27 September 2026 · by Jorg
Ask me how many nights I have spent away from home and I can give you five answers. Every one of them is correct.
Twelve years of my own log, public trips only. Same traveller, same record, five definitions.
That is a spread of 260 between the smallest and the largest, and none of it is rounding. Each number answers a different question. Our first post on this blog printed the hotel figure under the label "nights away from home". The number was true and the label was not. We corrected it, and Pelgrim now shows a definition with its night counts, so it cannot happen quietly again.
The gap worth looking at sits between the beds and the trips: 131 nights when I was travelling and slept in no bed I booked.
One square is one night.
Sixty-eight were spent on a plane: the flight left one evening and landed the next day. Forty-three are stays I keep private, so they stay out of anything we publish. One was an airport in Jeddah, waiting for a morning connection. And nineteen are the strange ones.
Local time at the departure airport. One dot is one flight. Filled dots are flights home to the Netherlands.
Singapore to Amsterdam, 01:40. Taipei to Amsterdam, 00:10. Seoul, 00:55. Bangkok, 00:30. The hotel checks you out at noon. The boarding pass says tomorrow. The night in between, spent in a lounge, a taxi or a departure hall, belongs to nobody. No hotel programme counts it. The airline dates the flight the next morning. The calendar shows a day with a hole in it.
Nineteen of those in twelve years, and 17 of the 19 were the flight home. It is the schedule, not bad luck: the long flights out of Amsterdam cross midnight in the air, and the long flights back from Asia leave just after it.
Because the day somebody asks you to count (a tax office, an employer, a visa form, a loyalty programme that disagrees with you), the first question is which of these five they mean. Most people find out there is more than one at the worst possible moment.
The caveats. One traveller, not a survey. Departure times are the scheduled times on the itinerary, not the actual ones. A "night" here is a date on which I did not check into a logged bed. Trips and stays marked private are left out, which is why these totals sit below the ones on my own dashboard.
In Pelgrim, each night count tells you what it counts when you hover over it. A number without a definition is how our first post got it wrong.
All posts — everything else on the Pelgrim blog.