I’ve kept a daily journal since March 2011. Nearly every single day. Most entries are a dozen terse bullets: who I met, what I worked on, where we had dinner. Among other things, they record where I was.
That makes 5,721 days of location data. Here they are in three minutes:
- 1,336,833 km travelled. A little over 33 times around the Earth.
- 35 countries and territories.
- 238 places.
- 1,381 days away from home. Close to four years.
The small maps on the right show local travel. Iceland is there throughout, and New England joins it for the years we lived in the Boston area, 2012 to 2018.
What stands out
The Atlantic groove. Six years of flights between Boston and Reykjavík wear a bright line across the North Atlantic.
The world trip. We left Boston in April 2018 and came home to Iceland in August, by way of Hawaii, Costa Rica, the Galápagos, Australia, Mauritius, Madagascar and Kenya. That’s the part where the map suddenly gets big.
Covid. Eleven days outside Iceland in 2020. None in 2021. The dot just sits there.
How it was made
The journal lives in my personal knowledge base, where every day is an entry and every place is an entity with coordinates. Since 2015 the location has been a field on each entry. Before that it was only implied by the text: “Drop off at daycare”, “Travel to Iceland”, “Taxi-ride to Framingham”.
So I had Claude read all 1,284 entries from 2011 to 2014 and work out where I was each day, quoting the evidence for each call and marking how sure it was. Those inferred locations went back into the knowledge base, so the clean-up outlives the video.
The first cut was still missing two weeks of trekking in Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains in February 2016. I hadn’t journaled at all on that trip. Claude pieced it together from emails and Facebook posts: a booking confirmation, a check-in in Dubai, photos from Gondar, a GPS track a fellow hiker sent afterwards. Hunting for it also turned up a few dozen days where a multi-day entry had stamped its first day’s location on every day, quietly erasing a road trip through Arizona and Nevada, a week in Bermuda, two ski trips and three trips home to Iceland.
The rest is a small canvas renderer. Flights follow great circles, so Boston to Sydney leaves the map over the Pacific and comes back in on the other side. The insets use conic projections, so Iceland doesn’t look stretched. Local trips follow actual roads from OpenStreetMap, so a drive to Akureyri goes around on the Ring Road instead of cutting across the highlands. The whole thing, data clean-up included, took a day of back-and-forth.
The lesson
The value of a journal compounds in ways you can’t plan for. I didn’t write down daycare drop-offs in 2013 so that I could map my travels in 2026. But because they were written down, every day, I could.