Posts Tagged ‘2010’

Counting the Places I’ve Laid My Head: 2010 in Numbers

// January 14th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, News, Travel

2010 was an immense year for me on many fronts, marking both the bulk of my Watson Fellowship experience as well as my first national tour. I’ve been struggling with how best to approach a year-end retrospective. Since most of my blog posts tend to be longwinded affairs and because January is supposed to be about both fresh starts and self-reflection, I’ve decided to examine the year 2010 in numbers, maps, and graphs. Mind you, I’ve never worked so hard to suck at anything in my life in quite the same way as Calculus, so this has been a bold undertaking. My rules in arriving at the figures below were that a location only counts if I spent at least one night there. Places I passed through in transit do not count. Enjoy!

Here’s a nifty google map marking the stops on my journey:

Travels in 2010
(You can view a larger version of this map with all the cities listed & twitter excerpts narrating each location!)

I thought it’d be fun to break down all that travel by modes of transport. The mile estimates, especially in terms car travel, err on the modest end of the spectrum. I actually put 16,000 miles on my car during the three months of the North American tour, but for the purposes of this blog post I was only calculating direct distances between cities. I didn’t feel that I could accurately track the miles I logged by autorickshaw in India, so, sadly, the long, hot, stinky, noisy, fume-filled hours I spent squashed under my harp & fearing for my imminent demise in those three-wheeled, two-stroke wonders of modern transport are not included.

miles traveled in various modes of transport. Notably, most of those bus miles were logged in Indonesia.

miles traveled in various modes of transport. Notably, most of those bus miles were logged in Indonesia.

While my carbon-guilt is great for having flown over 13,000 miles, I was slightly mollified to learn that I actually logged MORE miles by public transport (those 600+ miles spent on boats & ferry’s really sealed the deal). The grand total for miles travelled in 2010? 39,155

Other Facts & Figures

Continents Visited: 3
Countries Visited: 9
Cities Visited: 79
U.S. States Visited: 28
Languages Spoken (mostly very badly): 8
Currencies Held: 8
Hospital Visits: 2 (one for rabies post-exposure treatment in Indonesia, the other for a mystery virus in India)
Passports Stolen: 2
Consular Interventions on My Behalf: 1 (Thanks for getting me out of Russia, Wilma!)
Human-sized Hampster Balls oggled in Tyumen: 1

Now, I know this is a far cry from the wizardry of an OkCupid Trends post, but cut me some slack, okay? I was a Comparative Literature major! That said, if there are other calculations you’d like me to try and approximate, I’m open to giving it all of my XKCD-loving spirit.

Happy New Year!
-Gillian