Longer notes on travel data, and on what we are building.
I logged every night I ever slept away from home. It came to three years.
28 July 2026 · by Jorg
I did not set out to count the nights. I set out to count the
flights, because that is the number people ask about. Three hundred and
seventeen, as it turns out, over 1.53 million kilometres and 25 countries.
Then I added up the nights and stopped. One thousand one hundred and
seventeen of them, slept in a room I did not own. Three years and three weeks,
and I had never once put a number on it.
It adds up faster than it feels
Cumulative nights away from home. The flat stretch is 2020.
The map is genuinely nice to look at. It is also a little embarrassing, and
that turned out to be the interesting part.
Here is what I expected: a spray of pins across the world, the souvenir of
someone who travels a lot. Here is what I got: a single thick rope between two
airports, with everything else hanging off it as decoration.
The map is not a bucket list. It is a route.
One airport in Asia appears at one end or the other of 78 of my flights.
Forty departures, thirty-eight arrivals. One in four of every flight I have ever
taken touches that single hub, and the Amsterdam run to it alone accounts
for 34.
Not 34 destinations. One destination, 34 times.
86 routes, and two of them are the job
Every route flown, sorted by how often. One tall bar is where
the work was, the other is how I got there.
Plot every route I have flown, sorted by how often, and two bars tower over
the other 84. One is where the work was. The other is how I got there.
Thirty-eight routes in the tail were flown exactly once, and those are the ones
that felt like travelling.
Sort the history by where I actually spent nights and the top is not exotic
either. Japan alone accounts for 241. Add the two East Asian countries either
side of it and you have more than half of every night I have ever slept away
from home, holidays included. One hotel in Japan accounts for 135 of those
nights across 18 separate stays. I have slept there more than in some flats I
have rented.
And the country I have flown into more than any other, 90 times out of 317,
is the Netherlands. Every rope has two ends. Mine is mostly going home.
This is what a map does that a highlight reel never will. A highlight reel is
the trips you would describe at a dinner party. The map is the truth: for a
decade my travel was a job, a repeating triangle between Europe and three
countries in East Asia, and the adventure was a rounding error on top of a
commute. The longest single flight in the set, Singapore to Paris at 10,728 km,
was me going to work. The longest single trip, 29 nights at the end of 2019, was
also work.
I do not think this is unusual. Most people who travel "a lot" are doing a
small number of things many times, and would be surprised by their own map. You
do not feel the repetition while you are living it. You feel it when you count
it.
The years tell the story the pins hide
Flights and nights away, per year
Two measures, two panels, one shared timeline. 2026 is still
running.
Flights
Nights away
Flights per year is where it gets honest. The climb from 2014 is steady and
then steep: 11 flights in 2014, 43 in 2019, my busiest year on record, with 145
hotel nights. Forty percent of that year, I woke up somewhere that was not my
home.
How much of each year was spent away
Nights away as a share of the calendar year. Complete years
only.
Then 2020: four flights. The line does not dip, it falls off the table.
More interesting than the crash is the shape of the recovery, because the map
remembers what I had half-forgotten. In 2021 I did not go back to Asia. Twelve
flights, four countries, nearly all of it short-haul and close to home. The rope
to East Asia does not reappear until 2022, and by 2025 the old pattern is fully
back: 32 flights, the same triangle.
One person's boarding passes, and you can read a global event off them.
What it cost, in the currency nobody prints on the ticket
My logged flights add up to roughly 230 tonnes of CO2. It is an
estimate, a flat 0.15 kg per passenger-kilometre, and I am not going to pretend
it is precise or that seeing it has reformed me. But I would rather have it on
the map than not. A map that only shows the pretty parts is marketing. One that
shows the mileage, the repetition and the footprint is closer to a mirror.
The part I had to go and find
Until this week, four years of my log had flights but almost no hotels. Forty
flights in one of those years against a handful of logged nights is not a travel
pattern, it is a record half-assembled.
So I sat down and finished it. The app itself told me where to look: 22 trips
holding 286 nights that had a flight in and a flight out and nothing in between,
each one a night I demonstrably slept somewhere and had never written down. It
took an evening to close all of them.
Two of those nights are my favourite entry in the whole log. A week of diving
in Hurghada, and then a return flight, booked for 1 May, grounded by a technical
fault. The replacement aircraft flown in the next day also broke. I got home two
days late, and in between there are two hotel nights that exist only because
something went wrong. It
made the Belgian news. It did not make my
itinerary.
That is the thing a booking-based tool structurally cannot hold. Your
bookings say you flew home on the first available flight. You did not. The log
has to be able to say that a flight was cancelled, that another one replaced it,
and that two nights happened in the gap. Otherwise the record agrees with the
itinerary instead of with your life.
Every number here is a floor
The record runs from 2014, and from 2014 to today it is now genuinely
complete. Before that it thins out fast. I have flights going back to 1996 that
were never logged in any structured way, and personal trips from the 2014 to
2018 stretch that I am still recovering.
I am leaving that edge visible on purpose. A travel record that only shows
the tidy years is a scrapbook. One that also shows you what it does not yet hold
is a tool. Every figure in this post is a floor, not a total.
Why we built the thing that drew this
We are building Pelgrim, a travel tracker built around a living world map,
and it exists because none of the tools we tried would tell us the truth about
our own travel. They know what you booked. They do not know what happened.
Your data stays yours: EU-hosted, GDPR-native, exportable in full whenever
you want, no lock-in. We did not set out to build a confessional. We set out to
see a travel life in one place, honestly, and the honesty is what made it worth
looking at.
You can see the map without signing up for anything:
open the demo. Point it at a few of your own
trips and I would bet you find what I found. Your map is not the places you have
been. It is the one route you keep taking, and the nights you never wrote
down.
I logged every flight of my life expecting a trophy. I got a commute, a
pandemic, a footprint, 1,117 nights in other people's beds, and two of them in
Hurghada that only exist because a plane broke. Much better than a trophy.
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