The Year in Numbers
A look back at a year of global adventure
It’s been a year since we left the US and embarked on our global adventures. And what a ride it’s been! What started out as a gap year pivoted into a journey to live outside of our home country for a bit. I’m deep in the process of continuing to recap our nomadic adventure, process the transition we’re moving through (me especially), and document our current life in Albania. For now, I thought it would be fun to do capture the last year in numbers. Enjoy!
We traveled a total distance equivalent to circling the earth 2.5 times: ~62,322 miles or ~100,878 km! This does not include local taxi/ride share rides, nor metro trips, as we don’t have a way to account for those distances.
Total countries: 14 (+ the US)
Planes*
Total flights: 21
Total miles flown: 58,833 miles or 95,261 km (equivalent to 2.37x around the earth)
Total time flying: 86.83 hours (equivalent to 2.62 days of round-the-clock flying)
Longest flight: Rome to Singapore | 8,782 miles or 14,228km
Shortest flight: Penang to Phuket | 235 miles or 381km
Funny enough, our shortest flight followed our longest flight
Total airports: 23 together**
SFO, LIS, MAD, AGP, ATH, FCO, SIN, PEN, HKT, HND, NRT, LAX, OAK, IAH, EZE, JFK, LHR, TIR, TRF, STN, BRS, CPH, VIE
Total airlines flown: 12
TAP Air, Aegean Air, Singapore Airlines, Firefly, Southwest, United, Delta, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, Wizz Air, Ryanair, Norwegian
Trains
Total train trips***: 9
Madrid to Malaga
Rome to Venice
Venice to Rome
Tokyo to Kyoto
Kyoto to Tokyo
London Stansted to Liverpool Street Station
London to Bournemouth
Bournemouth to Oxford
Oxford to Bristol
Total rail distance: ~1,773 miles / ~2,763 km
Total metro systems used***: 8
Madrid
Singapore
Tokyo
Kyoto
London
Oslo
Copenhagen
Vienna
Automobiles
Total car rentals: 4
Malaga, Spain
Oslo, Norway
Tirana, Albania
Oxford, UK
Total distance driven: ~1,313 miles / ~2,114 km
Total hired drivers (for long-haul transport): 2
Singapore to Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur to Penang
Total distance ridden: ~460 miles / ~740 km
It’s pretty amazing to look at all together!
*I originally asked Perplexity to show me a table by flight segment of our flight times and distances, thinking I was smart to shortcut the manual effort of tabulating it myself. Ha! I noticed several discrepancies off the bat and, even after asking for them to be corrected, still didn’t trust the data coming back. So I found a site that lets you look up the details of your specific flights and I discovered numbers that were quite different from Perplexity’s. I got curious and learned that the air distances we typically see (e.g., for the purpose of mileage programs and what’s printed in our air itineraries) often use “great circle distance,” not the actual track miles a plane flies. Great circle distance is that between two points on a sphere, measured along the arc between them via the shortest path.
But that’s not necessarily how planes fly. Commercial traffic is routed onto interconnecting air routes, like highways in the sky that take a flight in approximately the right direction. And then lots of factors like weather conditions, aircraft weight, flight altitude, and air traffic-control constraints, not to mention political, legal and military restrictions on airspace affect the actual track miles flown. So, very often the miles we fly are farther than what think (or are told) they are. Here’s a short example based on the world’s longest air route currently. And, while old, I also found this thread interesting.
**In October this year (2024) C and I each did a solo trip, mine prior to Vienna and his after; I did not include those flights in these totals.
***Technically we took the train in Oslo and Copenhagen to get around more than the metro because of where our AirBNBs were, but I’m not listing them in the train section because we used them for daily outings as one would use a metro versus as a means of transit to go from one geography to another.