6 Months: Traveling Man

For every individual there exists an area on the globe that encloses every place the person has ever traveled. I've always tried to imagine a polygon where all inside angles are less than 180°, stretched over the surface of the earth. Thanks to Google Earth, I'm able to recreate that very map for myself. It looks like this:





For you conspiracy theorists, that's Jamaica, not Cuba, marking the southern extent of my North American travels!

Mary's map is far more impressive, although the area would probably have been much smaller if Google Earth let us create a polygon that crosses the dateline. This version stretches across all of Asia although she hasn't traveled into the Asian interior. The southern line stretches from Maui to Bali, but across Asia, Africa, and Central America, not directly across the Pacific.







Up until our recent vacation, poor August's map was puny indeed:



And I thought that this trip would dramatically reshape his map. But take a look at what happened. Here's the map before the trip, in red up at Boston:



And here it is, now including everywhere we traveled last week:



Who knew there was such a straight line between Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore, and DC?? We drove nearly 1,200 miles and stayed within this narrow little strip. Very weird.