Google Maps has been quietly keeping a diary of everywhere I go since November 2013. This year Google moved Timeline onto the phone, which came with an export button, so I pressed it. Out came a 56 MB file with 179,155 location points in it. This is what thirteen years of being followed around by my own phone looks like.
The raw numbers
Add up every journey and it comes to 147,217 miles. That is nearly six times round the Earth, or 62% of the way to the Moon. More than half of it was in the air, which says a lot about how far one trip to Australia goes. There is a hole in 2016 where the phone simply stopped recording, so the real number is a bit higher.
2018 broke the chart
Most years land somewhere between 6,000 and 19,000 miles. Then there is 2018: a spring trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, then Singapore, Sydney, Uluru, the Gold Coast and Phuket in the autumn. 44,442 miles in a single year, and a single day in October where the phone logged nearly 7,000 miles.
The January escape committee
Some patterns only show up in the data. Since 2022 the first proper thing we do every year is fly south to the Canaries, Gran Canaria four Januarys out of five, with Tenerife thrown in for good measure. And since 2024, every autumn has ended in Aberdeen for the Rogue Invitational.
The boring bits add up
Flights get the glory, but the everyday stuff is where the time goes. 107 days in a car or the van. A month on trains. 70 days of walking. Ten days in the air sounds like a lot until you see it next to all that driving.
A note on privacy
Everything here is built from my own export, rounded to a couple of kilometres, and the area around home is left blank on purpose. The phone knows exactly where I live. The internet doesn’t need to.