).``What,'' says he, ``could be more quintessentially American?''.

(The Asian Wall StreetJournal)