Four years of one travel calendar, cleaned up and counted. Every night is either somewhere or home in Wheaton, and nothing is counted twice.
The backpacking year ran at 92% away. Since then it settles near half the year on the road, which is a different life wearing the same label.
Home is excluded here. The top two are winter bases rather than trips, which is worth knowing before reading them as travel.
Turn the globe with your mouse or the arrow keys. Put the slider at the far left and there is one dot on it: Wheaton. Every other place stays dark until the night you first sleep there, then appears and grows as the nights add up. Press play and the globe follows you around, and the readout says exactly where you were that night.
One column per day, colored by where you slept. Every day is accounted for, so the blue is home rather than missing data. Late 2022 and 2023 run almost solid; from 2024 home starts taking real bites.
Ribbon width is nights. The US is split out as its own region and broken down place by place; Mexico sits with Central America. Home is drawn compressed so it doesn't flatten everything else, and its real number is on the label.
Every stay behind every chart, home stretches included. Home rows are greyed; they come from days with nothing on the calendar.
| Dates | Place | Country | Nights |
|---|
A calendar is a log of intentions, not a passport. These are the judgment calls made turning it into numbers, so you can overrule any of them.
Home is the default. Chicago and Wheaton events are Home, and so is every day with nothing on the calendar. That means all 1,431 days are accounted for and "away" is a real complement rather than "logged".
Nights, not days. A stay counts as end date minus start date, so a Friday to Sunday trip is 2 nights.
Overlaps get trimmed, not merged. Where one stay ran past the start of the next, the earlier one was cut back to the day the next began. That happens 48 times, mostly on the fast runs through Thailand, Bali and Peru.
Room changes are not new trips. The four Koh Tao events of Dec 2022 (cottage, upgrade, downgrade, hut) are one continuous fortnight on one island. Same for the hotel booking inside the Hanoi stay and "Thanksgiving in AZ" running into "Arizona".
Side trips are nested, not double counted. Nine stays sit entirely inside a longer one, like Ha Long Bay inside Hanoi, Lake Atitlán inside Antigua, Morocco inside Tarifa. Each is listed separately and its nights are subtracted from the surrounding stay.
Calendar dates win. The Salt Lake stay runs Jan 31 to Mar 10 2024 as entered, 39 nights. The Airbnb blurb pasted into that event says a shorter window; it's ignored.
Arizona is travel, not home. The 67-night Nov 2023 to Jan 2024 stretch and the 39-night Salt Lake one are winter bases, so they sit at the top of the longest-stays list without being anything like a trip.
Reminders were dropped. Four events were notes to self rather than stays, things like "Parents Arrive!" and "Leave for FLL".
Two locations were inferred. "Sonderberg" read as Sønderborg in Denmark, and "Antigua" as Antigua in Guatemala rather than Antigua and Barbuda, since Lake Atitlán sits inside that stay. Both worth a second look.
Places kept their calendar names. "Phoenix" and "Arizona" stay separate because you logged them separately, as do "Decatur, IL" and "Decatur / Hillsboro, IL". Say the word and they merge.
Upcoming trips excluded. Lisbon in September, Sri Lanka in October and Casa Shambala in November are on the calendar but haven't happened.
| Action | Event | Change | Reason |
|---|
Home nights are inferred, not recorded. Any day you travelled without logging it counts here as a night in Wheaton, so 904 nights away is a floor, not a ceiling. The effect is small in 2022 and 2023, where the calendar is nearly continuous, and largest in 2024 and 2025, where the longest unlogged stretch runs 53 days.
Distance has the same problem in reverse. It is measured straight line, point to point between the places you slept, so it misses layovers, the actual routing of any flight, and everything driven once you had arrived. Treat it as the shortest path that could have produced this itinerary.